Kid A — Radiohead (2000) - It was left alone...

The album that answered a masterpiece by refusing to be one

By Rafi Mercer

There is a particular danger in being told you have made the best record of your generation. The praise is real and the trap is real, and they are the same object. Do it again and you are repeating yourself. Do something else and you have thrown it away.

Most bands repeat. It is not cowardice. It is gravity.

Radiohead went the other way, and the strange thing is how physically you can hear the decision. Kid A opens on a Rhodes piano and a voice put through a machine until the words stop working as words. No guitar. No drums for a full four minutes. A band who had just been handed the guitar record of the decade beginning their next one by putting the guitars down.

The sessions ran across 1999 and 2000 — Paris, Copenhagen, a rented mansion in Gloucestershire, then their own studio in Oxfordshire. Nigel Godrich producing. Thom Yorke had stopped being able to write, had stopped wanting to hear a guitar, and was listening to Warp records. Jonny Greenwood took up the ondes Martenot, an instrument invented in 1928 that almost nobody plays. Brass players were brought in for "The National Anthem" and told to work against each other rather than together, in the manner of a free jazz section. The bassline underneath them is one Yorke wrote as a teenager.

Then it was released, on 2 October 2000, with no single, no conventional video and very little press.

It went straight to number one in Britain and, for the first time, in America.

Ten tracks. Forty-nine minutes. And a structure that becomes clearer the more you sit with it: two dense halves, and a hole in the middle.

That hole is "Treefingers" — Ed O'Brien's guitar processed until the word stops applying, no drums, no bass, no voice, three minutes and forty-two seconds at the dead centre of the album. Nobody plays it on purpose. It exists so that the second half has somewhere to start from.

Around it, the record does not behave. "How to Disappear Completely" is strings and ondes Martenot and a man saying "I'm not here, this isn't happening" over an arrangement that arrives from every direction at once. "Idioteque" is built from a sample of a 1973 computer-music piece by Paul Lansky, found on a second-hand LP. "Motion Picture Soundtrack" closes the album on harp and pump organ, sounding a hundred years older than everything before it.

The reviews split. Some called it wilful, or cold, or evasive.

The cold is real. But it is architectural, not emotional — the record is about coming apart and it is assembled with obsessive care, and the care is easiest to hear where the least is happening.

This is why it belongs in a listening room rather than on shuffle. Individually the tracks are difficult and the reputation for chilliness sticks to them. Played in sequence, in one sitting, with nothing else asking for your attention, the coldness turns out to be space. The middle of the record stops feeling like a gap and starts feeling like the point.

Twenty-six years on, the argument about whether it was a betrayal has quietly ended. The album is where a certain kind of guitar band went to stop being one, and half of what followed in the decade after came through it. What survives best is not the innovation. It is the restraint — the willingness to leave large parts of a record almost empty and trust that someone would sit still long enough to notice.

Put it on at the beginning. Do not skip track five.

The empty room is the one it was built around.

Quick Questions

Why has Kid A got no singles?

Radiohead released it with no lead single and no conventional videos, promoting it instead through short animated clips distributed online. It went to number one in the UK and gave the band their first US number one anyway.

What is the best way to listen to Kid A?

In one sitting, in order. The album is built as two dense halves either side of an ambient centre, and the sequencing carries most of the meaning. On shuffle it reads as difficult; in sequence it reads as spacious.

Is Kid A a jazz record?

No, but it borrows openly. The brass on "The National Anthem" was directed to play against itself in the manner of a free jazz ensemble, and the influence of Bitches Brew runs underneath a good deal of the album's approach to texture.

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