Thursday August 24th 2000

I’ve come to a decision: Radiohead are a national embarrassment and must be shot at once. Or at least deported. To Middlesborough.

Don’t get me wrong (said in my best Alison-Steadman-in-Abigail’s-Party voice). I actually quite like a couple of their songs. But as an ideology, they are singlehandedly ruining British music and British youth, by inspiring impressionable sixth-formers all over the country to equate faux-angst overcooked wailing, bad lyrics, entirely devoid of wit or humour (even Cohen has wryness, even their beloved U2 and REM don’t take themselves too seriously), and plumping for general self-deluding po-facedness with some ill-conceived idea of actual worth. Radiohead gave us Muse and JJ72. Thanks. Radiohead would explode if placed near a Motown record. Diana Ross’s “Touch Me In The Morning” contains more angst then they’ll ever contrive to disport.

Even their name is taken from a late Talking Heads song. A really naff one. Early Talking Heads would be fine… So why, then, are they allowed to live, worse, actively encouraged, unanimously, by the biz? Simply because they are at the heart of far too many people’s livelihoods: too many people in the Serious Rock Industry have vested interests in the perpetuation of both the band and all they stand for, every dour, dreary trapping. Result being: that dreaded phrase “Much Awaited New Album” everywhere I read, every week for the past year.

Not much awaited by me, dears. You’ll be the first ones up against the wall when the pop revolution comes. Small black schoolgirls on Tottenham buses are laughing at you.

Until that day of reckoning, Radiohead are continually held up as a precedent, nay, an acceptable, even preferable role model for glamour-free white boys with their irony-free Marshall amps and eyes set on the corporate Alt-Rock stadium career trajectory. I’m too fazed to even yawn.

Dear Susannah Yorke, if you genuinely hate your situation so much whilst being so concerned about cruelty to others in the world, please do us all a Benefit and stop making music. Signed, the entire population of Tibet.