No Surprises

“Reissue! Repackage! Repackage! Re-evaluate the songs!” declared Morrissey once upon a quiff, a caustic sideswipe at record companies constantly reselling the catalogue of their dead artists. Radiohead may not be dead, but for the suits at EMI they may as well be. At least they stopped short of including a tacky badge.

The very notion of a “best of” may seem an affront to fans of what is rarely described as a “singles” band. (That said, it’s easy to forget Radiohead had thirteen Top 20 hits, most of which are mopped up on this collection’s single-disc edition.) For a vocal majority, the key to “getting” Radiohead is to sit through the albums as the band intended, as many times as is necessary for it to click home in your brain. Of course, the idea of something grander to “get” is almost the sole domain of the music critic (actual or frustrated) and that for a lot of people the prospect of owning the band’s best tunes on one album is good enough. In this latter regard, The Best Of Radiohead succeeds admirably.

The theory that the chin-stroking music intelligentsia (insomuch as this is what they perceive themselves as) would like to argue at length is how Radiohead’s work loses something, that the hapless listener is missing something elusive and unquantifiable yet somehow essential, when rid of its original context. There’s a certain logic to that – Radiohead’s creative arc is after all a thrill in itself, rivalling that of, say, Talking Heads before them – but I can’t quite bring myself to believe that Fake Plastic Trees is any worse when rubbing shoulders with Lucky and Idioteque.

The key distinction is how the listener approaches these things – for some, an album is simply a collection of tunes, and the quality of said album is defined as the ratio of good songs to bad (how nuts!). On those terms alone, The Best Of Radiohead is a veritable masterpiece. As a definitive document of their importance, and why they were genuinely progressive in the literal sense of the word, perhaps not so much.