When OK Computer was released in 1997, NME called it “one of the greatest albums of living memory”. I on the otherhand had barely heard of Radiohead. I knew Creep and thought it wasn’t a bad song but that was about it.
One night my dad came home from work with two albums on cassette. In it for the Money by Supergrass and OK Computer by Radiohead. They had been left in a phonebox in a local music shop bag. Someone must have made a call and left them there. Well, anyway, there was to be one for me and one for my sister. I got to pick which one I wanted. I picked the Supergrass album. I was much more familiar with them and liked some of their stuff. It was a good choice, it’s a good album and I did replace it with the cd version sometime afterwards. My sister not being very into music at the time never listened to OK Computer. After a few months I think I actually borrowed the cassette from her and listened to it. I never gave it back. It is still on my shelf back in Dublin and she’s never having it back.
Looking back it’s one of the defining albums of my life if not the defining album. As I’ve mentiond before I just missed out on Nirvana and there was nothing else really iconic I guess is the word at the time which I fell for. Queen will always be up there as the first band I really loved and U2 will of course always be U2 but nothing will ever be like Radiohead. It might have taken six years, but tomorrow night I’ll be seeing them live for the first time. I figured I would see them at a festival or at a big arena gig, so to see them two nights running in a tiny Dublin venue at the kickoff of an 8 night club tour is well it’s almost like a dream come true.
Uh huh.
You know a single good version of There There live will make it all so very worthwhile. Fuckin A.