Is “Meeting People” Still Easy?

Director Grant Gee reflects on his 1998 documentary on Radiohead.

So you’re less concerned about this with a subject like Joy Division, who’ve already long been exposed, and Ian Curtis deceased, but you have a great awareness of this media overexposure in your work at least concerning modern subjects.

I did especially with “Meeting People Is Easy,” because I was 32 or 33 and I didn’t have any financial responsibilities beyond myself. Now, I’ve got a kid and a house and all that, so I’m much more liable to do work because it’s work. Back then, I was looking at every piece of work as what the fuck is this and what’s the point of doing that? Really questioning what the worth of it was. That’s as much to do with what the subject is as how I’ve changed my approach.

With Joy Division, there was no media saturation. The whole problem with that film is there was very little representation of them, so how could one make a 90-minute documentary when all there was were a few bits of Super 8 shot with really bad sound, a bad VHS [tape with] totally distorted audio, a couple of TV performances and that’s it. There are no interviews really, maybe one, two main groups of photographs, and that’s the history of a great rock band right there.

Seeing the film again recently, I was struck by a scene in “Meeting People Is Easy” where Thom Yorke talks about the world economy and how the West is a huge loan shark and extortionist, before saying the “banking system is going collapse.”

I know! Isn’t that fantastic!?! I just saw that, ’cause I was going to go and talk about it in Spain over the weekend and I hadn’t watched the film in years. It’s hilarious — it’s so last week, what he’s saying. At the time, it felt like, oh there’s Thom having a bit of a breakdown on camera. Not a breakdown, but just babbling what’s in his subconscious, but it sounds like a fairly astute political analysis all of a sudden. Good on him.

Very prescient. Do you see parallels in these various creative, often tortured people that you make your subjects?

If you’re more articulate than the art form generally allows, then a certain amount of pressure builds up behind it and every now and then, that pressure will come out. It’s like you read books, and all of the sudden you realize you want to write pop songs, but you want to pack in the other stuff you know and you realize that’s not going to fit into the structure of a five-minute pop song, so [you] try making a nine-minute pop song.

With the subjects I’ve done for music films, to keep me interested, there’s got to be some intellectual stuff to latch onto. And to keep an audience interested, there’s gotta be some, unless it’s a great physical catastrophe — like a Michael Jackson or a Kurt Cobain or something — which will keep people’s jaws slack, going oh my God. A lot of documentaries are essentially a freak show, and “Meeting People Is Easy” has got a bit of that, but [I] tried to limit it.

I can only imagine the staggering amount of performance footage you viewed in conducting your work, but is there a particular performance that stands out as a favorite in your films?

There are lots of little bits in the Radiohead film. Some of the songs there are B-sides or things that never got released, like one called “You Follow Me Around.” I think they wrote it one night, and then they played it the next day and I was there. It’s not a great, great song, but it was just so lovely hearing this band [and] this song come together. Thom started playing it on acoustic and at first, Jonny [Greenwood]‘s sitting down on the stage doing a crossword. And then Thom keeps this thing going with sort of made up words, and then Ed [O'Brien] starts making little squirrelly noises, as he does, around Thom’s acoustic pattern. And then Phil [Selway, the drummer] at some critical point, you get the boom bom bom boom and then oh my God, it starts moving! By the end, Jonny’s making all this art, Hendrix shapes around the main line and it’s all happened in seven minutes. I stood there with this shitty little video camera. [laughs]

We could probably spend all day listing the musical geniuses that’ve sprung up from Britain. What do you think it is about the British?

They talk English and it’s a very high population density, so Americans can understand them, and they’re operating at a density of people and interaction that’s about — I don’t know — 20 times that of the U.S., so interactions, cultural phenomena and social trends are born, happen and die ten times faster. There’s always a thing with the music papers. You could get a band who are the greatest thing in the world one week and then six weeks later, they’re out on their ear. And that whole cycle just keeps, keeps going. Yeah, I think that’s what it is: population density.

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