Radiohead

Kid A
Parlophone, 2000

Not today but soon I will spend an entire month writing about love songs. It occurs to me this column is very often filled with stories about junkies and suicides and rock 'n' roll tragedies, none of which can be particularly pleasant to read about on a Monday morning. However right now I have just finished reading Chuck Klosterman's Killing Yourself To Live, so bear with me a little longer.

I enjoyed this book immensely. It's about Klosterman's road trip across the USA, visiting the sites of famous rock 'n' roll deaths (Elvis, Cobain, the Big Bopper, etc) for an article in Spin. Except it ends up having more to do with the women he thinks about on the road, and the evangelical Christian movies he watches in motel rooms while getting stoned. It also has many asides about the author's thoughts on various records.

Now chances are you're not a Radiohead obsessive (because you're reading this magazine and not snoring through Drum), so perhaps you haven't heard this theory yet: that Kid A matches up to the September 11 attacks like The Dark Side Of The Moon to The Wizard Of Oz. Klosterman reckons each track represents a period of that day, in sequence, with the tragedy occurring during 'The National Anthem' (relevant lyrics: "What's going on?") and the following song representing the immediate shock ("This isn't happening"), and so on.

This is fairly interesting, but it is Klosterman's argument and not mine. What it reminded me to do was say that the last track on Kid A, 'Motion Picture Soundtrack', is one of the saddest songs ever made. It is set to what sounds like a wind instrument electronically distorted and slowed down. "Red wine and sleeping pills/ Help me get back to your arms," are the first lines, and "I will see you in the next life" is the last.

You could take it to be a fictitious suicide note – Thom Yorke was suffering from depression and rebelling from the success of OK Computer when it was recorded – and I guess in the context of Klosterman's thoughts about celebrity and death, and how the two are entwined, that would make sense. But that doesn't do it justice. In fact, such a reading may miss the point altogether.

'Motion Picture Soundtrack' is one of the saddest songs I have ever heard, but it's not about death. As much as one can say it is about anything (Yorke told journalists he pulled the lyrics to Kid A from a hat), it is about mourning. The opening lines, "Red wine and sleeping pills/ Help me get back to your arms", are a profound expression of loss. And that is something that dead people do not feel. They don't feel a thing. Nor do they drink red wine.