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Yorke, the group's central songwriter, is obsessed with the disillusioned and the disoriented: a plastic surgeon in a fool's war with gravity, a crash victim who finds his near death experience makes him feel alive, an earthbound stargazer who dreams of abduction by alien spacecraft. His voice is often sampled, distorted by synthesizers, his lyrics broken into elegiac fragments, shards of thoughts, mantras of melancholia. "I woke up sucking a lemon," Yorke sings on Everything in Its Right Place, and the phrase is repeated again and again in a plaintive sample. Throughout Kid A he returns to the theme of restlessness, rootlessness and confusion. On the ethereal jazz breakdown In Limbo, he croons, "I'm lost at sea... I've lost my way." But as Kid A nears its conclusion, Yorke's disembodied state gives way to all too solid flesh. "This is really happening," he sings, his voice quivering. Denied feelings are still felt; emotions have consequence. Then, on Motion Picture Soundtrack, Yorke sings the CD's haunting last line in a falsetto ringing with resignation: "I will see you in the next life."
It's sometime after 1 a.m. and, in a closed-off basement bar in the Malmaison Hotel in Glasgow, Radiohead is unwinding. Guitarist Ed O'Brien, 32, has turned in early, but drummer Phil Selway, 33, is at the bar, talking proudly about his baby boy. Bassist Colin Greenwood, 31, sits in a nearby booth, discussing British novelists Martin Amis and Niall Griffiths (Greenwood holds a degree in English from Cambridge; Selway, Yorke and O'Brien are also college graduates); a few steps away, his younger brother Jonny, 28, orders another drink from the bar and asks why his older brother is still up, given the fact that Colin has been suffering from the flu. But it is Yorke, 31, who seems the most animated. For its own amusement, the band has been shooting video footage of its live shows, and Yorke has just finished screening some of what was shot. "The video footage looks brilliant! F______ brilliant!" he tells Colin.
After recording stints in Paris and Copenhagen, the band finished up Kid A in a newly built studio not far from its hometown of Oxford, England. All the members of Radiohead grew up around Oxford, where they attended Abingdon School, a private all-boys school. It was there they discovered a shared love of music and began performing together. Nigel Hunter, Yorke's art teacher at Abingdon, says the aspiring rocker was strong-willed even then: "He was very independent. He wasn't someone who was swayed by a crowd."
His band shares those qualities. Its songs don't fit comfortable formats, and the band hasn't yet made a proper music video for the release (only an arty series of 10-sec. to 40- sec. spots that feature animated bears, stick figures falling into volcanos and the like). Also, in another unconventional move, the band is preparing to release another CD as early as the first months of next year. "We've finished all the tracks," says Selway. "It's just a matter of determining the running order."
Fan anticipation for Kid A is so fierce that every track was leaked to Napster weeks before the album's release. Says Yorke: "The cool thing about Napster is that it encourages bootlegging, it encourages enthusiasm for music in a way that the music industry has long forgotten to do."