Sleevenotes

A musical meditation on paranoia, premonitions and profound beauty.

If Achtung Baby was the sound of U2 chopping down the Joshua Tree, Kid A was the album that saw Radiohead ripping the wires from OK Computer, setting fire to the motherboard, and throwing the wreckage from a tenth-floor window.

They took the blueprint that had made them the biggest band in the world, and chucked it away. They wanted to dive deeper and deeper into the unknown — and to come up for air in a different world.

I saw Radiohead play their first gig outside London — third on the bill at the Mean Fiddler in Harlesden, twenty uninterested people. They were terrible, by the way.

The biggest mistake you can make is to chase your audience.

Peter Gabriel, to Jonathan Wingate

When we were working on Sgt. Pepper at Abbey Road, a lot of people in the industry were saying The Beatles were finished. And we knew we had this thing up our sleeve.

Paul McCartney, to Jonathan Wingate

It’s the sound of a mainstream rock band dissolving and reshaping into something less defined, almost amorphous. It’s like they invented a new musical language.

No singles. No videos. They did no press — and yet they were just about the only big band that really mattered.

I think Kid A is the sound of a band possibly trying to lose most of their audience.

If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of. And when you don’t feel your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.

David Bowie, to Jonathan Wingate

Once you’ve challenged commercial suicide to a staring contest and lived to tell the tale, you become fearless. And Radiohead were completely fearless.

They got to the top of that mountain — and I don’t think they liked what they saw.

The lyrics read like status updates. They could be Facebook posts, or tweets.

Kid A doesn’t predict the future, but it seems of the future. In a way, it took more than a quarter of a century for the rest of us to catch up with this record.

It is the sound of a fractured future. And it’s beautifully fractured.

This is not background music.

There’s an ageless ache in this music that is ineffably moving and impossible to define. And I think that’s why we’re all gathered here.

There’s a kind of communion — almost a spiritual experience, without being in a church.

She writes whole novels in three-minute songs. She’s never been afraid to sound like a grownup.

Blue is partly a diary. It’s me moving through the backdrop of our changing times. But it’s also more than a diary — it’s one chapter in the great American novel of my work.

Joni Mitchell

The instrumentation and the melodies fool people into thinking the whole thing is an album of love-lorn ballads. It isn’t. There are drinking songs on there, travel songs, screw-you songs.

It forced her to be simplistic. It’s a really lovely accompaniment to the poetry. And the songs she wrote on the dulcimer are all really personal — the most intimate songs.

Neal Whitmore, on the Appalachian dulcimer

Punk rock wasn’t invented then, but you can hear it’s got a rhythm and an energy to the dulcimer part. It’s not at all a shy, finger-picking, hippy-dippy song. It’s quite earthy.

Neal Whitmore

My father’s catchphrase was: tell ’em nothing. I never bared my soul in anything. So I really admire those people who can actually put their hearts on the line.

Neal Whitmore

I had no personal defences. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a packet of cigarettes.

Joni Mitchell, on writing Blue

It sounds like the past and the future at the same time. Utterly timeless.

The trick is, if you listen to the music and you see me, you’re not really getting anything out of it. If you listen to that music and you see yourself, it’ll probably make you cry — and you’ll learn something about yourself.

Joni Mitchell

That’s something that’s lost in the electronic world we’re all swimming around in — people don’t actually read the cultural or historical context of the music any more.

Joni Mitchell, like her songs, has always remained true to herself. Pure as a mountain stream.

Jeff Buckley is one of a rare breed of stars who seem to have beamed down from another musical universe.

In an era when love was an unpopular song topic, Buckley was a swooning romantic.

Like Robert Plant, he could start a song with a whisper before working his way up into an almost carnal, savage intensity.

There is no name yet for the places he or his voice can’t go.

Said of his father, Tim Buckley — and then of the son

It had a small bar and no stage. Buckley appeared at Sin-é almost every week in 1992, leaning against a wall and singing, accompanying himself on a Telecaster plugged into a little Fender amp.

It wasn’t long before limousines were lining up outside St. Mark’s Place, ferrying excited suitors from every major record company.

He was so mesmerising I could barely speak afterwards. He was shy and quiet, yet excitable — charismatic and mysterious without trying to be.

Leckie took them down to the Garage to see Jeff Buckley, who gave Thom Yorke the confidence to sing in falsetto. Yorke left the show and soon recorded a new version of Fake Plastic Trees alone on acoustic guitar. He played three takes and then burst into tears.

Their initial goal was to allow him the time and space to find out which Jeff Buckley he was going to be.

At its beating heart, Grace is a tragic but hopelessly romantic record. It’s sonically heavy and yet nakedly vulnerable.

Who else could include Corpus Christi Carol by Benjamin Britten alongside Eternal Life — which is essentially the blueprint for Radiohead’s OK Computer — and Leonard Cohen’s celestial Hallelujah?

Popular music has always drawn its richness both from the centre and from the outer edges — and sometimes what was on the outside makes its way to the very centre of the culture.

A chocolate and cream croon, feminine one moment, masculine the next, it fluttered, swooped and swooned like nobody I’ve ever heard. He made the impossible seem effortless.

When he was a toddler, his mother would often drive out to the ocean, and once he reached the beach, Jeff would strip off and run into the sea — something he continued to do whenever he got the chance, throughout his life.

We preserve our heroes in aspic, never to grow old and grey.

We will not see his like again.