ABSTRACT
My first reaction on listening to ‘Idioteque’ was that I felt as if I had participated in a musical time warp. I had recorded my part in the early 1970s when I was a bit younger than the members of Radiohead are now, and 28 years later the band came into the studio and did the rest. (Jonny reported to me that this had occurred to them as well.) This was really more than a reflection of ego, however, or of a subconscious desire of composers in my circle to be rock stars. It was, rather, a response to the seamless and ingenious way that Radiohead had woven a song around my chord sequence, using it repeatedly as the harmonic underpinning of ‘Idioteque.’ The piece puzzled me at first. I had never heard anything like it. Its profile was strange: sections were repeated many times, the tunes were relatively simple by Radiohead standards, and the textures were extremely unusual, with little deference to the slicker side of electronica. It took a number of hearings to begin to understand it, and eventually to genuinely like it. But almost immediately I was fascinated by what Radiohead had done and how it had done it.
