RADIOHEAD have dominated the music headlines in Australia in recent weeks - firstly by announcing their first Down Under tour in seven years, and secondly with the aftermath of tickets going on sale, which involved internet crashes, devious scalpers and disappointed fans.
We've done a comprehensive look through their amazing career before (you can read it at www.standard.net.au/blogs/musicology) but we just can't leave our love of Radiohead alone.
So in honour of their impending return (we can't wait 'til November), here's Musicology's countdown of the 10 best Radiohead songs.
10. The National Anthem
When it was suggested that Radiohead were "re-inventing rock" on
9. My Iron Lung
Amazingly, the version that made it on to
8. Exit Music For A Film
Spinechilling. Those ghostly synthesized choirs, Yorke's matter of fact delivery, those disturbing noises under the second verse - it's all suitably foreboding for a song that was written specifically for the closing credits of Baz Luhrmann's take on
7. Just
The story goes that Yorke and Jonny Greenwood were having a competition to get as many chords as possible into a song and
6. There There
After their "difficult albums"
5. Talk Show Host
Radiohead refused to let Luhrmann put
4. Street Spirit (Fade Out)
One of the beautiful ballads on
3. Karma Police
The title began as a band in-joke, with Radiohead members warning each other that the karma police would come and arrest them if they were being jerks. This became the jump-off point for their most anthemic track - a Beatlesy piano-and-acoustic guitar ballad, spiced with some textural production noise and a chorus quieter than the verses somehow thrown together to create perhaps the biggest single of their career and the centrepiece of their greatest album.
2. Pyramid Song
This song blew my tiny little mind when I first heard it. What timing is that in? What the hell is going on with the rhythm of the piano? What's that in the background? Then Phil Selway's light jazzy touch makes it all make sense, as Yorke's tragic cry details the end of the world, and somehow, once again, Radiohead have made something beautiful and sad and musically amazing, all at the same time.
1. Paranoid Android
Lists of the best songs of all time regularly feature this track, for good reason. A '90s version of the
