The people he meets squeal like pigs and buzz like fridges. “Hey man, slow down,” he warns on The Tourist, its most benign. “Please could you stop the noise?” Yorke begs at the start of Paranoid Android, the album’s most crammed song. OK Computer’s central axis is the contrast between noise and quiet, velocity and stability - an ambiguity illustrated by Stanley Donwood’s half-obscured artwork, which represents a partially successful attempt to erase the clutter. The images he wrote down manifested in the form of dreams, mantras, lullabies, litanies, curses, rants and panic attacks. “The immediate external world became very bright and powerful, like it was on fire, and that was when I wrote stuff.” Yorke’s flight from autobiography led him to inhabit other voices, other lives. “Stuff that meant anything to me came in the form of what I call Polaroids in my head,” he told Vox. OK Computer is more reportage than commentary. Both are evident in Yorke’s determination to be, as Christopher Isherwood said, “a camera”. Talking about his lyrical influences, Yorke cited John Lennon’s fractured newsreel verses in A Day in the Life and Elvis Costello’s ability to be “very emotional without being personal”.
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