I'm pretty sure...

[hmpf]

that a big part of the reason behind my Radiohead obsession(which, yes, is still very much alive) is that they turned out to be pretty different from what I expected them to be. Or, to phrase that more precisely: that their more complete public image, which is revealed when you go digging a bit deeper into the interviews and so on, is significantly different from the more widely spread version of their public image, which is based on a handful of facts (and myths) from the late 1990s.

Before I started reading all these interviews, I didn't know much about them - I knew the name of their singer, and that he cared about global warming, and that's all, really. I don't think I even knew there were five people in the band. But I must have extrapolated more of an idea of them from their music - an idea of their personality as a band, anyway - than I would have expected. Because if I *didn't* have some kind of idea of them, then why would I be surprised about any of the things I've found out since?

This discrepancy between two public images is, of course, perfect fodder for my ongoing fascination with identity issues and the differences between public perception and actual identities and so on.

**

What are the things I'm surprised by? They're mostly trivial, actually. (That I find them so surprising says a lot about how I perceive artists and rockstars, I guess.)

I experience little frissons of a kind of continuous, pleasurable surprise at these Radiohead factoids:

- They're all married. (Apparently I expect rockstars to have unstable relationships.)
- They all have several kids. (Apparently I don't expect rockstars to be into family.)
- They started the band when they were teenagers. (Not unusual to start a band at that age. I guess this factoid surprises me because I don't think many teen bands stay together that far beyond their teenage years - and without betraying serious signs of arrested development.)
- They're often fairly silly. (There's a kind of dark humour in their music - but outright silliness? Never got *that* vibe from their music.)
- They're frequently highly awkward on camera. (In my mind, apparently all rockstars are professional attention whores who just love being in front of a camera.)
- They're weirdly *cute*. Not necessarily cute-sexy (though that, too, sometimes) - puppy-and-kitten-cute. (*Nothing* in their music had given me any indication of that!)
- The latter goes doubly for Thom Yorke. (Both the cuteness, and the unexpectedness of same. Wasn't he supposed to be this morbid prophet/poet of doom? Do prophets/poets of doom usually look like adorable kittens or baby birds?)

Comments

[muladhara]

A lot of bands from the mid-90s in Britain got together as teenagers. At one point it was the rule rather than the exception, but I suspect that it's the other way around now (especially with so much manufactured dross about).

Yeah, but how many of those teenage bands are still...

[hmpf]

creating relevant music together 27 years later? That's the thing I still find so surprising here - that they've stuck with each other and the band, despite all the changes of growing up and growing older, and the changing dynamics brought about by fame and so on and so forth. I do think that's fairly unusual. I mean, I've barely managed to hold on to a couple of friendships from my school days - a continuous creative relationship with anyone from those years is almost unimaginable to me (and those years aren't even as long ago for me as they are for Radiohead - just twenty years). It must be very strange to still be so close, in such a fundamental way, to so many people from your distant past.

Various members of the band have described their relationship to the rest of the band as more like a sibling relationship than a friendship, and that makes sense to me. But there's the added element of creating stuff together, of course.

I'm endlessly intrigued by them as a group of people, not just as a band.