The Directors of Radiohead

By Brandon Kim

Thom Yorke gets lost in the supermarket in 1995's "Fake Plastic Trees"

[This article is part of our Radiohead Fanatic Fortnight -- check out our box set giveaway here.]

With great bands often come great videos, and Radiohead is one of those bands that matured quickly and garnered talented directors early on. Some directors set out to create a good marketing tool and simply made the members look cool. Others were as cutting edge as the band whose songs they set to the moving image. Here's a look at some of Radiohead's more memorable videos and the directors who shot them:

Director: Jake Scott
Video: "Fake Plastic Trees" (1995)

But that's what the kids want in a video -- to get closer and more intimate with the rock stars they idolize.

Scott, son of Ridley Scott (and nephew of Tony), seems to have more influences, education and inspiration to draw from than he actually knows what to do with. His film debut, the 1999 feature "Plunkett & Macleane," may satisfy the urge to indulge in a roguish period picture, but it was also almost terminally frenetic. You'd never guess from watching it that four years earlier Scott directed the video for Radiohead's "Fake Plastic Trees." His other standout work, R.E.M.'s "Everybody Hurts," shows more stylistic parallels with "Just," a Radiohead video from another director [see below], with subtitles moving a mysterious narrative along.

Scott likes the close-up, favoring gratuitous shots of his subjects talking, singing, strumming and striking poses with their heads. But that's what the kids want in a video -- to get closer and more intimate with the rock stars they idolize. "Fake Plastic Trees," with its whitewashed, saturated colors, may still be his best. Can't forget that long, bright look at Thom Yorke's fascinating face. (On the film side, Scott's next feature, the upcoming "Welcome to the Rileys," looks to be a considerably calmer drama that stars Kristen Stewart.)

Director: Jamie Thraves
Video: "Just" (1995)

Thraves has done videos for bands like Blur and radio titans Coldplay, but none of his videos has caused more stir than Radiohead's "Just." It epitomized the look of rock cool at the time. He nailed it with the Elvis glasses, Yorke's wardrobe and the hot shots of Jonny [Greenwood]'s string-bending solo. But what's kept fans talking on forums and blogs over the years is the weighty statement made by the man on the sidewalk that makes the crowd lie down with him, just as the subtitles stop. People have gone so far as to watch it in slow motion with lip-reading experts to determine what the line is. The results? Inconclusive, since the shot cuts away to the band anyway. Neither Jamie Thraves nor the band will say, even if there is actually something to say, since they feel it would defeat the point of the art. But fans still keep asking the question, anyway.

Director: Michel Gondry
Video: "Knives Out" (2001)

Gondry's wild, fantastical style is apparent throughout all his work, particularly his features "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" and "The Science of Sleep." But the French-born director got his start in music videos, and his filmic language, while evolved, remains rooted in the short form. Playfully toying with the viewer's frame of reference is a Gondry signature. In his video for "Knives Out," the camera eventually moves into a TV screen that shows Thom Yorke and a girlfriend (played by actress Emma de Caunes) in a train car. As the couple fight and Yorke eventually offers her an engagement ring, a hand is shown beneath the TV set hitting the VCR's rewind button to show their relationship play out in reverse through the train window. The scene bears a striking resemblance to the opening of Gondry's "Be Kind Rewind," which depicts the real-life jazz musician Fats Waller dying in a train car, as the window reveals a model of the train itself parked at a station outside. The same stylish mind-boggle plays out continually in the video, and indeed in much of his work.

Jonathan Glazer's "Karma Police," 1997

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.