Kid A Cover

I’m not exactly sure of the name of the job our fifth guest writer Simon Morley does at labels Full Time Hobby and Hassle but what he does is to find original and exciting new music and sell it to you people. Basically his job is to love music and without his fine work you wouldn’t be able to go into a shop and buy records by the likes of Tubelord, School Of Seven Bells and White Denim. I’d of been pretty disappointed if none of our guest writers decided to write about Kid A by Radiohead so a huge thanks to Simon for stepping up.

Imagine trying to follow OK Computer. This is the tricky position Radiohead found themselves in by 1998. According to Wikipedia the theme of OK Computer was something to do with a disconnection to the modern world. An accelerated society fueled by advanced capitalism, all that sort of stuff :( So you’d assume the attention the band had been attracting since ‘Creep’ wouldn’t have helped the band’s already bleak outlook. The mainstream anticipation for the follow up record was huge and most likely reason the band went down the route they did. Rather than build on the sound they’d gradually developed over 3 albums, they deconstructed everything. They started from scratch, adopting a much more electronic and experimental sound palette, sampling lots of their own and other people’s sounds. To me it sounds like a band making an album for themselves, not their record label, not their fans. It’s a big FUCK YOU in the face of commercial music. It says ‘yeah we can write big radio hits, but we don’t want to… we want to do this.’ The fact that Kid A featured no singles or videos suggests it might be a whacked-out-experimental-mind-melting-mess without any songs but it wasn’t. It features some of their best, my favorites being ‘Everything In It’s Right Place’, ‘The National Anthem’ and ‘Idioteteque’.

Also, the artwork is good too innit.

A big thanks to Simon for that. Please check out his work for Hassle and Full Time Hobby.