“Sometimes the nicest thing to do with a guitar is just look at it”: How Radiohead’s debut changed the way they thought about recording guitars – and set them up for two landmark albums

As Radiohead's first tour in seven years inches closer, we take a deep dive into the Guitar World archives to uncover the game-changing band's approach to recording guitars during what many may consider Radiohead's golden era: from Pablo Honey to OK Computer.

“There are lots of mistakes on it,” Ed O’Brien – one-third of the band's guitar triumvirate – commented back in a 1997 interview with Guitar World, referring to Radiohead's debut, Pablo Honey.

“But you learn from your mistakes. I still think it’s a valid album. It’s very up, quite hedonistic – ‘Let’s put on eight guitar overdubs and turn them all up!’ I think it’s one of those albums you might put on in an open-top car on a Saturday night going to a party, but I could be wrong.”

The Bends, released in March 1995, in particular, marked a significant shift from a guitar perspective: it was a band finally (fully) dipping its toes into experimenting and flexing its creative use of its three-guitar lineup, a peek into what Radiohead was to become.

Radiohead - Paranoid Android (Later Archive 1997) - YouTube

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“We were very aware of something on The Bends that we weren’t aware of on Pablo Honey,” O’Brien continued.

“There was a need to put more and more guitar tracks on Pablo Honey, and you had to play all the time. Whereas the approach to The Bends was, if it sounded really great with Thom playing acoustic with Phil [Selway, drummer] and Coz [Colin Greenwood, bassist], what was the point in trying to add something more?”

“Sometimes the nicest thing to do with a guitar is just look at it,” Thom Yorke jokingly added.

As for the division of guitar labor between Yorke, O'Brien, and Jonny Greenwood, Yorke commented, “I just keep time, really,” while Greenwood was uncomfortable being referred to as the lead guitarist. “You could describe it like that, I suppose, but it’s not really like that.”

Yorke quickly came to Greenwood's defense, adding, “When I run out of melodies, there’s usually something on Jonny’s guitar that’s a melody, like Mr. [George] Harrison used to do. You know, pick a melody up here [fingers upper reaches of imaginary fretboard], and so on, because it gets a bit boring listening to one voice all the time.”

As for why Yorke felt The Bends was successful, he divulged, “We had to put ourselves into an environment where we felt free to work. And that’s why we want to produce the next one ourselves, because the times we most got off on making the last record were when we were just completely communicating with ourselves, and John Leckie wasn’t really saying much, and it was just all happening.

“I don’t know if it’ll work again, but I hope it does,” he concluded.

28 years later, Radiohead have just released the live album Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003–2009) and are set to embark on a series of European dates in November – their first since their 2018 tour, which marked the release of A Moon Shaped Pool.