Rock And Hard Places Part 16

"Well, tell him h.e.l.lo," he says, and leaves.

Courtney reappears.

"Was that Kurt?" she says.

ON HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD, next to that stupid Chinese theatre thing that looks like a suburban Chinese takeaway that has been at the Chinese swimming team's medical kit, sad little men in sun visors sell maps of where the stars live. Barry and I buy one, determined that we cannot live another day without seeing Zsa Zsa Gabor's letterbox or the front gate of that bloke in Star Wars Star Wars who wasn't Harrison Ford, whatever his name was. Mark something, we think. who wasn't Harrison Ford, whatever his name was. Mark something, we think.

We spend an afternoon driving through pristine private suburbs with their own fences and police forces, filled with houses so big we wonder if the front and back porches have different postcodes or, in a couple of cases, if they're even in the same time zone.

Mostly, we wonder why anyone with enough money to buy one of these places would choose to live in Los Angeles.

COURTNEY CHOSE TO live in Los Angeles. It was convenient. It seemed like a good idea at the time. And anyway, to judge by her thus far modest but already riotously entertaining press file, she'd already lived everywhere else. The details vary according to Courtney's mood at the time and the imagination of whoever's writing it all down, but there're a few things we can be reasonably sure of.

She moved around a lot as a kid, even being dragged as far afield as Australia and New Zealand. She was the singer in an early lineup of Faith No More. She lived in England for a bit, where she appears to have done or said something to annoy Julian Cope, which is another entry on the credit side of her ledger. She has almost been a famous actress, having been considered for the starring roles in Sid And Nancy Sid And Nancy and and Last Exit To Brooklyn Last Exit To Brooklyn, though how seriously she was considered is open to argument. She very definitely made a brief appearance in Alex c.o.x's point-free spaghetti-western farce Straight To h.e.l.l Straight To h.e.l.l, about which she says, "Yeah, well."

Courtney Love, already, is a lot better known than what Courtney Love does.

"It's really weird," she says. "I mean, it's your life, and your life is being used to sell papers, or records, or . . ."

And that's just the stuff that's actually happened. Perhaps calling a song "Teenage Wh.o.r.e" was asking for trouble.

"A lot of that is fictionalised. I mean, no offence to Everett, but . . ."

Everett True, the journalist that Kurt Cobain was asking about earlier, was the first to write about Courtney-or Kurt, for that matter-for a British paper. He may well have gotten a little carried away, but then he does.

"Well, you know, he just decided he was bored and that England needed a new American character. There's things he wrote that were true and things that were absolutely not true. Some of the quotes he attributed to me were just amazing."

Anything in particular?

"Well, like that I had a profession based on a song I wrote, you know, a n.o.ble and ancient profession, but not one that I ever went to school for. I mean, when I read the last piece, I hit him."

She did, as well. Poor old ET was eating junket through a straw for a week. People get the songwriter mixed up with the song, though. It happens.

"But it's . . . narrative. Neil Young writes narrative, and n.o.body thinks . . . you know what I mean. The songs still feel like catharsis, still feel like exorcism, still feel really good to sing, but on the other hand, a lot of it is narrative. I'm not a character actress. I'm a songwriter."

It's only going to get worse.

"Oh, I know," she sighs. "I mean, I went to lunch with this corporate weasel from some major record company the other day, and he just said 'Courtney, what do you want to do?' Well, I told him I wanted to go and see Nirvana in Chicago, so he gave me a thousand dollars. I keep telling the other three they should be going out to lunch as well . . . I mean, we're talking here about restaurants I've never even seen the outside of. It's great. They buy me martinis and talk to me about money and it's, like, totally interesting . . ."

This is the first sarcasm I've heard since I arrived in California.

"We're just not ready," she decides. "For a band like us, with our ideology, the only reason to have a corporate label is better distribution. So if we sell enough records that we need that, then I'll think about it. They just want to buy something that they think is honest. But it's my life, you know?"

LATER THAT NIGHT, Hole open for Nirvana at the Palace. The crowd looks like a casting call for the next series of that MTV real-life soap where they stick six attractive young people in a house and see how long it takes for them all to wish each other dead. Axl Rose and Slash from Guns N' Roses are here, as is Perry Farrell of Jane's Addiction. Everybody else here looks like they either want to be them, or be very good friends indeed with them. There are at least half a dozen women in here wearing bikinis.

When Hole take the stage, Perry Farrell charges down the front, and stands still in the middle of the moshpit, head and shoulders above the melee. "Hey, b.i.t.c.h!" he calls between songs. "Suck my f.u.c.kin' d.i.c.k!" Courtney, who appears to be in on whatever the joke is, smiles back. Perry's date for the evening has a disarming habit of unzipping the front of her dress at anyone she suspects of staring at them. Needless to say, she ends up doing quite a bit of this. Hole, meanwhile, are great, as noisy and chaotic as a train wreck but considerably more tuneful, and Courtney looks and plays like the lost lovechild of Angus Young and Kim Gordon.

After Hole have played, and after Nirvana have played, I experience the rare pleasure of strolling backstage past a purpling Axl Rose, who is getting the your-name's-not-down-you're-not-coming-in routine from bouncers. As I head for Hole's dressing room, I can hear his multi-platinum squawk squawking, "Well, why has that motherf.u.c.ker got a laminate?" after me.

Courtney gives me a gla.s.s of wine, introduces me to someone to talk to and apologises, but she has to go and find another of her corporate weasels, to buy her drinks.

"The thing to remember," she says before she vanishes, "and this is important, is that I'm driven. I really am. I'm driven, for some reason. But I don't know where I'm going."

21.

YEN WILL I BE FAMOUS?.

Alisha's Attic in j.a.pan OCTOBER 1996.

THE IDEA ANIMATING this story, originally written for The Independent The Independent, was to illuminate the reality of making a budding British pop group big in j.a.pan. The group in question, Alisha's Attic-a pair of genial sisters from Ess.e.x-ended up doing okay, in j.a.pan and elsewhere, without quite broaching the stratospheres. Which is to say they ended up doing a street better than 99 percent of pop groups ever founded. They packed it in shortly after the turn of the century and embarked on separate careers, Karen writing for The Sugababes and Kylie Minogue, among others, Sh.e.l.lie-who seems to have changed her name to Sh.e.l.ly-making solo records under her own name.

I can only hope now, as I could only hope then, that this story does, in some way, illuminate the reality of making a budding British pop group, etc., etc. Because I'm as certain as I can be that it illuminates absolutely nothing-beyond one hungover, food-poisoned hack's total bewilderment at his surroundings-about the nation in which it is set. I have, in the course of my journalistic peregrinations, dropped in on more than seventy countries. j.a.pan is the only one that I have left feeling absolutely none the wiser about for having visited it. Everywhere else I've been, however briefly, I've flown home feeling like I've acquired some idea of what gets the people there laughing, crying and generally out of bed in the morning. I spent a week and a bit in j.a.pan on this story, went to four cities, and met, I'm sure, dozens of local people. However, when I collected my thoughts as the homebound flight prepared for takeoff at Tokyo's Narita airport, I realised that they could, pretty much, be summarised thus: "Huh?"

THE PROMOTIONAL TOUR is a peculiar ritual, in which rock'n'roll performers are coerced into performing in as un-rock'n'roll a manner as can be imagined. On a promotional tour, the workaday touring creeds of riotous excess, grand debauchery and glamorous disdain are sacrificed in favour of restraint, modesty and affability. To partic.i.p.ant and witness alike, the process is scarcely less disorienting than the prospect of senior members of the British royal family embarking on a vice-regal visit that saw them obliged to drive Rolls-Royces into swimming pools, cavort with ladies-in-waiting in baked-bean-filled gold bathtubs and heave bejewelled television sets out of palace windows.

Details of the promotional tour vary subtly according to local conditions, but the essential format is constant. The musicians are as pleasant as possible to as many as possible of the record company staff, disc jockeys and journalists upon whose favour future success may ultimately depend. The musicians will shake hands until they cramp, nod to the point of rheumatism and smile themselves halfway to permanent twitches. They must forgo the luxury of even the slightest lapse into sarcasm at what feels like the millionth introduction to someone called Hank Bucket of Plughole Records, apparently your licensee in Alaska, and his ugly, boring wife. They may not scream when asked, for the billionth time, where they got the name of their group from. Give any musician the option of going on a promotional tour or spending a week at home driving rivets into the roof of their mouth, and they will stride grimly but purposefully to the toolshed.

So it's a bit of a surprise to find the two members of Alisha's Attic in a highly chipper mood when we catch up with them in Polygram's offices in Osaka. Dagenham-born sisters Sh.e.l.lie and Karen Poole are new to all this-their debut alb.u.m, Alisha Rules the World Alisha Rules the World, has only been out in Britain a few weeks-and the excitement of visiting j.a.pan for the first time is having an obvious buoying effect, though they can't have seen much of it. They've only been in the country three days, but Sh.e.l.lie and Karen have already nodded and smiled their way through a heavy schedule in Tokyo and f.u.kuoka, and so far today they've met the staff at the Polygram sales office in Nagoya, visited the studios of ZIP-FM in the same city, caught the Hikari bullet train to Osaka, been interviewed by a local pop magazine and introduced themselves to the Polygram office. It's about three in the afternoon.

I'VE BEEN IN j.a.pan ever since this morning, arriving on an overnight flight from London with Alisha's Attic's press officer from Mercury Records, Susie Roberts. Even allowing for exhaustion and jetlag, it has been a strange day. It started at the hotel, with a series of hopeless, foggy-headed calculations with a pencil and beermat, trying to figure out if it was really possible that we'd just paid 120 for a taxi and 35 for four cups of coffee and a cake. We had. Even more disturbingly, we hadn't been ripped off. Those were the going rates. "I hope," said Susie, contemplating the wreckage of her expenses advance, "you like living on noodles and water."

It had gotten still stranger once they'd made our rooms up. My television wasn't capable of receiving anything but locally-produced hardcore p.o.r.nography, the f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o scenes in which made extensive use of an interesting cinematic innovation best described as k.n.o.b-Cam-all too literally, a j.a.p's eye view. There may be circ.u.mstances in which you want your television screen filled by a shot of the inside of someone's mouth going back and forth, but I can report that it's not just after you've got off a sleepless twelve-hour flight. She wants that filling looked at, I'd thought, trying to blink away ants-under-eyelids post-flight fatigue.

The bathroom didn't work, either. At least, I couldn't get it to work. After spending some minutes prodding uselessly at a console above the sink-it is possible to fly faster than sound in machines with less complex control panels-I rang reception. Someone came up, smiled and bowed a lot, and explained it all to me. I still couldn't see what was wrong with the hot tap/cold tap system. He smiled and bowed a bit more.

The digital bathroom is but one of thousands of symptoms of the technological psychosis that now grips j.a.pan. Since 1945, the j.a.panese have invented everything humanity is ever going to need, and so the admirably restless j.a.panese creative impulse now finds itself with nowhere left to go but haywire. Hence alternately frozen and scalded hotel guests jabbing keypads and swearing while they learn the hard way that 17 degrees is too b.l.o.o.d.y cold and 44 is too b.l.o.o.d.y hot. Hence the machine outside the hotel doors into which you shove your umbrella upon entering, to have it instantly and tightly wrapped in a drip-preventing clingfilm prophylactic. Hence the presence, in the cubicles in the public toilet in the hotel bar, of b.u.t.tons that produce a purely cosmetic flush, an ineffectual slos.h.i.+ng of water designed to spare the occupant of the next throne along the distress of listening to the splashes you're making for real. Hence, I guess, k.n.o.b-Cam.

Traumatised and confused, Susie and I headed for the aquarium. The Osaka aquarium is one of the best things in j.a.pan, and very possibly the world. It's eight storeys high, and is structured so that you walk in at the top, representing the surface of the ocean, and proceed in a descending spiral to the bottom, pa.s.sing as you go the various finned things that exist at different depths. So as you enter, you see lots of furry little otters cavorting cutely in the shallows, and just before you walk out, you are confronted with a tank full of giant spider crabs which are, indeed, enormous and do, indeed, combine all the most objectionable qualities of the two beasts they're named after-it's difficult to warm to a creature whose stomach is below its knees.

The real attraction is the central tank, as tall as the aquarium itself, and wide enough to comfortably accommodate dozens of sting rays, white pointers and hammerheads, schools of less excitingly dangerous fish and, most incredibly, two whale sharks. They swim slow laps of the tank, as vast and improbable and ridiculous yet strangely graceful as 747s circling a runway.

Back outside in the sun, we got mobbed. A shrieking posse of uniformed schoolgirls bore down on us, a white-socked lynch mob with instamatics, and took dozens of photos of each other standing next to me and Susie. The penny dropped on the train on the way back to the hotel: Susie has striped blonde and red hair. The Spice Girls were, or had just been, in Osaka. They thought she was Ginger Spice. What worried me-though it should worry the relevant Spice Girl more-was which one they thought I was.

SOMEONE FROM POLYGRAM Osaka produces their business card from a little silver business card holder, hands it over, smiles and bows. So does somebody else. And somebody else. I get my cards out of my wallet, hand them back, find myself involuntarily smiling and bowing, and suddenly wish I'd thought to have some cards printed especially for this trip, if only to find out whether or not anybody actually reads them ("Andrew Mueller, fully qualified bat-wrangler and moose surgeon: no job too small, childrens' parties a specialty, early closing Tuesdays and Hannukah").

Alisha's Attic's debut single will be released in j.a.pan in a few months' time. They're here now to meet the people who will be running the campaign when they return to formally seek the office of Pop Star. Polygram's view is that Sh.e.l.lie and Karen could find a lucrative niche somewhere in the middle ground between The Spice Girls (popular, but perceived as a touch strident) and Shampoo (two squawking adolescents from Plumstead who remain the biggest-selling British act in j.a.panese history). This is why the people at Polygram listen, beaming rapturously, to Sh.e.l.lie and Karen's earnest, self-conscious speeches about their hopes for a harmonious working relations.h.i.+p and an exciting future. It's why they burst into thunderous applause when the pair trot out the few halting j.a.panese phrases they've picked up. It's why they queue up to pose for photographs, and proffer CD booklets for autographs. They're laying on the superstar treatment for two relative unknowns in the hope that it will prove a self-fulfilling prophecy.

After a bit more bowing, smiling and distribution of business cards, a small swarm of Polygram employees, each wearing bomber jackets embossed with the company logo, organise us across town to the studios of FM802 and FM Osaka. At both stations, Sh.e.l.lie and Karen wander about introducing themselves to everyone, while the Polygram entourage scuttle around them with a ghetto blaster playing the first Alisha's Attic single, "I Am, I Feel," on an endless loop, and a cardboard sign bearing the j.a.panese for "I swear to support Alisha's Attic" to use as a prop in yet more souvenir photographs. Tottering a few steps behind, feeling my way through another blizzard of business cards, I think I can see where this particular j.a.pe is heading: "What do you mean, you won't play it? You swore that you would. We have the negatives."

Another logo-spangled Polygram minion is toting several plastic carrier bags full of sponge cakes in pretty purple boxes. The cakes, each decorated with another pro-Alisha's Attic diktat, are an expression of the ancient and n.o.ble j.a.panese custom of gift-giving. Whenever someone sufficiently ancient or n.o.ble hands over their business card, a cake is silently, anciently and n.o.bly produced from one of the bags and handed to either Sh.e.l.lie or Karen, who pa.s.s it anciently and n.o.bly onto the recipient, who responds with perfectly genuine-looking expressions of surprise and delight (and who then, doubtless, picks all the writing off the top, takes it home to his wife and says, "Darling! I've got a surprise for you!" To which she replies, "It's not another b.l.o.o.d.y cake, is it?").

"Everyone's really nice," says Sh.e.l.lie, or Karen, though most likely both. They're right. Everyone is really nice. What do they want?

ANYONE WHO GOES to any major Asian city for the first time always says it looks like the city in which Ridley Scott set Blade Runner Blade Runner, his long film about robots. Osaka actually is that city. We leave it for the airport in a train which, suitably, looks like what people in 1980 thought trains would look like in 2000. Our destination is Sapporo, the major city of j.a.pan's northern island, Hokkaido. We get in late. I open my minibar and wonder which marketing genius decided to call a soft drink Pocari Sweat, and what sort of idiot is ever going to drink it. I wonder if a pocari is some kind of veldt-dwelling scavenger dog, or if I've got it mixed up with something else. There's nothing else in the minibar. I drink it. It tastes like the sweat of a veldt-dwelling scavenger dog. I turn the television on. More k.n.o.b-Cam. I'm sure that filling is coming loose.

We're back in business early the following morning. More bomber-jacketed Polygram folk take us to do the cakes'n'cards thing at the local Polygram office, and at Sapporo radio stations AIR-G FM and NorthWave FM. At both places, Karen and Sh.e.l.lie deliver their increasingly familiar address about harmony and an exciting future to a.s.sembled staff, and in both places are cajoled, bowed and smiled into singing a bit. They knock out one perfectly harmonised a capella verse of "I Am, I Feel," which is a decent little pop song by any reasonable standards, and everyone claps and whoops with such expressions of awe that you'd think they'd never heard music before.

At NorthWave, Sh.e.l.lie and Karen are press-ganged into an impromptu live interview with the DJ who is evidently NorthWave's resident "personality." Which is to say he's a complete, total, all-the-medals, copper-bottomed, chateau-bottled, ocean-going, four-wheel-drive, armour-plated, uranium-tipped, olympic-standard, now-with-wings d.i.c.khead. He has some sort of alter ego called "The Fly." You can tell when he's being "The Fly" because he yammers drivel into a distorted microphone instead of a clean one. He asks Karen and Sh.e.l.lie to engage "The Fly" in conversation. Karen and Sh.e.l.lie are far, far too polite.

All we see of Sapporo is what we drive through. By late afternoon, we're back in the airport, where most of the departures concourse is taken up by a vast fresh seafood market. Rows of tanks bustle with fish, lobster and infinite examples of the bizarre, uncla.s.sifiable ocean-dwellers that only exist in the novels of Jules Verne and j.a.panese restaurant menus. It would be an extraordinary enough spectacle if it were down by the docks. Here, it feels like wandering into a rodeo in the middle of a shopping mall. I don't even have time to wonder what kind of person buys live seafood before getting onto a plane: everybody is. I like to try to fit in. I order a sus.h.i.+ salad. I will live to regret this.

Our flight down the east coast to Sendai touches down after a lurching, storm-tossed approach that causes more than one of our party to wonder if the pilot hadn't learnt his trade cras.h.i.+ng into American frigates. It's the kind of flight where you notice, as the aircraft pulls into the terminal that, up and down the plane, complete strangers are holding hands. It's early evening in Sendai, and we only stay long enough to distribute more tapes, goodwill and cakes to local Polygram staff and Sendai FM. I am feeling a hitherto unknown affinity with the Easter Bunny. The s.h.i.+nkansen bullet train takes us to Tokyo.

The bar at Tokyo's Roppongi Prince Hotel appears to have been decorated by Ridley Scott's less clever kid brother. The walls are covered with a gold and black lunar landscape, and the arches holding up the ceiling have been painted to look like ancient Roman columns. The combined effect almost obviates the need for alcohol, but the evening proves even stranger than the decor. The occupants of the bar are myself, Susie, Sh.e.l.lie, Karen, their manager (a former Page Three model), a drunk j.a.panese businessman, an embarra.s.sed-looking woman whom the drunk j.a.panese businessman keeps loudly introducing as his "cousin" while roaring with laughter, several members of the Harlem Globetrotters, who are also staying here, two seventeen-year-old actresses from a teen soap called Byker Grove Byker Grove, who are in j.a.pan trying to sell themselves as a pop duo called Crush, and their manager, who someone tells me is the mother of the singer from Saint Etienne, though by this point I'm prepared to believe anything.

The drunk j.a.panese businessman keeps gesturing at Susie and asking me, in what he probably believes is a conspiratorial whisper but is actually a deafening, s...o...b..ring bellow that all but moves the furniture around, where I got her. Actually, I tell him, she's paying for me, which is true enough as far as it goes, but makes him laugh so much I briefly wonder if I'm going to have to call for a.s.sistance. His "cousin" gets up, smiles, bows and leaves.

THE THREE DAYS we've been allotted in Tokyo are given over to the print media. I miss the first of these-the Sapporo airport sus.h.i.+ comes back, and brings a load of its mates. I haven't felt worse since a dodgy moussaka somewhere in Turkish Kurdistan reduced me to a week-long all-banana diet. Feverish and verging on the delirious, I spend the day s.h.i.+vering and damp on the futon in my room, watching coverage of the US presidential elections. CNN's informed talking head is a Democrat congressman from New Hamps.h.i.+re called d.i.c.k Swett. Thus the hours of purging luridly coloured emissions through every orifice bar my ears are interrupted, every half hour on the half hour, by pauses to weep with laughter. Every so often, a hotel employee comes and knocks on my door, bows, smiles and asks if there's anything I need, and every time I answer, there's less of me.

The next day, still feeling like someone's set me on fire and beaten it out with a railway sleeper, I sit in the interview suite at the hotel while representatives of various fas.h.i.+on, music and style magazines file in at half-hourly intervals to ask Sh.e.l.lie and Karen the following questions: What was it like working with Dave Stewart? What's it like being sisters in a band? Is the fact that their father is Brian Poole, once of The Tremeloes, in any way significant? Who is Alisha? What do they think of j.a.pan? So, at half-hourly intervals, Karen and Sh.e.l.lie say "Great," "Fine, no problem," "No," "Sort of an alter ego," and "Not as weird as East 17 told us it would be."

I interview one Tokyo journalist about the interview she's just done. I ask her if she's aware that j.a.pan is talked about by third-division English pop groups as a veritable rock'n'roll Shangri-La, that the general perception is that j.a.panese pop consumers are at once the most enthusiastic and ignorant on earth, happy to scream at, spend money on, and sleep with, any clump of British clowns who can hold a guitar the right way up.

"People do think we're easy," she agrees. "But everyone comes here now, and we can afford to be picky."

But they're not. "Big in j.a.pan" is the defiant boast of every bunch of tuneless timewasters who couldn't get arrested in Britain if they ran through Downing Street naked but for an Irish tricolour and a grenade-launcher, and it's usually true. I know of musicians back in London who couldn't give away their records at home if they came with a 20 note stapled to the sleeve, but who've come to j.a.pan and had to be smuggled in and out of the back entrances of hotels for their own safety.

"We just like music," she smiles. "And maybe we are not so cynical as you."

And maybe she's right. That evening, we are mini-bussed across town to Harajuku, the Tokyo suburb famous as the spot where j.a.pan's somewhat demented yet oddly demure fascination with western pop culture is given its fullest expression. It's just like Camden Market, except that everything's three times as expensive and there are marginally fewer j.a.panese people here. Karen and Sh.e.l.lie pose for photographs in a fas.h.i.+on boutique where, I cannot help but notice, one set of shelves is decorated in clippings from old issues of Melody Maker Melody Maker. Taking this homage to a frankly disturbing level of fastidiousness, each shelf is upholstered with cuttings by a different writer. Mine is the fourth shelf from the top. I hope they're not arranged in descending order of preference. The bloke who's got the shelf above mine is a sub-literate plodder with the aesthetic sensibilities of a chair leg.

AT THE HOTEL that evening, there's a small cl.u.s.ter of giggling teenagers waiting in the lobby with autograph books, photos of Alisha's Attic and pens. They squeal delightedly while Sh.e.l.lie and Karen sign their stuff, though I can see that Sh.e.l.lie and Karen are thinking what I'm thinking: n.o.body in j.a.pan has heard of them-who are these people?

"Yeah," says a friend of mine, back in London, whose own band had been through the same thing a few years previously. "The record company pays them."

22.

WHAT TIME IS LOUVRE?.

To France with Radiohead JULY 2003.

LIKE MOST PEOPLE-AND even, if they're honest, most rock critics-I arrived in my thirties aware of, and not much bothered about, the truth that my musical tastes were unlikely to expand much further, if at all. I knew what I liked-and, by and large, liked what I knew. It remains, I suppose, theoretically possible that some or other brainstorm will bestir a hitherto utterly dormant affection for techno or reggae, but it also remains theoretically possible, and about as plausible, that a long and complex sequence of early deaths and tenuous genealogical links will lead to me being crowned King of Tonga. And if that happens, I hereby promise that my first decree will order the adoption, as national anthem, of a Derrick May remix of Bob Marley's "Jammin.'"

The older I've gotten, the more likely it has become that my reply to the question of what kind of music I like will be: "Both kinds: country and western." The longer the road rolls beneath whichever conveyance is bearing me, the more my ears hunger for the truth-as Harlan Howard had it-set to three chords, with tears-in-the-beer vocals, crying violins, tw.a.n.ging guitars, lonesome lap steels, duelling banjos and the sort of piano you can imagine being played by some gold-hearted hussy in crinolines and fishnets while Gary Cooper and John Wayne hurl barstools at each other.

But I still listen to Radiohead, arguably the least country and western white band in the world. They seem one of few bands left even interested in trying to attempt something as ambitious as a soundtrack for the times-and one of very, very few bands left capable of creating such a thing. The alb.u.m they'd just made when I climbed aboard their bus for this trip in 2003, Hail to the Thief Hail to the Thief, was-and is-a masterpiece, a superb articulation of the angst felt not just by Radiohead, but by the people rather like Radiohead who const.i.tute much of Radiohead's audience: that vast global const.i.tuency of youngish, fundamentally decent, middle-cla.s.s liberals born into a fortunate life which presents no real impediment to their happiness bar the nagging suspicion that their comfort is related to the fact that someone else, somewhere else, is being paid ten cents a week to sew stripes onto their training shoes.

For such a crowd, Radiohead's singer and princ.i.p.al songwriter, Thom Yorke, is the ideal everyman: an aggrieved, affronted figure whose rage was borne of impotence, who was nevertheless willing to rebel against whatever you'd got, but didn't quite know where to start.

"WELCOME ABOARD," SAYS Thom Yorke. "Coffee? Instant okay? I think there's a cafetierre here somewhere, but I'm not sure where . . ."

Thom rummages noisily in a drawer in the kitchen at the back of the bus. Radiohead have just taken delivery of this imposing, midnight-black vehicle, which will be their home for a couple of weeks of European festivals. Today, we're doing London to Paris with a complement of Thom, Radiohead guitarist Ed O'Brien, Radiohead producer Nigel G.o.drich, Radiohead tour manager Hilda, a crew member whose name I don't catch and me (I'm a.s.suming there's a driver, as well). We're meeting the rest of the band in Paris, at the howlingly fas.h.i.+onable Costes Hotel.

"Have you stayed there before?" asks Thom, as he continues his search.

I haven't. What's it like?

"Unbelievably expensive, full of the most awful w.a.n.kers, and decorated like a brothel."

You've stayed there before, then.

"We always stay there. It's brilliant."

The downstairs area of the bus, where we are now, contains the kitchen, the toilet, four blue and gold leather seats around a table, a sofa-c.u.m-bed, a vast television hooked up to a PlayStation and DVD player and a stereo. Upstairs there's a lounge area, eight bunks, two more vast televisions, at least one more stereo, and, up the back, a separate room with a double bed and a mirrored wall.

"Maybe I should take that," says Ed. "I have trouble fitting into bunks."

This seems fair enough. Ed is six and a half feet tall, and tour bus bunks are, generally, less roomy than jockeys' coffins.

"Exactly," he nods. "Made for shorta.r.s.es."

"Hmmm?" says Thom. Thom, even when he stands up following his efforts to locate the cafetierre is, it might charitably be said, bunk-sized. He regards Ed quizzically, something like a jaguar deciding whether or not to pounce on a faintly annoying rodent.

"I mean," giggles Ed, "for completely normally proportioned people much like you, Thom. As opposed to grotesque freaks like myself."

Good catch, Ed.

IF THOM YORKE the human being was anything like the Thom Yorke of received wisdom, his reaction to Ed's mild dig might have encompa.s.sed any or all of the following: i) Ed's instant dismissal from Radiohead; ii) the total destruction of every inanimate object on both decks of the bus; iii) Thom's relocation to a tin shack deep in the woods, there to perch atop a stack of tinned food and argue with the clamorous voices in his head. However, today as in several meetings going back over eight years, Thom Yorke the human being and the Thom Yorke of received wisdom seem nothing more than a coincidence of names. Thom is unstoppably talkative, laughs frequently and is only reluctant to submit to a proper interview because he and Nigel and I get too absorbed too early in a discussion of the world at large. Thom is vexed about Iraq, especially his own early views on the conflict. "I bought it," he admits, glumly. "I thought, okay, if he has these weapons, they should be taken off him. You'd think I'd know better."

This is a good place to start. Radiohead's current alb.u.m, Hail to the Thief Hail to the Thief, is a distillation of the static that was buzzing in Thom's head at the end of 2001. If all you'd heard of it was the t.i.tle, you'd be forgiven for expecting an explicitly political tract. As is always the case with Radiohead at their best, though, it is and it isn't.

"It's not an America-baiting thing," says Thom, as we watch Kent go by. "That's not the point at all. And the t.i.tle keeps coming from different places, anyway. First, it's about that coup there, but look, there's another one here, and another one over there. And you could also think of it in terms of access and influence. It sets me off in different directions depending on what day of the week it is."

Hail to the Thief has an alternative name, has an alternative name, The Gloaming The Gloaming. This is more in keeping with the obtuse t.i.tles that have graced previous Radiohead alb.u.ms: 1993's Pablo Honey Pablo Honey (a reference to a sketch by phone pranksters The Jerky Boys), 1995's (a reference to a sketch by phone pranksters The Jerky Boys), 1995's The Bends The Bends (what Radiohead felt about their sudden rise to prominence in the early 90s), 1997's (what Radiohead felt about their sudden rise to prominence in the early 90s), 1997's OK Computer OK Computer (an approval of, or submission to, the technology that runs our lives), 2000's (an approval of, or submission to, the technology that runs our lives), 2000's Kid A Kid A (possibly borrowed from Carl Steadman's novel (possibly borrowed from Carl Steadman's novel Kid A in Alphabet Land Kid A in Alphabet Land), 2001's Amnesiac Amnesiac (answers on a postcard). (answers on a postcard).

"I was unhappy about the potential consequences of calling it Hail to the Thief Hail to the Thief. Personal attacks, threats . . . people can get quite upset. So I wasn't wild about that. But it's more jubilant, and deranged, and doublespeak, like 'collateral damage,' or 'regime change.' The Gloaming The Gloaming was much too . . . aaah AAAAHH ahh." was much too . . . aaah AAAAHH ahh."

Thom delivers these last three syllables in a pa.s.sable impression of a church organ.