They ask me where the hell I'm going
Radiohead - 'The Tourist' (OK Computer - 1997)
Radiohead become the 4th act to feature on The Run Out Grooves for the 4th time after The Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan have done likewise this month. It may be a while until we see them again on here.
Earlier this year, I was on a flight back from Rome and spent practically the whole flight listening to BBC Radio’s 25th-anniversary programme on OK Computer. For those of us who remember the record coming out, or in my case, remembering when it was the newest Radiohead album, it is worth pausing to acknowledge that when OK Computer was released, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of The Moon was only 24 years old. When I bought that record as a teenager, I certainly didn’t feel like that slice of classic rock was anything other than that. I get the sense now that OK Computer was so forward-looking that it doesn’t feel as old as the Pink Floyd record did in the late 1990s. - Though that may be wishful thinking by me!
As luck had it, the BBC Programme (available here, but not anymore1) lasted about the length of the flight and mixed in the songs from the album and stories about the tracks from the time of release and closer to the present. What this meant, by sheer serendipity, was that as I was coming in to land in London, ‘The Tourist’ was finishing, and I managed to hear that final chime, drummer Phil Selway hitting a triangle, that closed the record once I was back on the ground.
That chime is where I want to start on this song because there’s evidence suggesting that the record is cyclical. The record ends with someone driving too fast and begins with a car crash and a deployed airbag. This isn’t a new theory, but it is one that the band has acknowledged. In July 1997, the band were interviewed for Addicted to Noise by Clare Kleinedler and were quizzed by her on the theory.
‘The Tourist’ wasn’t the last song to be written for OK Computer though it was potentially the last one to be added to the album. The song, written by guitarist Jonny Greenwood, was initially sounded out at the Canned Applause2 sessions and much to Greenwood, J’s surprise, it snuck in as the last song. Lead singer Thom Yorke told myLaunch in May 1998;
In retrospect, The Bends had a very obvious and comforting resolution, which was by accident, not by design. But this one didn't. For two weeks before mastering the record and deciding which songs would go on it, I got up every morning at 5 am; I've got one of those minidisc machines where you can swap the order of the tracks, take tracks off, put them back on. I couldn't find the resolution I was expecting to hear once you put the songs together, and I went into a wild panic for two weeks. I couldn't sleep at all, because I just expected the resolution to be there - and it wasn't. There was all the trouble and no resolution. But that wasn't really true, as I discovered later. When we chose to put 'Tourist' at the end, and I chilled out about it and stopped getting up at five in the morning and driving myself nuts, we did find that it was the only resolution for us - because a lot of the album was about background noise and everything moving too fast and not being able to keep up. It was really obvious to have 'Tourist' as the last song. That song was written to me from me, saying, 'Idiot, slow down'. Because at that point, I needed to. So that was the only resolution there could be: to slow down. If you slow down to an almost-stop you can see everything moving too fast around you and that's the point.
The band have spoken about the inspiration for the song being Jonny Greenwood seeing American tourists in France charging around at pace, attempting to pack in as many sights as possible in the shortest time window and thus failing to take anything in. The question of at what speed you live your life runs through OK Computer like a stick of rock. It is one of the only times it is specific about who needs to slow down with the titular tourist. They also spoke in a 1997 Melody Maker3 interview of the need to have a song where they weren’t focused on having a song where something had to happen every three seconds. In that sense, it means there are two Radiohead albums in a row that ape The Beatles' White Album closer 'Good Night', this and 'Motion Picture Soundtrack'.
Elsewhere the album isn’t specific about the person commuting and travelling for business on planes, trains and automobiles, in and out of airports, hotels and conference centres. Rather than what was referred to at the time as pre-millennial angst and placed alongside the novel (and latterly 1999 film) Fight Club, it is now recognised as a predictor of how many of us have lived the last two decades. With the impact of technology and the giant corporations that have spread further and further into our lives, Naomi Klein’s pre-Millennial polemic No Logo feels like the closest book to associate with the album.
In an article from 2011, Steven Hyden, who would go on to author a book looking at the release of Radiohead’s Kid A - book This Isn’t Happening, said that the band;
…appeared to be ahead of the curve, forecasting the paranoia, media-driven insanity, and omnipresent sense of impending doom that's subsequently come to characterise everyday life in the 21st century
This is very suggestive of the idea that slowing down, idiot, is the only sane thing to do in the face of the modern world. Stop and smell the roses, put the screen down and look around you.
Musically, ‘The Tourist’ is a song with the most space of any song on the record. While the singles, the pre-1997 tracks ‘Lucky’ and ‘Exit Music’ and the sort of US single ‘Airbag’ garner more attention along with fan favourite ‘Let Down’ and meme favourite ‘Fitter, Happier’, it is the closer that acts as a palate cleanser after all that late nineties angst. It has space to breathe; the vocals aren’t tense and urgent, nor are the guitar soundscapes. It is no indication where they were going to go next; some of the era’s b-sides like ‘Meeting In The Aisle’ are more instructive on the direction of travel. The song effectively winds down from some of the more intense and loud parts of the album and is effective exit music4 for the album.
The lyrics tell the story of our protagonist tourist who, unlike the actual, literal tourists that inspired the writing, is a tourist in his own life. His dog doesn’t recognise him, and his continuous movement makes him seem as dead as a ghost or like a robot filling in for a person. The question is also raised, who needs to slow down first, the protagonist or everyone else, so they can? What is being achieved for all this moving around?
All that was thrown in to contrast with the pandemic5 when all that moving and rushing around was stopped. The irony of listening to a documentary about this album on my first business trip for several years wasn’t lost on me. Coming out of the pandemic restrictions, it has been FOMO6 that has ruled the narrative. People seem to be playing harder and making the most of the short time available to do things they enjoy rather than the type of life the narrator has in Fight Club.
By the time the band looked back at 20 years of the album in Rolling Stone, they were saying very similar things about the song and what it meant.
That’s a classic situation where Jonny had written this incredibly slow, moving riff so I started singing about slowing down and we were travelling, endlessly travelling, endlessly. Everything was about speed. Everything was moving so fast. I had that sense of sitting in looking out a window and things moving past me so fast you could barely see them.
With the band averaging an album every five years over the last two decades and the clock approaching seven years without a new album, they at least have taken heed of their own advice.
*ting*
Radiohead’s mobile studio - a converted shed in Didcot, Oxfordshire.
Melody Maker, 31st May 1997.
Pun was very much intended.
One which arguably took hold as it did because of the amount of global travel that we have become accustomed to over the 20 years of the 21st century that preceded it.
Fear of missing out.
"I get the sense now that OK Computer was so forward-looking that it doesn’t feel as old as the Pink Floyd record did in the late 1990s. - Though that may be wishful thinking by me!"
I feel the same way, although I wonder if it's because the pace of musical evolution has slowed down, so we haven't actually moved on that much.
Not to rag on new music or say the old days were better. It's just that the 60s–90s were a kind of Cambrian explosion. That pace of growth was never sustainable.
That album is very prescient of our lives now, ruled by the constant prescence of smartphones, streaming and the feeling that you can't miss out on anything.