Exit Music: The Radiohead Story
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Product Description
Radiohead don t play by the rules of rock stardom. When conventional wisdom urges a turn to the right, Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Ed O Brien, Colin Greenwood and Phil Selway unfailingly turn left.
Despite or perhaps because of this, they have become one of the world s most famous bands.
But their journey to fame over more than a decade has been fraught with tension. As the quintet continue to search for sounds that haven't been heard before, each new album and tour is a potential crisis point, threatening to split the band apart.
Through it all, these consummate outsiders have revealed little about themselves. But Exit Music: The Radiohead Story uncovers the details behind the songs.
In this new, updated and revised edition, author Mac Randall follows the band from their beginnings in suburban Oxford through the success of Creep and OK Computer to the traumatic recording sessions that spawned Kid A, Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief, on to the award-winning In Rainbows and beyond.
Despite or perhaps because of this, they have become one of the world s most famous bands.
But their journey to fame over more than a decade has been fraught with tension. As the quintet continue to search for sounds that haven't been heard before, each new album and tour is a potential crisis point, threatening to split the band apart.
Through it all, these consummate outsiders have revealed little about themselves. But Exit Music: The Radiohead Story uncovers the details behind the songs.
In this new, updated and revised edition, author Mac Randall follows the band from their beginnings in suburban Oxford through the success of Creep and OK Computer to the traumatic recording sessions that spawned Kid A, Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief, on to the award-winning In Rainbows and beyond.
About the Author
Mac Randall is editor-in-chief of Music Alive! and Teaching Music, the magazine of MENC, America's National Association for Music Education. He was formerly the senior editor of Musician and Guitar One magazines. Over 20 years as a journalist and critic, he has written about music of all genres for numerous American and British publications, including Rolling Stone, Mojo, Q, Vanity Fair, Details, and the New York Times. He lives in New York City with his wife, daughter, and cat.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The first half of "Exit Music" is fascinating reading for the obsessive fan; Radiohead's formative years are explored in fresh detail thanks to new interviews with teachers, schoolmates and musicians who knew them. These provide the bulk of the book's sparse original research; for later eras, Randall has to make do with the same interviews any fan can dig up online (including several Randall himself conducted in the 90s). This means later chapters are little more than timelines - not much more than an afternoon browsing of Wikipedia and its citations would provide, unless you're entertained by Randall's personal opinions about individual songs and albums. (I would have been much more interested in a more thorough exploriation of each song's history, but then Randall wouldn't have been able to produce anything more comprehensive than an encyclopaedic fansite like citizeninsane.eu already provides.)
Every fan who reads this book will have his or her own favourite Radiohead era, so Randall's partisan track-by-track reviews are surely doomed to irritate. (I personally was alarmed at his casual dismissal of A Wolf at the Door.) He makes clear early on that The Bends is his favourite album, and though he praises Radiohead's "weirder" later work, his coverage of it is tinged with a suspicion, almost uninterest, that is telling. Radiohead's infamous shift from guitars and drum kits to samplers and drum machines was a game-changer for the music industry and for pop music, but few words are spent analysing what, exactly, caused this seismic change, beyond mentioning that the band listened to Charlie Mingus and Aphex Twin. This is a huge oversight: now Kid A has been named the best album of the 2000s by several big-name publications, it's looking likely that history will not remember Radiohead for Creep, The Bends or even OK Computer but for the genre-hopping work that followed. Randall sounds like a journalist who still can't forgive Dylan for going electric. His calling any kind of electronic music or instrumentation "techno", like those folk who think anything with electric guitars is heavy metal, doesn't help.
Sometimes he just gets things wrong. A few lyrics are misquoted, and facts are asserted that don't match my understanding of things (and it's clear we're drawing from the same interviews). He draws lines between events that I suspect didn't exist so cleanly in reality, but I suppose that's the problem of any biography. There is little to no coverage of producer Nigel Godrich or cover artist Stanley Donwood, both of whom have worked closely with the band since The Bends are as vital to Radiohead's product as any member of the band.
Also unflattering are the attacks on other bands Randall considers derivative of Radiohead's sound, such as Muse, Coldplay and Travis - as if none of those bands had forged distinct identities by the time this edition was written, and as if Radiohead didn't spend their early career aping their own heroes anyway (as this book well covers). However you feel about those acts, the attacks feel malicious, and fanboyish, and unecessary.
This edition, the third, was published only months before Radiohead's eigth album, The King of Limbs, was announced. Describing Radiohead returning to the studio to decide how to proceed with their next release, the book's final chapter ends with the line "the world waited to find out." I know writing a biography of a still-active band makes finding a firm ending difficult, but this inconclusive getaway is a cop-out, and feels like a bridge to the inevitable fourth edition. Perhaps it will be better.
Every fan who reads this book will have his or her own favourite Radiohead era, so Randall's partisan track-by-track reviews are surely doomed to irritate. (I personally was alarmed at his casual dismissal of A Wolf at the Door.) He makes clear early on that The Bends is his favourite album, and though he praises Radiohead's "weirder" later work, his coverage of it is tinged with a suspicion, almost uninterest, that is telling. Radiohead's infamous shift from guitars and drum kits to samplers and drum machines was a game-changer for the music industry and for pop music, but few words are spent analysing what, exactly, caused this seismic change, beyond mentioning that the band listened to Charlie Mingus and Aphex Twin. This is a huge oversight: now Kid A has been named the best album of the 2000s by several big-name publications, it's looking likely that history will not remember Radiohead for Creep, The Bends or even OK Computer but for the genre-hopping work that followed. Randall sounds like a journalist who still can't forgive Dylan for going electric. His calling any kind of electronic music or instrumentation "techno", like those folk who think anything with electric guitars is heavy metal, doesn't help.
Sometimes he just gets things wrong. A few lyrics are misquoted, and facts are asserted that don't match my understanding of things (and it's clear we're drawing from the same interviews). He draws lines between events that I suspect didn't exist so cleanly in reality, but I suppose that's the problem of any biography. There is little to no coverage of producer Nigel Godrich or cover artist Stanley Donwood, both of whom have worked closely with the band since The Bends are as vital to Radiohead's product as any member of the band.
Also unflattering are the attacks on other bands Randall considers derivative of Radiohead's sound, such as Muse, Coldplay and Travis - as if none of those bands had forged distinct identities by the time this edition was written, and as if Radiohead didn't spend their early career aping their own heroes anyway (as this book well covers). However you feel about those acts, the attacks feel malicious, and fanboyish, and unecessary.
This edition, the third, was published only months before Radiohead's eigth album, The King of Limbs, was announced. Describing Radiohead returning to the studio to decide how to proceed with their next release, the book's final chapter ends with the line "the world waited to find out." I know writing a biography of a still-active band makes finding a firm ending difficult, but this inconclusive getaway is a cop-out, and feels like a bridge to the inevitable fourth edition. Perhaps it will be better.
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