Radiohead: Best of – out now
This DVD, which contains all of the band’s promo videos to date, has been rushed out as an accompaniment piece to the Best Of CD released by EMI, as a sort of counter to Radiohead’s now infamous going solo gesture, effectively releasing their ‘In Rainbows’ album for free on the internet, inviting fans to pay as little as £0.00 for the album if they so wished.
This is worth checking out, not just for the famous videos such as ‘No Surprises’ and ‘Just’ – you can have fun freeze-framing the video and trying to work out what the guy on the street is saying – but for the less well-known latter-day Amnesiac/Hail to the Thief stuff such as ‘There There’ and the strange wireframe glitchscape of the ‘Pull Pulk/Like Spinning Plates’ video(s), which looked to us like a cross between a car advert and the movie Tron (also worth renting by the way, especially if you’ve got an HD set).
Videos for early minor hits such as ‘Pop Is Dead’ – which features a young Thom Yorke (bleached blond version) being carted around in a Snow White style glass coffin – and ‘Stop Whispering’ are also included, making the disc is a good introduction to newcomers of the band, whilst providing a neat, retrospective run through the part of the band’s history which will probably now be referred to as the EMI years.
Much of the stuff contained on the disc will be familiar to fans who have probably seen it all before anyway, but its worth checking out, just because you get a nicely presented run through all of the official promo videos at your disposal – this of course means there’s no Kid A stuff, and it’s a real shame that their version of Carly Simon’s ‘Nobody Does it Better’ recorded live for MTV doesn’t get a look in (YouTube it).
Still, it’s much more fulfilling than the mid-career 7 Television Commercials, more straightforward and less bewildering than The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time and nowhere near as big a bummer trip (and by the same coin, as insightful) as Grant Gee’s Meeting People Is Easy documentary.
