Talk:Radiohead/Archive 3

Creep = first single?
This issue seems to come up a lot.

Someone changed the intro to say "Creep" was the second single, I changed back and added a footnote:

^ Note on singles: Radiohead first released the Drill EP in early 1992, which attracted very minor airplay for lead track (not a single) "Prove Yourself", then the limited single of "Creep" in late 1992, then "Anyone Can Play Guitar", "Pop Is Dead", "Stop Whispering" and finally a re-release of "Creep" in 1993.

This note will probably be removed but that's ok if it serves its purpose.

If we count an EP as being a single, then Drill would be Radiohead's first single. I don't know of anyone who counts EPs as being singles (unless they're called by the same name as the lead track) or in fact anyone who obsesses over this kind of issue so much! but suffice to say, there's not much reason to count Drill as a single either, for practical purposes, since it didn't sell or get played at all really.

I'm not sure what limited means. Were they just testing out the waters or something? Maybe limited just means it didn't catch on? "Creep" in late 1992 was still a single, it was sent to radio 1 (who elected to take it off their playlist quickly) AND had a physical CD release, that's enough to qualify isn't it? Gnarls Barkley's Crazy was just put out in a couple hundred vinyl copies so they could qualify for singles charts, and then was massive on iTunes and radio. does that make it not a single?

What happened with "Creep" is that it became a hit on radio sometime between its initial release and the time it was officially re-released on a brand new CD single, then charting high.

In the meantime it had already gotten huge radio play, and whether or not the original physical single was available in most of those countries or even still available in the UK, it was still their first single in both senses of the word- their first song released as one, and their first song widely heard as one. Anyone Can Play and Pop is Dead were put out in tandem with Pablo Honey, had minor success, and Radiohead was shaping up to be a commercial disappointment, really nothing compared to the airplay Creep began getting within a couple months of the album's release. Even when they put out Stop Whispering, it was largely ignored in favor of the first single that was already out- Creep. Likely due to some DJs having picked up that original "limited" single.

If we count a limited single as a single, "Creep" is their first single. If we count only a non "limited" (whatever that means) single as being a single, then "Creep" is I think their FOURTH single because it was only re-released "properly" after all those. Does anyone think THAT's accurate??

It is simpler and equally accurate (if not more) just to call it their first single.

Things to note
Watch for incessant updates of the page everytime Dead Air Space is updated. Please edit/revert the page if you see such additions. As it stands, the "Seventh studio album" section on this article is only a summary of the material in the article on Radiohead's seventh studio album, and should remain very brief for the moment. Major deletions of material from the article should be discussed first on this Talk page, or they will be quickly reverted. Please correct wording that violates NPOV or uses original research, and please remove any claims in the article that you know to be factually wrong. However, if a claim appears true but needs a source, please take the effort to find one, or use rather than deleting the section. Deleting claims that are true but seem irrelevant is a bad idea unless you have enough knowledge of the subject area to be sure of their relevance (or lack thereof).

Contentious items of article
In the spirit of how Wiki is SUPPOSED to work, here are some of the things in the article that we seem to be having disagreements over as of January 2007. Discuss if you want.

Years in the intro - The intro has a brief history summary and each album is listed with the year after it, i.e. OK Computer (1997).

Not that my opinion matters, but I personally feel this is appropriate, encyclopedic and provides useful contextual information that someone would otherwise have to click lots of links or read through the whole article to learn. Not everyone reading the article may have a grasp of the typical 2-3 year release schedule in modern pop music either. If the band starts in 1991 some people may hear "fourth album" and think, "hmm that must be in the mid 90s".

Opening acts in trivia - Radiohead's opening acts are listed in an item in trivia. such as Sigur Ros, Clinic, Beta Band, Spiritualized, etc. A few of these bands even achieved greater fame as a result of opening for Radiohead (just as Radiohead did in opening for REM in 1995, another fact that has been deleted by some people from this article). Others are well known in their own right. Either way it is interesting, and certainly "encyclopedic" type of information for the TRIVIA section. Note: TRIVIA. No one is saying this is strictly relevant in the same way as the rest of the article.

OK Computer acclaim - OK Computer is one of the most highly acclaimed rock music albums in modern history, like it or not, but deal with it. The article needs to convey this fact without seeming to take a particular side. I don't see anything wrong with the item in the trivia section that OK Computer has frequently appeared on top lists (there used to even be a Wiki article of this title!) with a mention of several of them. The person who deleted this, also deleted all mention of all lists from the OK Computer article itself, which is beyond the pale. It's a matter of being "encyclopedic". It's not "fannish" if one of the most salient facts about an album (or a band) is the reception it received from critics and magazine polls, its "acclaim" or "overratedness" if you prefer.

Yes there is a danger that such an article would just be reinforcing critical opinion, Wiki's own mention of acclaim serving almost as a list placement in itself (probably why the "albums that have consistently appeared on top lists" articles here were removed- good decision, imo). BUT that is a risk that has to be taken in order not to present a distorted and incomplete picture of the subject, and it's a small risk if this is just an item in trivia. We have cleaned up the intro of many of the more POV assertions, but it's going too far to remove so much that no one would get an idea of Radiohead's "reputation" by reading the article. Imo.

Removal of other sections of the article and citations

If there's a whole section someone disagrees with, can they either rewrite it, or remove it TO THE TALK PAGE in case anyone wants to comment or disagree on their deletion or restore the text. Don't just delete it.

Also, citations should generally not be removed from the article, and someone should be very reluctant about removing text that has citations after it, compared to other text. In fact, more citations should be added to this article if it wants to have any chance of achieving a better status. It is a huge amount of time and effort to add citations and shows disrespect to people who worked on the article to delete them without discussion. 172.166.129.168 11:50, 11 January 2007 (UTC)

Radiohead Members' Personal Lives
Does anyone agree with me that specifics about this is absolutely irrelevant to the general Radiohead article, unless it impacted Radiohead's career? It's fine to note in general they were touring less due to having families and kids, or that a member had a child born, if that had an effect on what they did as a band (as I believe it is in the Hail to the Thief section). However the date or NAME of the child born (Ed's kid is Salvador, blah blah) is not relevant.

Otherwise any personal information that doesn't have direct bearing on the band-- including the names of kids/wives/etc-- should be confined to individual articles on band members, if included in Wikipedia at all.

removing ateaseweb.com link
Ateaseweb has been attacked by a virus. Should I temporarily remove the link until the problems are solved? I do not want other people to get the same virus that I got from Ateaseweb. What is the ==Misconceptions== Radiohead is not a band "from Abingdon". The members met at Abingdon School in Abingdon (which is near Oxford. both are a part of the region of OXFORDSHIRE) and some lived there for a while afterwards. The band was definitely founded in Abingdon in the mid 80s when they all attended the school, and it must be listed as the founding location. However, there is no evidence to suggest that any band members currently live in Abingdon. Thom Yorke at least is known to live in Oxford itself, while some other band members live in other parts of England. Ed O'Brien lives in London. No one lives or works in Abingdon or it's not public knowledge. The band's personal studio and management headquarters are not located in either Abingdon OR in Oxford, but in Didcot another separate town. The unifying fact about all these places (besides London)? They are all in OXFORDSHIRE.

On Can
"Can? What is that? I've never heard of that!! Radiohead was never influenced by that!"

ahem...

"perhaps nowadays we look more to Can and electronica etc to work out how to stucture stuff." - yorke, on the Kid A sessions, 2000

"The reason why Radiohead had recorded in Paris, Copenhagen and Gloucestershire was because their own studio, which they had expected to be ready by the start of 1999, was still being fitted out and would not be fully operational until September. Yorke imagined Radiohead using their studio much as Can had used their Cologne fortress in the '70s: to record every minute of music played, editing the best stuff down to album length." - 2000

"I couldn't make any sense of Dollars & Cents, for example... Thom: Well, that started out as a IO-minute piece of us mucking around, trying to do the Can thing. It just came out spontaneously. Lyrically, I like doing things like that - where whatever happens in the first take is what stays." - on Amnesiac, 2001

"I’d say it’s so obviously taken… it’s a homage to something like Tago Mago or something by Can. It’s always been in that area for me, that song.” " - On "There There" from Hail to the Thief, 2003

Please stop censoring the article of anything you haven't heard of. Yes it's true an intro must be very generalized. In it we cannot even mention 5% of the influences Radiohead has admitted to liking or the press has cited for them, nor should we. We are supposed to give an accurate representation of things however. There is no point citing multiple similar examples of a single genre, and ignoring others when we could use the same number of pixels and present a broader image of the facts.

We don't namedrop in wikipedia in favor of fame vs accuracy. This is like the Pink Floyd re:OKC, and the Nirvana re:Pablo Honey issue. Just because a large amount of the press hadn't heard any angsty rock not made by Nirvana, any slow art rock not made by Floyd, or any experimental electronic music not made by Aphex Twin, or whatever, doesn't mean it didn't exist.

Yes, Thom Yorke was/is a huge fan of Aphex, as with the whole Warp Records style as of 2000. However there is already one representative of that movement of electronica mentioned in the intro, Autechre. If you insist it to be Aphex rather than Autechre fine. But Can represents a different strain of avant garde rock/electronica that influenced them.

and they covered a Can song for god's sake (out of about three covers of anyone they've done this decade). Like Spinning Plates itself is practically a cover version of a song from Tago Mago. Just move on to some articles you have a background in and stop proving your ignorance please.

Genres
We all know Radiohead never were Britpop. I'm changing it. - —Preceding unsigned comment added by Revan ltrl (talk • contribs)

Misconceptions
Radiohead is not a band "from Abingdon". The members met at Abingdon School in Abingdon (which is near Oxford. both are a part of the region of OXFORDSHIRE) and some lived there for a while afterwards. The band was definitely founded in Abingdon in the mid 80s when they all attended the school, and it must be listed as the founding location. However, there is no evidence to suggest that any band members currently live in Abingdon. Thom Yorke at least is known to live in Oxford itself, while some other band members live in other parts of England. Ed O'Brien lives in London. No one lives or works in Abingdon or it's not public knowledge. The band's personal studio and management headquarters are not located in either Abingdon OR in Oxford, but in Didcot another separate town. The unifying fact about all these places (besides London)? They are all in OXFORDSHIRE.

On Can
"Can? What is that? I've never heard of that!! Radiohead was never influenced by that!"

ahem...

"perhaps nowadays we look more to Can and electronica etc to work out how to stucture stuff." - yorke, on the Kid A sessions, 2000

"The reason why Radiohead had recorded in Paris, Copenhagen and Gloucestershire was because their own studio, which they had expected to be ready by the start of 1999, was still being fitted out and would not be fully operational until September. Yorke imagined Radiohead using their studio much as Can had used their Cologne fortress in the '70s: to record every minute of music played, editing the best stuff down to album length." - 2000

"I couldn't make any sense of Dollars & Cents, for example... Thom: Well, that started out as a IO-minute piece of us mucking around, trying to do the Can thing. It just came out spontaneously. Lyrically, I like doing things like that - where whatever happens in the first take is what stays." - on Amnesiac, 2001

"I’d say it’s so obviously taken… it’s a homage to something like Tago Mago or something by Can. It’s always been in that area for me, that song.” " - On "There There" from Hail to the Thief, 2003

Please stop censoring the article of anything you haven't heard of. Yes it's true an intro must be very generalized. In it we cannot even mention 5% of the influences Radiohead has admitted to liking or the press has cited for them, nor should we. We are supposed to give an accurate representation of things however. There is no point citing multiple similar examples of a single genre, and ignoring others when we could use the same number of pixels and present a broader image of the facts.

We don't namedrop in wikipedia in favor of fame vs accuracy. This is like the Pink Floyd re:OKC, and the Nirvana re:Pablo Honey issue. Just because a large amount of the press hadn't heard any angsty rock not made by Nirvana, any slow art rock not made by Floyd, or any experimental electronic music not made by Aphex Twin, or whatever, doesn't mean it didn't exist.

Yes, Thom Yorke was/is a huge fan of Aphex, as with the whole Warp Records style as of 2000. However there is already one representative of that movement of electronica mentioned in the intro, Autechre. If you insist it to be Aphex rather than Autechre fine. But Can represents a different strain of avant garde rock/electronica that influenced them.

and they covered a Can song for god's sake (out of about three covers of anyone they've done this decade). Like Spinning Plates itself is practically a cover version of a song from Tago Mago. Just move on to some articles you have a background in and stop proving your ignorance please.

Formation date / Years active
There's no dispute on the facts of this, it's just how to present them.


 * The five members of Radiohead formed a band in the mid 80s. 1985 to be precise, or 1986 if you start it with their first gig. Sometimes other members were also in this band, but from 1985/6 it always consisted of at least the current five members. This band was known mostly as On a Friday, though it had other names at times (i.e. Shindig). The members went to college and had other bands in some cases (Flickernoise, Headless Chickens for Thom) but they continued to play together every few months/years during holiday breaks and had ambitions to return to their original band.
 * In the early '90s On a Friday formally got back together, began playing live a lot and releasing demos which they sold in local record shops, trying to get signed. During this time they hooked up with their current managers at Courtyard Studios.
 * In late 1991 they were signed by Parlophone/EMI/Capitol and changed their name. They released their first recordings as "Radiohead" in early 1992, their first single (that would be Creep) in late 1992, and their first album in early 1993.

Given all that, which is already adequately covered in the appropriate history sections, what do we say about when they were formed in the sidebar and more importantly in the intro?

I think we can say first, "Radiohead are an English rock band from Oxfordshire, originally/initially formed by school friends in [pick your preferance: 1985/6/the (mid-?)1980s]." [Then we go on to say the stuff about their first single/album in 1992/3, so it becomes obvious they were not publicly releasing music in the 1980s. The "school friends" thing also lets you know how old they were at the time they formed the band.]

The sidebar can stick to "years active 1991-present" and be fully accurate. it's just that for the first sentence of the intro, the band was not "formed in 1991", but long before, even though they have only been active outside their local boys high school or under their current name since after '91. 172.144.0.252 23:02, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Position on fan taping
Does anyone know if Radiohead has made any official statements on fan taping at concerts? I've always assumed they 'look the other way', but I've yet to hear an official statement from them. Whoblah 22:48, 16 January 2007 (UTC)

They never made an official statement, but if you go back to 2000-2001, the band made positive comments about their live songs being shared on Napster. They've also said other enthusiastic things in interviews and concerts about how fans will get used to the songs before they're out, and it may have been a factor in their touring mostly to introduce new songs that weren't out yet in 2002 and 2006. Even though in 2002 they were just touring Spain and Portugal, the fans in other areas could find the tracks via Internet.

So anyway I'm quite sure the band doesn't have an official taping-friendly policy where certain areas are reserved for tapers or anything, it's always up to fans who want to do it to get past venue security however strong or lax that may be, but the band themselves certainly doesn't oppose taping and sharing of live shows for nonprofit use. 172.149.220.25 07:57, 19 January 2007 (UTC)

Crossover influence of Radiohead
This may seem minor to rock fans, but Radiohead's compositions are quite popular/influential outside of rock. I like the mention of their compositions for Merce Cunningham's dance company (which I've seen). In addition, the prominent jazz pianist Brad Mehldau (I'm a fan) regularly adapts Radiohead tunes, on record and in concert. The classical pianist Christopher O'Reilly has also done at least two albums of Radiohead transcriptions: "True Love Waits" and "Hold Me To This". This is serious stuff, not the typical rip-off artists you get with lots of cross-over stuff - - like transciptions of classic rock for string quartet, or symphony.

I am but a fan of Radiohead and Mehldau [and wikipedia], not a writer myself. But I recommend anyone to look into the wider influence of Radiohead in the realm of "serious" music. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 199.36.20.5 (talk) 16:12, 28 December 2006 (UTC).

There used to be a separate article about Radiohead's influence on other musicians, for some reason- it was probably spun off from a section of this article at some point, but then that article grew a lot of extraneous information, original research and fannish writing and was deleted. That article had a comprehensive list of musical artists in different genres who covered Radiohead songs, including the classical and jazz things.

It's too bad this list is now gone along with the old article- you have to look in articles on each specific Radiohead album or song to find who did the cover versions- but maybe it's for the best, this article could become too cluttered every time a new person did a cover. I did add a citation to the intro statement of this article about their influence on musicians in many genres, with a representative list in the footnote of some of the artists that have covered Radiohead- the genres aren't listed, but they range from jazz to reggae to hip-hop to indie rock to pop to alt-country to singer songwriters to new/bluegrass to heavy metal, and not including any of those "the [x genre] tribute to..." by unknown musicians, either. I didn't put Christopher O'Riley, because his name isn't widely known aside from his Radiohead albums, however I know he is a respected classical pianist, it's true they've gotten a different sort of covers from most bands. I listed Mehldau, definitely. :)

Oh and something quite cool in terms of "high" art, which there isn't really any place to mention in the article: Michael Cunningham said OK Computer was a large influence on The Hours.

172.161.190.202 16:07, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

Radiohead single or plural
The article mostly treats Radiohead as a plural noun but sometimes as a singular one. Make consistent? (But which way: singular makes sense to me)

Moxbib 14:06, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

You have to be flexible with collective nouns (see this AskOxford FAQ for example). Phil Smith 12:09, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Passed GA
Excellent article. Everything made perfect sense to me, as someone who has never heard of Radiohead. I could only recommend adding some inlines in paragraphs that don't have any. I'd also recommend a Peer Review to flesh out more problems. I really enjoyed reading it though. Nice work.  Dooms Day349  21:17, 14 February 2007 (UTC)

Radiohead interview
I did an interview with Ed of Radiohead 10 years ago. (God, time flies.) I don't want to post the piece myself, but if any of you deem it worthy to quote, extract information from or otherwise use, feel free. :-)

http://sheknows.com/about/look/4364.htm

- Nancy

Andwhatsnext 22:40, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

"Band members" is TWO WORDS
Please stop using the word "Bandmembers." It does not exist.

Also, if you take the time to add new text mentioning an album, album titles should always be italicized, i.e. Kid A or Amnesiac. Song titles should have quotes around them, i.e. "Paranoid Android." (or "Paranoid Android", with the period/comma afterwards, depending on your country or style preference. I'm not sure the article is consistent). To get the italic effect just put  around  the word you want to italicize. If it's also a link, put the apostrophes just outside the " " 172.145.206.220 17:59, 30 March 2007 (UTC)