The Directors of Radiohead

A few of the band's finest videos and the men who made them happen.

Director: Jonathan Glazer
Videos: “Karma Police” (1997); “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” (1996)

Glazer did both “Street Spirit (Fade Out),” from “The Bends,” and “OK Computer”‘s radio-friendly “Karma Police.” The latter plays out like some kind of missing nightmare episode from Glazer’s critically acclaimed 2000 film “Sexy Beast.” The barrel-chested thuggish character jogging in front of the menacing car could pass as one of the middle-aged criminals in that film. Just replace Thom Yorke with Ray Winstone’s dreamscape hairy rabbit thing.

The earlier “Street Spirit” video is perhaps more interesting, even if its visual style has become tiring, and that’s putting it kindly. At the time, Glazer’s use of various camera speeds and tricks that showed Yorke and crew moving at different speeds in the same frame was new, cutting edge and as hip as the band it was created for. In one scene, Yorke remains static in the foreground as Jonny Greenwood leaps into the air, changing speeds from slow, then fast, then slow again. There’s quite a bit of jumping, in fact, something of which Radiohead no longer seems fond.

Director: Grant Gee (1998)
Video: “No Surprises”

Gee claims that the idea for “No Surprises” came from brainstorming at his desk, where a little poster from Stanley Kubrick’s “2001″ was stuck on the wall above. It was the picture of astronaut Dave Bowman’s face as he is stuck outside the ship — “That first moment of panic across the guy’s eyes and it’s just a close-up shot of him through his visor,” as Gee puts it. For “No Surprises,” Gee upped the ante by putting Yorke in a similar situation and filling the visor up with water, which solved two problems the director needed to address: how to introduce drama and mark the passage of time.

There’s a great scene in Gee’s 1998 documentary on the band, “Meeting People is Easy,” in which a group of British TV journalists are discussing how awful “No Surprises” is while watching Gee’s video for it. In this work within a work, they naïvely wonder about how Yorke can hold his breath so long as Gee humorously intercuts footage from the video’s shoot, revealing the camera tricks that should have been apparent to them.

Director: Shynola
Video: “Motion Picture Soundtrack”; “Pyramid Song” (both 2001)

Shynola isn’t the fanciful handle of a single person, it’s actually the name of a London artist collective who’ve worked with Radiohead a number of times. Multi-talented animators, they’ve also created videos for Beck, Blur, Stephen Malkmus, The Rapture and Unkle, among others. Their Radiohead collaboration started with the creation of some of the cartoon “blips” that coincided with the release of “Kid A” in 2000. These little 30-second animated spots, which were first used as marketing tools, eventually came together as the video for the song “Motion Picture Soundtrack.” Whether putting the shorts together was planned from the start or realized separately later, it’s genius.

A precursor for their work on the feature adaptation of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” Shynola’s animated short for “Pyramid Song” uses watery effects to capture the dreamlike quality of the song in a way that live action could not have done without the most colossal budget. Of “Pyramid Song” itself, Thom Yorke reportedly called it “the best thing we’ve committed to tape, ever.” Shynola’s video might be as moody and beautiful as the song for which it was made.

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