OK Computer - Background

Background

In 1995, Radiohead were touring in support of their acclaimed second album The Bends. Midway through the tour, Brian Eno commissioned the band to contribute a song to The Help Album, a charity compilation organised by War Child. The Help Album was to be recorded over the course of a single day, 4 September 1995, and rush-released that week. That day the band recorded "Lucky" in five hours with engineer Nigel Godrich, who had assisted producer John Leckie with The Bends and had produced several Radiohead B-sides.

Godrich said of the Help Album session later, "Those things are the most inspiring, when you do stuff really fast and there's nothing to lose. We left feeling fairly euphoric. So after establishing a bit of a rapport work-wise, I was sort of hoping I would be involved with the next album." To promote The Help Album, "Lucky" featured as the lead track on the Help EP, which only charted at number 51 after BBC Radio 1 chose not to play it. This disappointed Radiohead singer Thom Yorke, but he later said "Lucky" crucially shaped the nascent sound and mood of their upcoming record: " 'Lucky' was indicative of what we wanted to do. It was like the first mark on the wall."

Meanwhile, Radiohead found the Bends tour to be stressful and draining and took a break in January 1996. Subsequently, the band sought to distance their new material from the introspective style of The Bends. Drummer Phil Selway said, "There was an awful lot of soul searching . To do that again on another album would be excruciatingly boring." Yorke, Radiohead's primary lyricist, said, "The big thing for me is that we could really fall back on just doing another miserable, morbid and negative record lyrically, but I don't really want to, at all. And I'm deliberately just writing down all the positive things that I hear or see. I'm not able to put them into music yet and I don't want to just force it."

The critical and commercial success of The Bends gave the band the confidence to self-produce their third album, and they were supplied with a £100,000 budget for recording equipment and an open-ended deadline by their label Parlophone. Guitarist Jonny Greenwood said "the only concept that we had for this album was that we wanted to record it away from the city and that we wanted to record it ourselves." A number of producers, including major figures like Scott Litt, were offered the job, but the band were encouraged by the sessions with Godrich. They consulted him for advice on what equipment to use, and prepared for the upcoming sessions by buying their own recording equipment, including a plate reverberator purchased from Jona Lewie. Although Godrich sought to focus his production work on electronic dance music, he outgrew his role as advisor and became co-producer on the album.