Notes
1
Available online at: http://www.rollingstone.com/recordings/review.asp?aid=2042419&cf=236, 31
August 2001.
2
Available online at: http://www.q4music.com/features/fullfeature.cfm?ObjectUUID=8F01B66FCB7B-11D4-9CDA000629DEBDC3, 31 August 2001.
3
Wells, Steven. ‘Banging On Radiohead About…’. New Musical Express (July 15 2000), available
online at: http://www.greenplastic.com/articles/nme07152000.html, 31 August 2001.
4
Fricke, David. Review of Radiohead’s Kid A for Rolling Stone, available online at:
http://www.rollingstone.com/recordings/review.asp?aid=64764&cf=236, 31 August 2001.
5
See Steven Wells’ comment in the NME quoted above.
6
An article in the Silicon Alley Reporter Magazine 41 (April 2001) notes that, ‘Radiohead’s death-bear
icon has roots in a bedtime story Stanley [Donwood] once told his daughter’, available online at:
http://www.greenplastic.com/articles/siliconalleyreporter2001.html, 31 August 2001.
7
On Yorke’s desire to instrumentalize his voice, see Reynolds, p.28.
8
Yorke quoted in Rolling Stone (July 2001), p.50.
9
The drawings of twisted trees with sinewy branches and roots are very reminiscent of descriptions of
the tree root that provokes such terror for Roquentin in Sartre’s Nausea.
10
At the band’s label website, http://hollywoodandvine.com/radiohead/, it is currently possible to
‘Befriend the Buddy! Add the Googly Minotaur to your buddy list for all things Radiohead’, or else get
the Minotaur as an ‘instant messaging buddy icon’.
11
It is of vital importance to realize — as critics such as Steven Wells and Andrew Collins have not —
that this latter phase of Radiohead’s career truly is the result of a marriage between the mainstream and
avant-garde experimentation and not indicative of a desire completely to abandon commercial success.
As Yorke has said when asked if he can live with the contradiction existing between his anti-corporate
rhetoric and the fact that his band is financed by a huge media conglomerate: ‘Not really, I’m pretty
touchy about it […]. But if you want to actually have your record in a shop, then you’ve got not way
round it because you have to go through major distributors and they’ve all got deals and blah blah blah.
There isn’t a way round it. Personally, one of the reasons that I wanted to be in a band was actually to
be on the high street. I don’t want to be in a cupboard. I write music to actually communicate things to
people’ (quoted in Uncut (August 2001), p.61).
12
One shot is particularly significant as a melancholic portrait of Yorke enters into a dissolve with the
weeping Minotaur, the latter fading into the very center of Yorke’s face (figure 5). The video is
available in its entirety in streaming format at the band’s official website, http://www.radiohead.com,
31 August 2001.
13
Yorke quoted in Uncut (August 2001), p.66.