Plot
Meeting People Is Easy takes place during the promotion of Radiohead's 1997 release OK Computer, containing a collage of video clips, sound bites, and dialogue going behind the scenes with the band on their world tour, showing the eventual burn-out of the group as the world tour progresses. The inaugural show of the OK Computer tour began on 22 May 1997 in Barcelona, Spain. Their final performance, 104 concerts later, was in New York's Radio City Music Hall.
Unlike other music documentaries, the film does not focus on the band's friendship with one another, families, or anything else outside the direct production, promotion and touring of a record. Most of the film contains footage consisting of music writing, concerts, promotional material, and abstract video footage.
During interviews, the rock group take on critics, record-label hype and American modern-rock radio, which Yorke compares to "a fridge buzzing." This coincides with the soundtrack of the film, with sounds that weave in and out of snatches of interviews, conversations, and songs. Along with this "radio wave" effect is a series of edits and quickly moving shots with stills, slow tracking shots, time-lapse photography, and colour/black-and-white film and video.
The documentary opens with video taken from the back of a subway train, along with the track "Fitter Happier" from OK Computer. This cuts to the band members reading off several dozen radio intros. Interspliced with the promotional material is live footage taken from various venues around the world, including the song "Karma Police" on Late Show with David Letterman.
Included in the documentary are various video clips of television appearances, newspaper articles, and other mentions of Radiohead in the media. In a clip from a Sky News programme, presenter Kay Burley comments on the video for the band's song "No Surprises", saying "Music to cut your wrists to. … It's the most miserable-sounding tune I've ever heard." While watching the video, the programme's music reviewer quips "You'll probably quite enjoy it because he actually drowns at the end". The making of the video is then shown, where frontman Thom Yorke is lip-synching while trapped in a tank of rising water.
The world tour that is the subject of the film has subsequently been admitted as a low point for the band, specifically Yorke, who had a near-breakdown. As "On Your Own Again" by Scott Walker plays on the soundtrack, Yorke is seen placing a note that reads "i am not here and this is not really happening" on his hotel windowpane, which looks out onto midtown Manhattan. This message was suggested by his friend Michael Stipe (singer of R.E.M.) as a way of dissociating himself from everything around him, and was used as the central lyrics of How To Disappear Completely, released in their following album, Kid A. This would also form the background of Radiohead's recording sessions beginning in 1999 for their next albums Kid A and Amnesiac, inspiring a different songwriting and recording style and the band's changed sound after OK Computer.
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