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Radiohead: Bands
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All Radiohead members have been involved in music projects outside the band. In 1998, Thom Yorke collaborated with Drugstore on the single "El President", and contributed vocals to the UNKLE track "Rabbit in Your Headlights", a collaboration with DJ Shadow. He participated in the 1998 Velvet Goldmine soundtrack, singing Roxy Music cover songs as part of the fictional band "Venus in Furs". In 1999, Jonny Greenwood played harmonica and guitar on Pavement's Terror Twilight and Ed O'Brien contributed to the soundtrack for British television miniseries Eureka Street. In 2000, Yorke sang duets with Björk and PJ Harvey on their respective albums Selmasongs and Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea. Later that year, O'Brien and Selway toured with Neil Finn, Johnny Marr and others for "7 Worlds Collide". O'Brien played guitar on Asian Dub Foundation's 2002 album Enemy of the Enemy.
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Expectations for Radiohead's fourth album were stratospheric, which placed additional pressure on the already perfectionist band, and led to several stumbling blocks along the way. An intense buzz of excitement among the band's still-growing following greeted the prerelease appearance of most of the album's tracks on the Internet in MP3 form; they displayed an all-out fascination with challenging, often minimalist electronica. Titled Kid A, the album was finally released in October 2000 and astonished many observers by debuting at number one on the U.S. album charts. While the band didn't release any singles or embark on a formal tour, the album met with a mixed critical response as the group was accused of creating a distant and radio-unfriendly record; ... it did remain a fan favorite. In June of 2001, Radiohead quickly released an album under the name Amnesiac that consisted of material that was recorded during the Kid A sessions. The band made it very clear, though, that it was not to be considered an outtakes album; rather, they insisted that the two albums were of clear and separate concept.
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Thereafter, Radiohead embarked on a vast international tour, lasting about a year. It saw the band visiting Australia and Japan for the first time since their OK Computer tour in 1997–1998, more than 6 years previous. Many Australian fans were deeply upset by the cancellation of the last show merely hours before its scheduled start due to problems with Yorke's throat. Many fans had come to Melbourne all the way from Brisbane to attend the show. Radiohead headlined the main (Pyramid) stage on the Saturday of the Glastonbury 2003, to huge crowd acclaim and positive press reviews. The same year, Jonny Greenwood, with the help of his brother and Colin Greenwood, recorded and produced the soundtrack to the avant-garde documentary movie Bodysong.
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Although "Creep" made Radiohead a success, it ... led many observers to peg the band as a one-hit wonder. Conscious of such thinking, the group entered the studio with producer John Leckie to record its second album, The Bends. Upon its spring 1995 release, The Bends was greeted with overwhelmingly enthusiastic reviews, all of which praised the group's deeper, more mature sound. However, positive reviews didn't sell albums, as Radiohead struggled to be heard during the U.K.'s summer of Britpop and as American radio programmers and MTV ignored the record. The band continued to tour as the opening act on R.E.M.'s prestigious Monster tour. By the end of the year, The Bends began to catch on, thanks not only to the band's constant touring but also to the stark, startling video for "Just."
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What happened to Radiohead in 1997 was that they caught a wave of generational anxiety. The album "OK Computer," with titles like "Paranoid Android," "Karma Police," and "Climbing Up the Walls," pictured the onslaught of the information age and a young person's panicky embrace of it. Yorke's lyrics seem a mixture of overheard conversations, techno-speak, and fragments of a harsh diary: "I trust I can rely on your vote"; "An airbag saved my life"; "Ambition makes you look pretty ugly." The songs offered images of riot police at political rallies, anguished lives in pretty suburbs, yuppies freaking out, sympathetic aliens hovering overhead. Yorke even dared to describe the feeling of letdown that follows a blast of hype, such as the one his band was producing. "When it comes, it's so-so," he sang. "It always ends up drivel." The album sold more than four million copies worldwide, enabling the group to become, by 1999, an independent operation. Radiohead were the poster boys for a certain kind of knowing alienation—as the Talking Heads and R.E.M.
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Radiohead's evolving musical style has been seen as a consequence of band members' varied tastes and accomplishments. Lead guitarist Jonny Greenwood is the only classically-trained member of the band and served as the BBC's Composer in Residence.[70] Greenwood is a multi-instrumentalist; aside from guitar and keyboard, he plays the Ondes Martenot, banjo, viola and harmonica. He ... in recent years has done electronic and digital manipulation. However, not all of these instruments have appeared on record. Greenwood has also arranged string orchestrations for Radiohead songs, including "Climbing Up the Walls", "How to Disappear Completely" and "Pyramid Song". Yorke plays guitar and piano and, at Exeter University, was once a DJ and part of a techno group, "Flickernoise".[38] In recent years he has focused on the digital manipulation of sound, claiming in 2003 that if forced to choose, he would rather make music only on computer than only on guitar.[71]
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