EXIT MUSIC

A better-than-average biography of a better-than-average pop band.

The Oxford-based quintet Radiohead, as any musically aware 30-something will tell you, has emerged in the last few years as one of the most influential rock groups around, with their 1997 album OK Computer immediately hailed as one of the best records by an English band ever. American music journalist Randall charts Radiohead’s transformation from a twee combo called On a Friday into a technologically and musically sophisticated group whose name pays fitting homage to the 1970s art-rock group Talking Heads. Some of the band’s quirkier tunes, such as the mid-1990s alt-rock hit “Creep,” have earned considerable airplay, but generally the band isn’t much heard beyond the college-radio circuit, a fact that its members lament. They insist that all they want to do is make more or less mainstream pop music and to live normal suburban lives in their off-hours; the lads, says Randall, are bookish sorts who keep to themselves and clean up trashed hotel rooms after their more rambunctious peers have departed. (Oxford has a lively music scene, he adds, because it’s a hick town that the big acts overlook, so that the locals have to make their own music.) Randall is prone to a fan’s enthusiasm—he writes, for instance, “In a relatively short time, Radiohead has undergone a remarkable transformation from pop flavor of the month into perhaps the most important rock band working today”—but the members of the band take a more modest view of themselves. One, in fact, observes late in Randall’s narrative that the group would have to split up if they ever started to believe that they were important—they’re only pop musicians, after all.

Radiohead is important, as these things go, and Randall does a thoughtful, literate job of tracing the group’s career over the last decade.