ANYONE can play guitar, but only a talented few can take a tired old lump of rock'n'roll stone and transform it into something pure and translucent. With their third album, OK Computer, Radiohead have completely reprogrammed rock music, using a different set of commands and finding a whole new bunch of connections which most bands seem to have missed. They could have cashed in their microchips and gone for big, blustery fame - instead they've delved further into the musical murk, and uncovered some hitherto unseen depths. It's a whole new adventure in hi-fi.
Radiohead were once your common or garden Britpop burnouts, making vaguely American-sounding music which conformed to all the stock cliche's for stadium rock, yet they still managed to woo the Blur/Supergrass constituency. The aforementioned Anyone Can Play Guitar, with its neck-wrenching hooks, string-bending lines and nuthead attitude, and the outcasts' anthem, Creep, with its explosive, expletive-driven urgency, both struck the right chords with American grunge-kids and UK guitar-lads. These were great songs, and they were destined to take their rightful places in the corridors of power pop. They were also doomed, however, to become just another pair of ancestral oil paintings hung up in an ever lengthening hallowed hall of pop; two more steps in the straight and narrow path of rock'n'roll.
On Pablo Honey, Radiohead's debut album, Thom Yorke sang the immortal line, "pop is dead, long live pop". It could have been a cliched catchphrase to add to all the other hackneyed aphorisms which litter the world of rock lyrics, and it could have signalled Radiohead's decline into a modern-day version of Van Halen. But it didn't. Instead the Oxford five-piece put their music where their mouth was, and their second album, The Bends, was a tortured, twisted funeral for a genre which had become retro and recidivist, always sinking back into the same old cliches.
The album's opening track, Planet Telex, sent out a clear message: in the cosy new order of Oasis, Radiohead weren't about to accept the status quo, and their music was going to be uncomfortable, uneasy listening. Just, My Iron Lung and Fake Plastic Trees were authentic artefacts of modern rock, difficult and dystopian; in chart terms, they wouldn't exactly get Gina G's g-string in a twist, nor cause alarm bells to go off in Blur's country house. But they had more depth than anything Ocean Colour Scene could ever dredge up from the past.
American kids didn't get The Bends - it was too close to the nerve endings, the levels of toxic distaste turned up too high for safe exposure. Having bought 1.5 million copies of Pablo Honey, Radiohead's US fanbase switched their allegiance back to Bush otherwise known as the English Nirvana - revealing the idle nature of their worship. But, outcast from the mainstream, The Bends became Radiohead's sleeper", slowly insinuating itself into the consciousness, its acrid odour of discontent seeping into pop's inner wiring. Once you were locked in The Bends' decompression chamber of horrors, you would never want to return to the shallows of Pablo Honey, nor would you want to go much deeper into Thom Yorke's suffocating psyche.
Just when you thought it was sale to go back in the water, however, here comes OK Computer, Radiohead's third album, and their most complex and challenging to date. Any hopes that Yorke & Co will pander to the "new U2" tag which is being foisted upon them have been dashed with a graceful stroke of genius. If this is stadium rock, then it's a pretty screwed-up venue they're playing in, and if this was POPMart, then everything on the shelves would come with a mental health warning. Interesting, then, that OK Computer is poised to become Radiohead's breakthrough album, the one that finally tips the Oxford band into the abyss of superstardom. Those same pop kids who couldn't handle the psychotic pressure of The Bends will now probably embrace the neurosis of OK Computer - looks like they're finally prepared to take the plunge.
Twenty years ago. Pink Floyd put for ward their own jaundiced view of England's decay, an Orwellian epic entitled Animals. Its parade of yelping dogs and squealing pigs seemed to sum up the contempt which the band felt for the state of the country, and it was a dyspeptic presage to The Wall, Floyd's over-ambitious vitriol-feat which threatened to emulate the creeping fascism it was meant to attack.
OK Computer has many parallels with Animals, although its imagery has been upgraded from Floyd's fiery industrial wastes to a barren metallic circuitboard landscape. And Floyd's solid musical structures have been replaced by carefully unbalanced arrangements which seem to he continuously on the verge of collapse. The gentle, almost mellow surfaces are constantly broken by the seething maelstrom of malaise which boils underneath.
THE cover of this month's Select magazine juxtaposes images of U2 and Radiohead with the headline, "The Kings are dead . . . long live the kings". It's probably a bit early to assume that the Oxford oddballs are going to oust the Dublin demigods in the commercial arena, but it's clear that, with OK Computer, Radiohead have come closer than anyone to the heart of madness in the modern world as it stumbles blindly towards complete crashdown around the year 2000.
Forget that little date problem in the global computer system - there's a nasty little virus in humanity's pentium chip, and it's ticking away like a timebomb in all our souls. OK Computer is a musical attempt to reboot our collective conscience by taking a lateral route through rock's drive path. It doesn't quite succeed, but it certainly opens up a few new options for a genre which has been in serious danger of becoming obsolete. Pop is dead, so is POP, but somewhere inside Radiohead's mental mirror-maze, rock is still doing OK.
