Kid A, a personal history

After almost a decade of the album being released, I downloaded Kid A today.

It’s a big deal for me.

Back in 2000, I was 19 years old, a sophomore and a diehard Beatles nut. I was also nuts for all of Britpop, at least the most mainstream artists in it, like Oasis, Blur, Ocean Colour Scene, Kula Shaker, The Verve. You name it, I loved it.

I loved all those melodies, the classicist songwriting, the guitar solos, the “wow these are my rockstars” kind of stars-in-your-eyes devotion that these bands inspired. I loved the way they dressed, their haircuts, their guitars, all that cool gear man!

Yet, there was one band that I just felt no attraction for. Radiohead. Of course, I had heard and loved Creep and Karma Police and Just, even No Surprises. But Subterranean Homesick Alien? Thanks but no thanks. This was just too weird for me, and I couldn’t abide by electronics. And what was with all that moaning anyway? Why couldn’t I make out what Thom Yorke was trying to say?

So no Radiohead for me then. In fact, when my copy of Ok Computer got whacked, I couldn’t give a damn. After all, Travis was much nicer. The Invisible Band? I thought it was a classic.

In 2000, I heard all that brouhaha about this crazy new album that Radiohead have come out with, something called Kid A. I read about it in music magazines- “Thom Yorke has an emotional meltdown!”; “Radiohead says, ‘No More Melody!’”; “Colin Greenwood confides, ‘We could almost kill each other’”. This weird band had apparently gotten weirder. Apparantly this album had no guitars, no songs, just ambient moaning, and lots of electronic didgeridoo.

Kid A was a work of painful genius, they said; it captured the disjointed new Millennia; it was the sound of the new century! Thank you, I’d rather weep to Parachutes. Chris Martin had a better voice I thought. The very name, Radiohead, reminded me of all those strange noisy bands on Rock Street Journal with ‘head’ in their names- Portishead, Buckethead, Motorhead, Jarhead, god-knows-what-head. It was so, you know, musty and Nineties!

When I left University with my MA in 2004, all of 23 and nowhere to go but away, my musical tastes were the same- Bob Dylan, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Oasis, Kula Shaker; and bands that sounded like them. The only anomaly to this was probably my un-analysed love for The velvet Underground

And so I carried on through those lost years (in a way), as my career atrophied and went nowhere and my yearning for the mountains grew into an unrequited hurt. But musically, 2005 and 2006 were rich years. I was finally earning, though peanuts. I had a little cd player. I could finally go to a cd shop- in this case Music Land in New Delhi- and pick up old albums by The Band, Traffic, The Byrds, Motown. I could finally hear all these great bands and their albums from the 60s and the 70’s; build up a record collection that I could be proud of.

But it was a record collection that mirrored those of my peers. There was nothing I didn’t have that they didn’t. I was hanging out with a peer group at least 5 years older than me, and it did me a world of good too, as I started listening to more Jazz, Bluegrass, Folk. But there was nothing I could call my own, apart from The Beatles, and we all know just how many other billions regard The Beatles as their own! It was as if this decade, my decade, was passing me by and I knew nothing of its music, hadn’t even bothered to hear anything new. It would all be inferior to the 60’s anyway, I told myself. Why bother?

And then, 2007.

I was finally in a job that I was comfortable in; that gave me some breathing space; that didn’t ask for too much of my time. Better still, I had a regular income. And I was in a band again.

Being in a band that rehearses every other day and that wants to play its own songs does things to you that would never otherwise happen. You start thinking of music as something organic, something that grows. It ceases to be a commodity, no matter how highly prized. The band's guitar player Sujoy (The Prof) introduced me to Bop and Swing; to Django Reinhardt, Lenny Breau, Esbjorn Svensson, Brad Meldhau and so much more. Meanwhile my editor at the magazine, Sanjoy, exhorted me to write on music.

Easier said than done. I had discovered Indie, and so my first reaction was to write on Devendra Banhart or LCD Soundsystem or The Strokes, often in a haphazard way. Would staid suits (the predominant audience of my magazine) be even remotely interested? But it was a start, and I was grateful.

I got albums by the dozen. Including Radiohead’s In Rainbows. Swayed by the beautiful, haunting songs on that album, I went back to their earlier albums, especially Ok Computer. The songs started making sense. They ceased to be miserable moanings in the dark and became immensely complex bits of enjoyment. Then I discovered all those covers of the band's music by other bands, jazzmen. These forced me to listen to Radiohead-music with fresh ears.

Over the last couple of years I’ve discovered more bands and music than I can possibly keep up with. Much of it has been great. Since I was now writing on them, I had to pay better attention. Under Sanjiv, my erstwhile editor, I was forced to think about how to write, how to present my ideas, how to tie it up in a cohesive way. All the stuff, basically, that you never learn unless you’re doing it. Again, I’m extremely grateful.

My own songs started to reflect this broad palette. That, in turn got me thinking about song structures, melodic lines, key shifts, what have you. And as I grew in music, I started looking at my old loves in a new light. For the first time, I could enjoy The Beatles in an objective way, looking out for details, making notes about the songwriting and the arrangements. The internet was there, along with a plethora of books on music, for any questions I may have. Then there was the Prof, arguing with me on every turn. That helped.

I was even going to the mountains.

And so, after years of being in denial, I downloaded Kid A. From the horns-led mayhem of The National Anthem, to the panic disco of Idioteque, and the fragile beauty of Morning Bell- I'm dissolving in an ocean of sound.

Everything in its right place.

There Will Be Blood

Here's another bit of music I heard recently and have fallen in love with it. The review in another form will appear shortly in BT More. Here's the unedited version.

Johnny Greenwood- There will be Blood

If Thom Yorke is Radiohead’s resident genius, then Johnny Greenwood has to be the band’s secret weapon. He is one of the best English guitar players to emerge from the Nineties, along with Blur’s Graham Coxon. But if the latter is a pop stylist par excellence, the former is an auteur of the instrument, equally capable of ballsy riffing and getting weird sounds that you wouldn’t believe could be coaxed out of an electric guitar. However, Greenwood’s musical palette far outstrips anything that he’s done to date with Radiohead. Following Greenwood’s stint as BBC’s in-house composer in 2005, director Paul Anderson approached him to score his epic oil movie There Will Be Blood. Now scoring a film is not your average rockstar gig. Not only does it call for a certain cinematic sensibility of mood and tone, but also economy and setting. This breathtakingly bleak score delivers on all these counts, and in spades. If There Will Be Blood is about wide open spaces, loneliness and the heart of darkness of a ruthless man, then the soundtrack echoes it with grand orchestral sweeps of cellos and violins and counterpoint melodies which get under your skin and haunt relentlessly. On viewing the film, one is as struck by the moments of silence as by the music. Running at a sparse thirty-something minutes, you can listen to the soundtrack at one sitting and be stunned by it. Opening with the grave vistas of Open Spaces scored for cello and violin, the piece draws the listener in with its glissandos (the music sliding from one pitch to another) - it’s the musical equivalent of seeing a blood red sunrise over a vast desert landscape. Then the strident, staccato cellos of Future Markets arrive, with restless plucked violin strings acting as a counterpoint to a raging string section. The emotion is occasionally relieved by pieces of such beauty as Hope of New Fields, where violins create a mood of heartbreaking beauty. Greenwood reserves the bleakest soundscapes for the central pieces of Henry Plainview and There Will Be Blood. In the former, an unrelenting character study of the cold, ruthless oilman, the strings fade in from the middle distance like a squadron of fighter planes, building on sound and fury only to crash like a gigantic wave and retreat. Thereafter, the track becomes a succession of long held notes blowing like the barren soul of Henry Plainview. There Will Be Blood builds similarly, and then becomes a spiraling landscape of noise where furiously sawed violins and cellos battle for space, creating sonic mayhem. Greenwood shows his indebtedness to such path breaking 20^th century Classical composers as the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki and Frenchman Oliver Messiaen. This is a work of a profoundly gifted musician.