Ozark, Radiohead and a Peaky Blinders warning from the Daily Mail
“The lunatics have taken over, the asylum. Waiting on the rapture”.
“The lunatics have taken over, the asylum. Waiting on the rapture”.
It’s a lazy statement to assert that Radiohead, the genre defying band from Oxford, England are a political band. But they are and I’m a lazy obsessive of their incredible music that now stretches back almost three decades. We could travel from their earliest utterances recorded to vinyl on their 1993 album Pablo Honey or more meaningfully their follow up two years later with The Bends and the tormented wails of lead singer Thom Yorke of facing down the
“CIA”
and
“Tanks and the whole marines to blow me away”
or the pointed lyrics on their most melodic and sweetest of sounding songs such as Fake Plastic Trees or No Surprises from their most accomplished and 1997 zeitgeist defining album, OK Computer. Both tell fake tales, of plastic wealth in a plastic world for crumbling and unhappy people to the glockenspiel inspired stadium sing-a-long and the desires of a quiet and “pretty” life and the angrily pointed lyrics:
“A heart that’s full up like a landfill
A job that slowly kills you
Bruises that won’t heal
You look so tired, unhappy
Bring down the government
They don’t, they don’t speak for us
I’ll take a quiet life
A handshake of carbon monoxide
And no alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises
No alarms and no surprises
Silent, silent”.
The band as a whole are outspoken critics of the ruling class with Thom very publicly attending CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) rallies and anti austerity protests throughout the 1990’s. Dollars and Cents on their 2001 Amnesiac album is another obvious example amongst many, many more of Thom’s angst filled angry ripostes to overbearing Governmental authority figures who cannot allow the central figure of the song to be happy, peaceful and content. “Why don’t you quiet down” could be construed as the inner monologue of the central character wanting peace, freedom and tranquillity away from this monstrous authority figure looming over him, or it could be argued that this is that very same authority/monetary establishment quieting down the argument as they “crack your little souls”. Electioneering on their seminal OK Computer album is as gloriously sneering and anti-Establishment as Thom gets and is as prescient then as it is today and sadly, I fear, for decades to come:
“Riot shields
Voodoo economics
It’s life, it’s life
It’s just business
Cattle prods and the I.M.F.
I trust I can rely on, your vote?”
So Radiohead are many, many glorious things but they are very definitely a political band, I am a huge and lifelong obsessive of their music and in recent years I’ve rather fallen in love with the television crime drama show Ozark and the two have coalesced rather pleasingly.
If you haven’t seen Ozark, here’s a basic premise:
A growingly angry Chicago accountant stumbles unwittingly onto his business partner’s duplicitous ties with a Mexican drug cartel and is the only survivor of a brutal and bloody “business meeting” that ends with the accountant moving his family to the beautiful surrounds of the Ozarks and lakes of Missouri to launder money as a repayment of his partner’s debts and to retain his and his family’s lives.
I fell immediately in love with Ozark as the above premise is roughly half the original first episode of a series now in it’s fourth, and I believe last, season. So I was hooked way before the closing credits of this series opener as the “Byrde” family of Marty, Wendy and their children Charlotte and Jonah looked out from on high and across the expanse of their new home of the Ozarks. As the crane shot lengthened slowly away from the family it was accompanied by the rather delightful Decks Dark from Radiohead’s 2016 album A Moon Shaped Pool and hence my royal seal of approval was quickly applied.
I watch a below average amount of television and when I do I seem to pick a winner.
Take Peaky Blinders for example.
This gritty tale of a post World War I crime gang in Birmingham seemed synonymous with the contemporary Sheffield sound of the Arctic Monkeys, but in more recent seasons Radiohead have made some spectacular musical entrances to the world of Thomas Shelby and his gang of razor blade wielding cut-throats coming to terms with the shellshock of the horribly monikered “Great War”. Season 3 ends with the ironically titled You and Whose Army from their 2001 Amnesiac album as does the wonderfully mournful Pyramid Song. You and Whose Army is brilliantly used as tales of “ghost horses” and “we ride tonight” accompany the entire crime family climbing into their incredibly rare and luxurious motorcars for the short journey to their place of both work and immense wealth. The Amnesiac album was an angst filled cry out from lead singer Thom Yorke against the beating of the war drums that would lead to the destruction of Iraq and this song alone condemned the “cronies” and their defence of their “Holy Roman Empire”. Two seasons later Climbing up the Walls was aptly used as, if memory serves, it accompanied a painful family scene and/or the mental decline of it’s premier character Tommy Shelby and was exactly in line with the claustrophobic and nasty nature of this horribly graphic yet musically brilliant ninth track on their 1997 OK Computer album.
*Important notes for the coming videos*
Ozark — “Decks Dark” Ends the first episode of the first season. This is the only video available and a still from the scene at the conclusion of this episode accompanies the entire Radiohead song.
Peaky Blinders — “Pyramid Song” and a compilation of clips from the show accompanied by the full Radiohead song which appears on the show’s soundtrack album.
Peaky Blinders — “Climbing up the Walls” — A pictorial still from the soundtrack album accompanies this entire twisted Radiohead creation.
Peaky Blinders — “You and Whose Army” — I highly recommend you view this video if none of the above marvellous musical creations do not pique your interest. This video is the final 4 minutes of the final episode of season 3 and it’s rather marvellous! It’s the final video of the four linked below.
Countless Radiohead songs have appeared on both the small and much larger cinema screen, from Black Mirror to Westworld and lead guitarist Jonny Greenwood is now Paul Thomas Anderson’s go to musical collaborator on nearly every film since 2007. Lead singer Thom Yorke too has created solo film soundtracks (Suspiria being just one example) and his brilliant song Analyse accompanies the closing credits of Christopher Nolan’s lesser known (and rather unloved) 2006 film The Prestige. But in keeping with this article we should perhaps turn to another 2006 film, Children of Men, and directed by the Mexican filmmaking genius that is Alfonso Cuaron. With a country spinning out of control and their authoritarian Government under attack from unseen “terrorists” the world at large is in mortal peril as the last known born child dies, and against a dystopian backdrop of 1984 style surveillance and totalitarian control, we have the introduction of those cheery fellows from Oxford!
As “Theo Faron” (Clive Owen) meets “Julian Taylor” (Julianne Moore), one resistance fighter meets another. Kind of. However the scene is set and amid Radiohead lyrics of “papering the window panes” and “living in a glasshouse” the two heroes meet in a figurative and literal glasshouse with said windows completely covered in newspapers. Again the lyrics meet the cinematic spectacle perfectly, of jagged conversations and pointed discussions, the claustrophobia and anxiety of fearing who to trust and who may be listening in and all accompanied by Radiohead’s more directly pointed lyrics:
“Once again, I’m in trouble with my own friend
She is papering the window panes
She is putting on a smile
Living in a glass house
Once again, packed like frozen food and battery hens
Think of all the starving millions
Don’t talk politics and don’t throw stones
Your royal highnesses
Well, of course I’d like to sit around and chat
Well, of course I’d like to stay and chew the fat
Well, of course I’d like to sit around and chat
But someone’s listening in”
Life in a Glasshouse isn’t my favourite Radiohead song but it is my favourite Radiohead album song. I’m an obsessive, I know these deliberations are ever so slightly strange, but then again, so am I. I adore this song almost, almost, like no other Radiohead song and suffice to say that is high praise from this particular paranoid android. Thom’s lyrics here are venomous and spat out so deliciously in the direction of the all pervasive surveillance state, the antiquated “Establishment” and the hypocrisy of their evil actions. I simply can’t recommend the following video enough: Humphrey Lyttleton and his assorted jazz band accompany Radiohead in a live version on the hugely popular BBC music show “Live with Jools Holland” in 2001 and whilst the boys from Oxford were no doubt promoting their Amnesiac album. Wholly and myopically biased I may indeed be, but the four minutes below is rather astonishing:
Returning to Ozark brings us relatively up to date as well as concluding as we began: Radiohead are many things, a genre twisting concoction of geniuses who seemingly refuse to bow down to any kind of musical conventions? Perhaps. I’d also posit they are the prog rock Pink Floyd for our generation and hopefully the one that follows too. Radiohead are a guitar band who hate their guitars! At least until they fall in love with them again. With the addition of Clive Deamer in recent years they now have two drummers (four if you include both Thom and Jonny’s rare forays behind the skins) and their original drummer, Phil Selway lives within his own eclectic time beats and rhythms. I love bassist Colin Greenwood simply for being the big kid who loves every second of playing live with his friends and I adore Ed O’Brien’s laconic and relaxed approach to his craft. Aside from the aforementioned album Amnesiac they also released another album in the same year of 2001 entitled Kid A. Fans of the band as well as contrarians like myself have often retitled these albums Kid A and Kid B as they are remarkably similar and from the same initial recording period. These two albums aside, every other piece of vinyl musical art has been greatly different, from punk rock to alternative rock guitar, electronica to progressive rock and OK Computer contains a little bit of genius from every genre wrapped into 53 minutes of utter perfection.
Radiohead are a political band and never is this more aptly demonstrated than in the Ozark episode under discussion and linked below. Again I’m wholly biased but as this is taken directly from the show as it was aired during it’s third season, I can’t recommend this highly enough as it’s utterly superb:
To put this clip into some vague context you have “Wendy Byrde” (the magnificent, mesmeric and sublime Laura Linney) returning to the old family home in Chicago during a brief trip away from her new home in the Ozarks. As Radiohead’s Daily Mail accompanies her two minute roam through a kingdom she once owned, her conflicting character is brilliantly displayed against the juxtaposition and rising anger of the song. Where once Wendy was placid and going along with a life that unfulfilled her (she rearranges the furniture and makes the family bed) now she is the real power behind her new Ozark throne and now ruthlessly, recklessly and very powerfully detached from reality. This is perfectly demonstrated by the simmering rage with which she now unmakes and ruffles the family bed and re-rearranges a family home that has long since been hers. Leaving her key on a sideboard as she casually departs from the house, the beautiful intensity of this at first quiet and melancholic Radiohead song rises to a full band jam crescendo.
“The moon is high up, on a mountain
The lunatics have taken over the asylum
Waiting on the rapture
Singing, “We’re here, to keep your prices down
We’ll feed you to the hounds
To the daily mail
To get up, together
You made a pig’s ear, you made a mistake
Paid off security and got through the gate
You got away with it, but we lie in wait, eh
Eh, eh?
Where’s the truth? What’s the use?
I’m hanging around, lost and found
And when you’re here, innocent
Fat chance, no plan
No regard for human life
You’ll keep time, you’ve no right
You’re fast to lose, you will lose
You jumped the queue, you’re back again
President for life, love of all
The flies in the sky, the beasts of the earth
The fish in the sea have lost command”
Continuing yet another central theme this is a favourite Radiohead song (and one with which I am rather obsessed) but a favourite song that hasn’t been officially released as such and does not appear on any album to date. It was released as a download only in 2011 but to my old musical head that doesn’t really count! So The Daily Mail is in a similarly unique category alongside Life in a Glasshouse (Favourite Album Track) and Talk Show Host (Favourite B-Side) and why I adore this song so very much is two fold:
(1) Musically: From a gentle and mournful piano beginning it is Thom and his angelic voice alone for the opening bars of the song. But as his vocals rise higher and louder so too his venom toward the “lunatics” who think they’ve evaded our collective scrutiny and as Thom squarely states “we lie in wait”, a challenge has been thrown down, we’re onto their mindless destruction and mind games and the entire band crash in through to the end of this magnificent song. The contrast between the two segments of the song is incredibly stark, from quiet and melodic through to bittersweet and angry, and perfectly encapsulated by Colin’s simple bass, Phil’s more standard time drumming and Ed and Jonny’s ferocious wielding of their musical axes.
(2) Lyrically: Throughout all of the articles linked below I’ve continually stated that songs and lyrics are open to a multitude of interpretations and so here’s mine for The Daily Mail. The title itself refers to a Right Wing leaning newspaper here in the UK but more widely known today in The Matrix as an online supplier of “News”. I disagree immediately with the lunatics/asylum analogy as I believe the voids of inhumanity we see daily on our telescreens in the guise of Politicians, World Leaders, Captains of Industry or Celebrity Billionaires have always been in charge of the asylum in which we live.
Always.
Not just during the past two lockdown years, or the forever wars (Cold/Hot/Proxy or otherwise) they promote and encourage in all four corners of our world, and their laughable hypocrisy of defending the earth, or freedom or indeed the democracy they are in fact deliberately destroying, and with malice aforethought in industrial spades in every regard. It could be argued there’s a large fringe element who see this as a religious “rapture” and it could be conspiratorially argued that this element is anything but fringe. Throughout even our more recent history, say from the JFK assassination in 1963 onward, every single Governmental authority have made “a pig’s ear” and glaring mistakes but they’ve been paid off here lyrically by the “Security” of an unquestioning and compliant legacy Media and an all encompassing narrative dictated by fewer people than you’d ever, ever believe. But Thom’s defiance shines through in the final three quick verses in his and our search for the truth, the acknowledgement that these despicable shells of humanity are not innocent and have “no regard for human life”.
So shall we bring down the Government before the lunatics destroy the last vestiges of what it truly feels like to be a free human being?
They really don’t speak for us.
But please be careful, “someone’s listening in”.
Thanks for reading. Below are three random articles of mine on Radiohead and if you’ve enjoyed this and the three below, there are numerous others on the band within my archives too:
Radiohead, and the album that isn’t
But with the remarkable tracks that end their nine studio albums, maybe it should be?medium.com
Radiohead swimming in a Moon Shaped Pool
and a daydreaming stroll along the River Severn with a Radiohead fan.medium.com
Radiohead, Kid A and Kid B
and do we all have collective amnesia or is Kid B far better than is critically recognised?medium.com