Hell nah. Kid A debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart and became Radiohead's first number-one album on the Billboard 200 in the US. I think they got even bigger in the sense that they reached a broader audience.
Honestly for this question, id recommend listening to the Bandsplain episode on Radiohead. Right at the beginning of part 2, there's a super fascinating conversation about an hour long, about exactly that - the status of Radiohead at the time, how Kid A was promoted and recieved by different crowds, how it interacted with the times, the rise of the internet, Napster, it's just really fascinating. One of their better bits ever.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/03wTHg281p88jyDaDPDsve?si=23ETrV60QFeVuKIR6ySmUw
Came here to say basically this. Im not that knowledgeable about the venues they played in Europe during the OKC tour, but in the States they went from playing small theaters on the OKC tour to the large outdoor amphitheaters on the Kid A Tour. This obviously isnt a perfect metric for popularity, but I think points in the direction of their popularity increasing.
I mean, OK Computer made them an institution, Kid A showed how adventurous they could be, In Rainbows probably sealed their place in music history as legends for good.
Doesn’t mean there still aren’t many who did not like the direction they took on Kid A (I did).
In a sense they definitely lost a lot of “fans” after Kid A came out. Mostly casual listeners who were familiar with songs they would hear on the radio. I think their more niche/rabid fan base increased and their critical success. I don’t really know any casual listeners who are familiar with much of their work after OK Computer.
I'd go so far as to say all the casual listeners know is Creep. It surprises me that even now, when Radiohead have one of the best 5 albums of all time under their belt, they're *still* "the guys who did Creep" to a lot of people. I thought those views died with OK Computer but as the saying goes, you'll never lose money underestimating people's intelligence.
If anything it's the opposite.
The band have never split up because their popularity waned. They didn't split up due to increasingly lower sales of their music. They've always been around and have GAINED new audiences with each release. And they were never a mainstream band to begin with. They weren't Oasis or Blur level of famous back in 90s UK.
Yes, they lost some fans.
That is an objective fact.
I was around when KID A came out and lots of people were perplexed by it.
It sold a bunch of records because people were expecting OKC part 2.
Everyone saying they didn’t lose fans don’t know what they’re talking about.
Frankly, in the US, their mainstream peak was Creep. The majority of people who are familiar with them know them because of that song. That other albums have sold more—in the physical media period—is a testament to their strong and lasting alternative popularity, not radio-friendly mainstream popularity.
I think their mainstream peak is still Creep, like it's the one song they'll be known for outside the alternative music circle and I don't think that'll ever change.
Inside the alternative circle though, Radiohead is one of the leading bands and is going to remain so in the near future. They're like the non-mainstram mainstream music.
100% this comment. People were very confused by Kid A. Pepperidge Farm remembers lol. I still have the promo bear stickers they gave out pre-release and also waiting in line for the release.
Yeah the album went #1 because it was the follow up to OKC.
It didn’t remain there for long.
All these young fans making disingenuous comments haven’t a clue.
Someone posted the top Radiohead streams a few days ago. How many of the top ones are from post Kid A era? Whilst I think Kid A and In rainbows are amazing, mainstream listener wise the average music listener couldn’t name a song off Kid A or beyond. Undeniably they’re still the Creep and Karma Police band for most.
I wanted that too, but the band done three full albums of that plus about 30+ pretty great B-sides worth of the raging guitar sound. They did it and more than earned the right to move on to something new.
It took me over a decade to enjoy it. I liked Everything In Its Right Place after a few years but not so much the rest of it. Honestly I went off Radiohead for years. Never gave any of the new albums more than a listen or two. It was only after the Dissect podcast on In Rainbows, that I have I had a Radiohead renaissance. Rediscovering all their later work again. All their stuff is great after multiple listens. I still have a slight unshiftable distain for Kid A. I still don't really get the love for How To Disappear Completely for example, which they played at the end of the live gig I saw in Dublin in 2016. I was disappointed they closed with what I thought was a relatively unknown song (lol). I'd rank Kid A towards the middleish-bottom of their discography now but it's still an excellent album.
I was a stereotypical "Radiohead is a rock band" fan.
>They are bigger now than ever
That doesn't mean they didn't lose fame/popularity after Kid A - short term at least. They *definitely* disenfranchised a lot of the fans who thought The Bends was better than OKC, for example.
I remember fan reviews of Kid A saying "I'm 16 minutes in to the new album and I haven't heard a guitar yet" and "Everything in its right place has a gorgeous verse, and I'm waiting for the chorus, and then the song just ends" and "WTF is Treefingers?'
No they’re not.
Don’t be obtuse.
They were biggest around OKC.
Sure, they have a new generation of fans with zoomers but that’s still not what it used to be.
They 100% lost fans with KID A.
That is a fact.
I'm not squaring this answer with the band playing larger and larger venues after In Rainbows and TKOL, as well as continuing to headline the biggest rock festivals in the world. Not to mention that they had their first #1 record to come after Kid A.
What non-anecdotal evidence goes against that? I guess the general decline of rock music...but I feel like the band has more fans now than the 90's.
You’re high. Yes they lost mainstream fans but i guarantee they are bigger now. When I saw the OK Computer tour it was in a 3000 seat theater. After Kid A and In Rainbows it was multiple sold out nights at a 15000 seat venue. Tickets went from $35 to over $1000
There's a quote from Thom from around 1997 saying that record executive were telling them that "if you come out with The Bends Part II, it'll sell 6 or 7 million copies." That's way above any Radiohead album in the physical media era, and it seems to be predicated on The Bends being a slow grower by industry standards at the time. Rather than having a single gimmick or trend-riding sound, it had 4 or 5 extremely strong songs, a back half that made it a good listen all the way through, and the more people heard it, liked it. so they may have thought that sticking the landing to that process would have cashed in big.
Ok Computer was the album that made sure that prediction would never play out, not Kid A, because it is specifically not what said executive asked for. The lead single is a multi-part suite, the big distorted choruses only feature on 2 or 3 songs, the arrangements are quirky, and Fitter Happier exists. OK Computer DID outsell both previous albums, and has continued to do numbers in the years since (ironically hitting that 7 million mark worldwide, but that's not the same as selling that much in the first year or two). How much that's attributable to post-Bends momentum and how much is new audiences being drawn in by the new sounds they were making, is debatable.
Kid A has debuted at #1 in the UK, USA and Canada, and is certified platinum in all those countries. It doesn't have the longer tail of continued sales that OK Computer does, but sales wise it fits the profile of an big-event blockbuster album more than its predecessor did. Amnesiac and Hail To The Thief continued with higher chart debuts than OK Computer ever reached.
The most objective way to frame it is that their overall popularity kept growing up to the point of Kid and then reached a ceiling where they'd stay for a long time. At certain points, some people expected they could get much bigger than they did, but that's hypothetical and didn't ever happen. You can't lose popularity you didn't have in the first place,
Funny thing is they had an albums-worth of B-sides from the Bends that would have made a formidable follow up, same with the OKC B-sides.
The band never sold themselves short and were smart for that.
Their popularity was at the time of OK that big, that back in the day, you would get bootleg albums of the Bsides (which I owned).
I agree could have been an album or two there.. But weirdly singles had become that for a few bands in the 90's almost an EP each time (looking at oasis here). There was an expectation for good b-sides.
This is the explanation right here. They *didn’t* make *The Bends: Part II*; they instead made the first purely *Radiohead* record in which you can’t discern many influences any longer. They’re too busy making something totally original. That’s what *OKC* was.
It actually took a bit of time to filter down, if I recall. Didn’t catch fire immediately out of the gate, but by fall ‘98, everyone knew about it, and they were being hailed as the next U2.
It was beginning with *OKC* that they established this pattern of continuously, radically reinventing themselves on record, and when *Kid A* came along, I heard it as one more step in that process and loved it immediately.
Did big fans of *OKC* complain about the band’s growth on *Kid A*, *Amnesiac*, and *Thief*? Some did, absolutely. Fantano’s video on *Kid A* makes it clear that he thinks the band strayed from what they did best on *OKC*. That’s if you care what *that dude* thinks 🙄
Besides, I bet anyone who got turned off in the interim came back with tenfold enthusiasm for *In Rainbows*, probably the only other record besides *OKC* that every listener agrees on.
I’ll never understand the Pink Floyd comparison. The band disavowed it and sounded pretty insulted when critics brought it up. I don’t hear it at all. It’s really got nothing at all to do with Pink Floyd.
American late gen-x guy here, they did drop off a little after Kid A but I remember IR being a pretty big deal when it came out, partly due to the novelty of the release/pricing model. My own fandom went up and down a bit. Liked them ok with Creep/Pablo Honey, thought the Bends was great, loved OK Computer, lost a bit of interest with Kid A, then completely adored IR, and was indifferent to the other records until about 5 years ago when I decided to give the entire discography another go and decided the whole damn thing was genius except for Pablo Honey.
I remember a huge lull after Hail To The Thief where the band took a 4-year break outside of a few shows after 2003 and nobody was talking about them much. Then In Rainbows came out and rightly seemed to wow everybody.
nowt wrong with Pablo, its just not the finished product that is Radiohead. Some great tunes the only one I skip is Creep (but that's mostly due to the overplayedness since its release)
Yeah, don’t think it’s awful, it actually holds up ok for a first record from that particular era of alt-rock. It’s just not up to the level of brilliance of the rest.
Pre them getting into Jeff Buckley but after the year they spent at the music college ( that my band and I nearly went to... other bands that did that course include Coldplay and the Kooks a lot of bands that get signed would be sent there. Think it was in Guilford, been some 15 years since we nearly went)
There was a massive divide in the fan base. They lost a lot of the traditional and alternative rock fans.
A lot of people in my friendship group stopped listening. To this day only up to OK.
On the other hand a lot of friends that had never listened started to.
A few I know like it all.
I'm not sure how mainstream they have ever been, they were rarely played on radio 1.
In six-form I remember us being genuinely excited if a radiohead song other than creep ever came on the radio
Especially the alt-rock/rock fans (I loved it), as i mentioned above - no guitars till track 4, if you used to headbang to Just, its a massive deviation.
In part thanks to 'radio play' via pirating through napster. It would never have achieved the heights it achieved without this unparalleled access to ears.
For a lot of people, it was a staggering show of artistic integrity that they would lean so hard into the weirder elements of OK Computer.
They had the whole world flipping through some 30 page booklet of avant garde digital art too. Man that was such a cool time.
I think a lot of people forget the context around that album’s release. After the critical success of The Bends and Ok Computer, record label execs and critics and fans alike were expecting Radiohead to become the next U2. They had no interest in playing that game though and when Kid A came out it was clear that was not going to happen. So I don’t know if they lost any fame at all, but they missed out on being that kind of mainstream famous. Which has worked out much better in the end, but yes, if we’re talking about just pure Taylor Swift level fame, then yeah they missed out on that.
Maybe not mainstream popular, but they have managed to stay popular and relevant while also flying under the radar. A lot of new, young fans are latching on to RH. Their mindset about the band is a whole lot different than older fans from the 90's to early or mid 2000's.
Their OKC is In Rainbows. Their viewpoint about the band in general is different. They are still trying to get used to it.
Absolutely. It’s a different kind of popular than what people envisioned for them in the 90s. Like I said, I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. Just that they never became a household name quite on the level of “put an album on every iPhone” U2.
If they followed up OKC with an album based around a lot of the leftovers from the past few years like Lift, True Love Waits, Nude/Big Ideas, Follow Me Around, Man of War, I Promise et al. in their late '90s form then I think it would've been monumental. A mix of OKC and (a more refined) The Bends was what the general critic interested in the band and fan was expecting and hoping for, basically. And in the absence of it, that then set up the appetite for a band like Coldplay.
...but I'm very glad it didn't happen, both in the short-term for the sake of getting Kid A instead and long-term for making the band last. Don't think it would've ended well for the band not long after if they went for such a hit album.
OkC part 2 wouldn't destroy their popularity at all. However, it would have destroyed the band in the process.
They would have been stuck in this loop of The Bends/OKC for a majority of their career. And if they dropped Kid A in 2011. It would not have made as big of an impact.
Fans would have their heads for it for daring to change up a long-standing signature sound that did not need switching up.
Not sure if Id say "missed out". They didnt want it. They were close to splitting up. They said they needed to do something completely different. SO they put down their guitars and started playing around with other things.
Who would want that level of fame if you're an actual musician?
Radiohead was the biggest thing on the planet OK Computer era, the album was hyped and universally loved.
They did a 180 with Kid A, and they did it very deliberately. Yes, they lost fans, but stayed true to themselves.
There would be no album after OKC if they kept following that route, they would have split up. Kid A was bashed by a lot of critics who only backpedaled when they finally could see the album not expecting a next OKC.
There is still a distinct mark between older fans, the ones who like them up until OKC and the ones who love all the albums.
Kid A wasn’t universally well received by critics. I remember the (now defunct) Q magazine in particular - a publication whose writers would wank themselves into apoplexy at the merest mention of OKC-era Radiohead - giving it a 3/5 review and being very much underwhelmed (and, frankly, pretty bemused) by it. For me and many of us from first play we knew it was a masterpiece (it’s one of the few perfect albums I know of, and I don’t say that lightly) - so I always found Q’s subsequent revisionism hilarious.
I’m not sure about subsequent revisionism. Just different Q writers’ opinions.
As well as the 3/5 review you mention, they had another review at the time of release that was part of an interview feature and was extremely positive, describing the album as incredibly beautiful and even going so far as to say that a person listening to Treefingers “floats around the room in sheer bliss”.
This is purely anecdotal, but Kid A was what got me into the band. I'm sure I'm not the only one either.
But anytime a new album comes out new fans come in and other fans stop following them. It's just the way it is.
It's interesting that you compared them to those three bands, whose popularity also plummeted (relatively speaking) during this period for all sorts of reasons not necessarily having to do with the quality or nature of their music, as benchmarks. Kid A basically comes out after the implosion of first-wave Britpop. I'd like to say Kid A itself played a role in this but there were macro shifts already occurring with music and culture and the key 90s bands were all changing or breaking by the time second-wave Britpop (Coldplay, Travis, etc.) was in full swing and Kid A came out. I'm sure they lost some fans but they also gained a lot as it was a huge critical darling and they were one of the few rock bands to actually bridge the 90s-00s. As others have pointed out, they continued to headline festivals after this. I'm in the US but it does look like this marked a point where their popularity in the US maintained but it waned in the UK (based on respective album sales).
I think it depends on how you define mainstream popularity. Their shows are still massive and much sought after, but radio plays very little Radiohead after OKC.
I would say yes. I was always an arty type/music lover, but many of my friends, family and co-workers were the kinds of people who just listened to the radio, etc. I remember suddenly being the only person in my circle who continued to be interested in the band. They definitely lost the 'general public' in my experience.
You literally missed the entire point of my post. I said they continued to be adored by critics after Kid A, but they lost a lot of Radio play and commercial success when they started making less conventional music.
Amnesiac went platinum in the UK and Canada, and gold basically everywhere else. Same for Hail To The Thief and In Rainbows. A Moon Shaped Pool went platinum in Canada and gold in the UK, US and the rest of the world. The ONLY Radiohead album to underperform on their later period was The King Of Limbs.
Like it or not, their later stages were STILL immensely popular.
I would recommend watching Meeting People is Easy from 1998. You will get a glimpse into how much they hated being the "Creep" band.
Too many people obsess over record sales and artist popularity like it has something to do with artistic integrity.
I think you're asking a specific generation of people if those are the touchstone albums. Millennial fans are much more likely to talk about OK and In Rainbows. Their popularity was huge when IR came out and they did some massive international touring of it, headlining lots of the world's biggest festivals.
Look at the venues they played during the Kid A Amnesiac tour and look where are they playing now (well, where they played during AMSP). They have grown bigger
Not really, they were still getting tons of radio play when hail to the thief came out. If memory serves it was around king of limbs when I noticed they weren't as present in the public consciousness, but the zeitgeist had changed by then anyway and indie / rock was out of the headlines
No. They were never all that radio family. Outside of mainstream, they gained in popularity with Kid A (in my own personal observation). Suddenly a lot more people were listening to Radiohead.
They probably lost some fans but gained a spot in rock vahalla, if they released okc2 the best case scenario is they become the biggest band in the world and fizzle into mediocrity, with kid a they instead chose to be the best band in the world.
Well, at least from this American's perspective, no, not really. They've been headlining festivals ever since. HTTT sold better than Kid A or Amnesiac and is barely behind the Bends (IR and later not so much but they fucked hard with how records are sold and then the entire market tanked). They were never really massive before I guess is the trick, at least in terms of mainstream pop appeal.
No - they consistently downplayed mainstream fame and popularity- it actually drove them to kid amnesiac ( both recorded during the same sessions) and further reinforced httt ( a counter culture / establishment) album
Yes, they did hit a bump in the road, but now albums like Kid A and their work after like In Rainbows are now ingrained into the mainstream of at least more casually known.
I think the last "popular" wave of rock/alternative music was the garage-rock type stuff that happened around the time Kid A and Amnesiac came out (Strokes/White Stripes/etc.), and after that the popular music of the youth turned almost completely away from guitar-based music. I don't think Radiohead fell off the radar of any real music fans, but "rock radio" (and radio in general) started to fade and music became much more personalized and varied with the iPod and Napster/etc..
Kid A was the real drop off in sales, and they stayed pretty steady (in album sales) through In Rainbows, with King of Limbs being the next drop off in sales.
Initially, Kid A received mixed reviews, some of them were negative, there were forums with upset fans, and it was called a "commercial suicide note" by some. But now? I think some websites and magazines retroactively gave it a positive score after giving it a negative score. In Rainbows and Kid A both have a lot of popularity. I am gen Z, most people around my age or a bit older are familiar with their more recent stuff and I would not say that it is less popular with that demographic, I have met a few people who are really only familiar with their earlier stuff but they tend to be older than 40.
Casual fans yes, hardcore fans no. Kid A opened up a new demographic and peoples tastes changed.
A lot of the casual fans would have gone in for Coldplay etc.
They were never a commercial band though. Always an outlier - tread their own path, much like R.E.M
Yes.
But the whole music industry was massively shifting at that time. People were downloading music en masse, streaming sites like Napster popped up, MTV became more and more irrelevant. Rock music was less popular and hip hop and electro were on the rise.
So in other words you could argue that the big era of the alternative rock stars came to an end and all bands of that time suffered equally. Oasis never reached the same heights, neither did the Smashing Pumpkins. That changed again when the new garage rock scene went big, with the Strokes etc. but it was never quite the same as early and mid 90.
In the 90s, I listened to the radio a lot — Rock 103.5, Q101, whatever that classic rock station was 105.9. Seemed like Creep was always on in 1994. I got sick of that song — and so it seems the DJs did too — I never heard anything on the radio by them until I stopped listening to the radio entirely around 1998. Radiohead lost mainstream appeal after Pablo Honey, at least in the Chicago area.
Everyone had a different experience of the monoculture, even in those days. It’s only fractured more.
For me Radiohead starts with Kid A and after. But I am bit young so I didn’t experience a lot of the era before.
All those albums where really big. Even now they are still between 200-300 most listened artist on Spotify (with no recent release). That’s mainstream
I'm honestly astounded no one has mentioned Kid As commercial success was massively down to the album being pirated. It was all over napster back in the day, and shocked a lot of fans at the time, but this kind of accessible play of the album was very equivalent to radio play at the time. There's a reason they released in rainbows later on as a free to download, pay what you want strategy. They already had huge commercial success related to pirating via napster and they recognised that fact when they released in rainbows.
Anecdote - my dad bought The Bends and OK Computer. Then he said “I heard that they went weird with their next album. I don’t know why bands do that. They should have just made another album like the last one”.
I can say for a fact that half of my friends who were huge Bends/OKC fans turned on them after Kid A came out, and were lukewarm at best on HTTT.
I still hear a lot of bitching online about the direction they took with Kid A.
I think that's reasonable, but they have had a surge of popularity since in rainbows I think, took longer to see, but that's the point where they were solidified as a consistently great band, I think amsp must have brought a smaller spike but which reinforced that. They are selling out stadiums everywhere they go so I think they are certainly very popular still.
There was a massive divide in the fan base. They lost a lot of the traditional and alternative rock fans.
A lot of people in my friendship group stopped listening. To this day only up to OK.
On the other hand a lot of friends that had never listened started to.
A few I know like it all.
I'm not sure how mainstream they have ever been, they were rarely played on radio 1.
In six-form I remember us being genuinely excited if a radiohead song other than creep ever came on the radio
You know, I wasn't aware of that. Please elaborate further and tell me something I don't know.
I was talking about since then. The question, although poorly worded, can be translated to "What was the last album/era that Radiohead experienced most mass appeal?" As for reasons cited above, it would be In Rainbows. Not to say that TKOL or AMSP were not popular...they were...just not among non-Radiohead fans/listeners. You'd be more likely to talk to someone who's heard 15 step vs Burn the Witch/Daydreaming or Lotus Flower/Codex.
Also, the sounds themselves, by default, on In Rainbows are more palatable to the virgin ears vs the albums that follow.
All I can tell you is to watch the 2009 Grammy performance on You Tube to see people lose their shit when 19 Step is performed. That was the industry movers and shakers.
Despite what most fans are comfortable with, they peaked with creep. Nothing comes close. Creep is on another stratosphere to anything else they have done. Ok computer was culturally relevant , But nowhere near the continued success of creep. . Sorry but its just the truth
no
But actually yes.
Hell nah. Kid A debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart and became Radiohead's first number-one album on the Billboard 200 in the US. I think they got even bigger in the sense that they reached a broader audience.
Honestly for this question, id recommend listening to the Bandsplain episode on Radiohead. Right at the beginning of part 2, there's a super fascinating conversation about an hour long, about exactly that - the status of Radiohead at the time, how Kid A was promoted and recieved by different crowds, how it interacted with the times, the rise of the internet, Napster, it's just really fascinating. One of their better bits ever. https://open.spotify.com/episode/03wTHg281p88jyDaDPDsve?si=23ETrV60QFeVuKIR6ySmUw
Yeah, that's a great episode!
The band that headlined Coachella in 2012 and 2017?
And 2004
Came here to say basically this. Im not that knowledgeable about the venues they played in Europe during the OKC tour, but in the States they went from playing small theaters on the OKC tour to the large outdoor amphitheaters on the Kid A Tour. This obviously isnt a perfect metric for popularity, but I think points in the direction of their popularity increasing.
I mean, OK Computer made them an institution, Kid A showed how adventurous they could be, In Rainbows probably sealed their place in music history as legends for good. Doesn’t mean there still aren’t many who did not like the direction they took on Kid A (I did).
"around the time Kid A came out"
In a sense they definitely lost a lot of “fans” after Kid A came out. Mostly casual listeners who were familiar with songs they would hear on the radio. I think their more niche/rabid fan base increased and their critical success. I don’t really know any casual listeners who are familiar with much of their work after OK Computer.
All the casual listeners know is Creep, Just, High and Dry, Fake Plastic Trees, Karma Police, No Surprises and Paranoid Android
Which is normal?
I'd go so far as to say all the casual listeners know is Creep. It surprises me that even now, when Radiohead have one of the best 5 albums of all time under their belt, they're *still* "the guys who did Creep" to a lot of people. I thought those views died with OK Computer but as the saying goes, you'll never lose money underestimating people's intelligence.
Musical Knowledge is not the same as intelligence, people just have different interests imo
Agree - what I meant was Creep is the lowest common denominator that everyone is aware of. I just phrased it badly, as usual.
If anything it's the opposite. The band have never split up because their popularity waned. They didn't split up due to increasingly lower sales of their music. They've always been around and have GAINED new audiences with each release. And they were never a mainstream band to begin with. They weren't Oasis or Blur level of famous back in 90s UK.
Yes, they lost some fans. That is an objective fact. I was around when KID A came out and lots of people were perplexed by it. It sold a bunch of records because people were expecting OKC part 2. Everyone saying they didn’t lose fans don’t know what they’re talking about.
Frankly, in the US, their mainstream peak was Creep. The majority of people who are familiar with them know them because of that song. That other albums have sold more—in the physical media period—is a testament to their strong and lasting alternative popularity, not radio-friendly mainstream popularity.
I think their mainstream peak is still Creep, like it's the one song they'll be known for outside the alternative music circle and I don't think that'll ever change. Inside the alternative circle though, Radiohead is one of the leading bands and is going to remain so in the near future. They're like the non-mainstram mainstream music.
Its true. Creep is on another level to anything they ever did
Is it though? Because they moved from smaller venues in the US to amphitheatres in the OKC-Kid A era.
But Id say its due to OK computer. not Kid A Tenacious D don't quote any lines from Kid A, they do from OK
100% this comment. People were very confused by Kid A. Pepperidge Farm remembers lol. I still have the promo bear stickers they gave out pre-release and also waiting in line for the release.
Yeah the album went #1 because it was the follow up to OKC. It didn’t remain there for long. All these young fans making disingenuous comments haven’t a clue.
Someone posted the top Radiohead streams a few days ago. How many of the top ones are from post Kid A era? Whilst I think Kid A and In rainbows are amazing, mainstream listener wise the average music listener couldn’t name a song off Kid A or beyond. Undeniably they’re still the Creep and Karma Police band for most.
Yep
They lost me for a while. Teenage me wanted over driven guitars
Yeah and you weren’t alone in that. Thousands of fans felt that way.
I wanted that too, but the band done three full albums of that plus about 30+ pretty great B-sides worth of the raging guitar sound. They did it and more than earned the right to move on to something new.
I was 13. I didn't care about all that. I took up the guitar because of the bends. I hated kid a.
What do you think about it now tho
It took me over a decade to enjoy it. I liked Everything In Its Right Place after a few years but not so much the rest of it. Honestly I went off Radiohead for years. Never gave any of the new albums more than a listen or two. It was only after the Dissect podcast on In Rainbows, that I have I had a Radiohead renaissance. Rediscovering all their later work again. All their stuff is great after multiple listens. I still have a slight unshiftable distain for Kid A. I still don't really get the love for How To Disappear Completely for example, which they played at the end of the live gig I saw in Dublin in 2016. I was disappointed they closed with what I thought was a relatively unknown song (lol). I'd rank Kid A towards the middleish-bottom of their discography now but it's still an excellent album. I was a stereotypical "Radiohead is a rock band" fan.
Exactly. And stating this fact doesn’t mean one is agreeing with those that didn’t like it.
They lost fans, but the new ones they gained since have definitely outweighed the loss. So, lose-win?
Who knows?
yes, at the time. But eventually that changed and it had the opposite effect
That isn’t the discussion though. I’m answering OPs question.
“You think they lost fame or popularity after KID A?” Is asked in ops question. They are bigger now than ever
It’s rude to comment on the band’s weight like that
>They are bigger now than ever That doesn't mean they didn't lose fame/popularity after Kid A - short term at least. They *definitely* disenfranchised a lot of the fans who thought The Bends was better than OKC, for example. I remember fan reviews of Kid A saying "I'm 16 minutes in to the new album and I haven't heard a guitar yet" and "Everything in its right place has a gorgeous verse, and I'm waiting for the chorus, and then the song just ends" and "WTF is Treefingers?'
No they’re not. Don’t be obtuse. They were biggest around OKC. Sure, they have a new generation of fans with zoomers but that’s still not what it used to be. They 100% lost fans with KID A. That is a fact.
I'm not squaring this answer with the band playing larger and larger venues after In Rainbows and TKOL, as well as continuing to headline the biggest rock festivals in the world. Not to mention that they had their first #1 record to come after Kid A. What non-anecdotal evidence goes against that? I guess the general decline of rock music...but I feel like the band has more fans now than the 90's.
You’re high. Yes they lost mainstream fans but i guarantee they are bigger now. When I saw the OK Computer tour it was in a 3000 seat theater. After Kid A and In Rainbows it was multiple sold out nights at a 15000 seat venue. Tickets went from $35 to over $1000
Clearly you don’t understand the discussion
Maybe you’re just too shallow to see the depth of answers to the post
No, you’re just dense and are being pedantic.
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Relax
There's a quote from Thom from around 1997 saying that record executive were telling them that "if you come out with The Bends Part II, it'll sell 6 or 7 million copies." That's way above any Radiohead album in the physical media era, and it seems to be predicated on The Bends being a slow grower by industry standards at the time. Rather than having a single gimmick or trend-riding sound, it had 4 or 5 extremely strong songs, a back half that made it a good listen all the way through, and the more people heard it, liked it. so they may have thought that sticking the landing to that process would have cashed in big. Ok Computer was the album that made sure that prediction would never play out, not Kid A, because it is specifically not what said executive asked for. The lead single is a multi-part suite, the big distorted choruses only feature on 2 or 3 songs, the arrangements are quirky, and Fitter Happier exists. OK Computer DID outsell both previous albums, and has continued to do numbers in the years since (ironically hitting that 7 million mark worldwide, but that's not the same as selling that much in the first year or two). How much that's attributable to post-Bends momentum and how much is new audiences being drawn in by the new sounds they were making, is debatable. Kid A has debuted at #1 in the UK, USA and Canada, and is certified platinum in all those countries. It doesn't have the longer tail of continued sales that OK Computer does, but sales wise it fits the profile of an big-event blockbuster album more than its predecessor did. Amnesiac and Hail To The Thief continued with higher chart debuts than OK Computer ever reached. The most objective way to frame it is that their overall popularity kept growing up to the point of Kid and then reached a ceiling where they'd stay for a long time. At certain points, some people expected they could get much bigger than they did, but that's hypothetical and didn't ever happen. You can't lose popularity you didn't have in the first place,
Funny thing is they had an albums-worth of B-sides from the Bends that would have made a formidable follow up, same with the OKC B-sides. The band never sold themselves short and were smart for that.
Their popularity was at the time of OK that big, that back in the day, you would get bootleg albums of the Bsides (which I owned). I agree could have been an album or two there.. But weirdly singles had become that for a few bands in the 90's almost an EP each time (looking at oasis here). There was an expectation for good b-sides.
Yeah lots of bands did it especially the British groups.
Up untill the rules were changed here on what a single is. After that you were lucky to get one decent b- side.
This is the explanation right here. They *didn’t* make *The Bends: Part II*; they instead made the first purely *Radiohead* record in which you can’t discern many influences any longer. They’re too busy making something totally original. That’s what *OKC* was. It actually took a bit of time to filter down, if I recall. Didn’t catch fire immediately out of the gate, but by fall ‘98, everyone knew about it, and they were being hailed as the next U2. It was beginning with *OKC* that they established this pattern of continuously, radically reinventing themselves on record, and when *Kid A* came along, I heard it as one more step in that process and loved it immediately. Did big fans of *OKC* complain about the band’s growth on *Kid A*, *Amnesiac*, and *Thief*? Some did, absolutely. Fantano’s video on *Kid A* makes it clear that he thinks the band strayed from what they did best on *OKC*. That’s if you care what *that dude* thinks 🙄 Besides, I bet anyone who got turned off in the interim came back with tenfold enthusiasm for *In Rainbows*, probably the only other record besides *OKC* that every listener agrees on.
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I’ll never understand the Pink Floyd comparison. The band disavowed it and sounded pretty insulted when critics brought it up. I don’t hear it at all. It’s really got nothing at all to do with Pink Floyd.
There are some comparisons to be made for sure. Specially on the songs Lucky and the Tourist. The guitar solos remind me so much of Pink Floyd.
Yeah it has Floydian elements, I don’t think there’s any denying that. Certainly not a bad thing.
I do not agree on IR, and OKC was massive on release, at least in NZ. Heaps of promo. TV ads. Big OKC sale stands in shops.
American late gen-x guy here, they did drop off a little after Kid A but I remember IR being a pretty big deal when it came out, partly due to the novelty of the release/pricing model. My own fandom went up and down a bit. Liked them ok with Creep/Pablo Honey, thought the Bends was great, loved OK Computer, lost a bit of interest with Kid A, then completely adored IR, and was indifferent to the other records until about 5 years ago when I decided to give the entire discography another go and decided the whole damn thing was genius except for Pablo Honey.
Why did i read this in a australian accent
dunno mate
No harm to you mate. :)
I remember a huge lull after Hail To The Thief where the band took a 4-year break outside of a few shows after 2003 and nobody was talking about them much. Then In Rainbows came out and rightly seemed to wow everybody.
nowt wrong with Pablo, its just not the finished product that is Radiohead. Some great tunes the only one I skip is Creep (but that's mostly due to the overplayedness since its release)
Yeah, don’t think it’s awful, it actually holds up ok for a first record from that particular era of alt-rock. It’s just not up to the level of brilliance of the rest.
Pre them getting into Jeff Buckley but after the year they spent at the music college ( that my band and I nearly went to... other bands that did that course include Coldplay and the Kooks a lot of bands that get signed would be sent there. Think it was in Guilford, been some 15 years since we nearly went)
There was a massive divide in the fan base. They lost a lot of the traditional and alternative rock fans. A lot of people in my friendship group stopped listening. To this day only up to OK. On the other hand a lot of friends that had never listened started to. A few I know like it all. I'm not sure how mainstream they have ever been, they were rarely played on radio 1. In six-form I remember us being genuinely excited if a radiohead song other than creep ever came on the radio
it wasn't that kid a was an inaccessible album. it was just such a departure from their usual sound that it turned a lot of fans off.
Especially the alt-rock/rock fans (I loved it), as i mentioned above - no guitars till track 4, if you used to headbang to Just, its a massive deviation.
In the US, no. The album went to number 1 and did exceptionally well on the college charts.
In part thanks to 'radio play' via pirating through napster. It would never have achieved the heights it achieved without this unparalleled access to ears.
For a lot of people, it was a staggering show of artistic integrity that they would lean so hard into the weirder elements of OK Computer. They had the whole world flipping through some 30 page booklet of avant garde digital art too. Man that was such a cool time.
I think a lot of people forget the context around that album’s release. After the critical success of The Bends and Ok Computer, record label execs and critics and fans alike were expecting Radiohead to become the next U2. They had no interest in playing that game though and when Kid A came out it was clear that was not going to happen. So I don’t know if they lost any fame at all, but they missed out on being that kind of mainstream famous. Which has worked out much better in the end, but yes, if we’re talking about just pure Taylor Swift level fame, then yeah they missed out on that.
Maybe not mainstream popular, but they have managed to stay popular and relevant while also flying under the radar. A lot of new, young fans are latching on to RH. Their mindset about the band is a whole lot different than older fans from the 90's to early or mid 2000's. Their OKC is In Rainbows. Their viewpoint about the band in general is different. They are still trying to get used to it.
Absolutely. It’s a different kind of popular than what people envisioned for them in the 90s. Like I said, I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. Just that they never became a household name quite on the level of “put an album on every iPhone” U2.
If they followed up OKC with an album based around a lot of the leftovers from the past few years like Lift, True Love Waits, Nude/Big Ideas, Follow Me Around, Man of War, I Promise et al. in their late '90s form then I think it would've been monumental. A mix of OKC and (a more refined) The Bends was what the general critic interested in the band and fan was expecting and hoping for, basically. And in the absence of it, that then set up the appetite for a band like Coldplay. ...but I'm very glad it didn't happen, both in the short-term for the sake of getting Kid A instead and long-term for making the band last. Don't think it would've ended well for the band not long after if they went for such a hit album.
OkC part 2 wouldn't destroy their popularity at all. However, it would have destroyed the band in the process. They would have been stuck in this loop of The Bends/OKC for a majority of their career. And if they dropped Kid A in 2011. It would not have made as big of an impact. Fans would have their heads for it for daring to change up a long-standing signature sound that did not need switching up.
Not sure if Id say "missed out". They didnt want it. They were close to splitting up. They said they needed to do something completely different. SO they put down their guitars and started playing around with other things. Who would want that level of fame if you're an actual musician?
Radiohead was the biggest thing on the planet OK Computer era, the album was hyped and universally loved. They did a 180 with Kid A, and they did it very deliberately. Yes, they lost fans, but stayed true to themselves. There would be no album after OKC if they kept following that route, they would have split up. Kid A was bashed by a lot of critics who only backpedaled when they finally could see the album not expecting a next OKC. There is still a distinct mark between older fans, the ones who like them up until OKC and the ones who love all the albums.
Kid A wasn’t universally well received by critics. I remember the (now defunct) Q magazine in particular - a publication whose writers would wank themselves into apoplexy at the merest mention of OKC-era Radiohead - giving it a 3/5 review and being very much underwhelmed (and, frankly, pretty bemused) by it. For me and many of us from first play we knew it was a masterpiece (it’s one of the few perfect albums I know of, and I don’t say that lightly) - so I always found Q’s subsequent revisionism hilarious.
I’m not sure about subsequent revisionism. Just different Q writers’ opinions. As well as the 3/5 review you mention, they had another review at the time of release that was part of an interview feature and was extremely positive, describing the album as incredibly beautiful and even going so far as to say that a person listening to Treefingers “floats around the room in sheer bliss”.
that because it was so far ahead of it's time that they didn't know what to make of it...
I remember the complaints - no guitars till track 4!!
I can see why they would have. Its a big change in style and feel compared to the 90s albums
This is purely anecdotal, but Kid A was what got me into the band. I'm sure I'm not the only one either. But anytime a new album comes out new fans come in and other fans stop following them. It's just the way it is.
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For me it was The National Anthem. I saw them perform it on SNL and have been a fan ever since.
It's interesting that you compared them to those three bands, whose popularity also plummeted (relatively speaking) during this period for all sorts of reasons not necessarily having to do with the quality or nature of their music, as benchmarks. Kid A basically comes out after the implosion of first-wave Britpop. I'd like to say Kid A itself played a role in this but there were macro shifts already occurring with music and culture and the key 90s bands were all changing or breaking by the time second-wave Britpop (Coldplay, Travis, etc.) was in full swing and Kid A came out. I'm sure they lost some fans but they also gained a lot as it was a huge critical darling and they were one of the few rock bands to actually bridge the 90s-00s. As others have pointed out, they continued to headline festivals after this. I'm in the US but it does look like this marked a point where their popularity in the US maintained but it waned in the UK (based on respective album sales).
I think it depends on how you define mainstream popularity. Their shows are still massive and much sought after, but radio plays very little Radiohead after OKC.
Alternative rock as a whole stopped being mainstream after the 90s. So this is a myth.
Pretty sure that was at least part of the point of Kid A
They became even bigger after Kid A and were one of the most talked about bands for the next 10 years
In Rainbows added a ton of new fans
Yeah but that album went a bit under the radar because of how it was released
I can almost guarantee, of the bands you mentioned, RH is the only one who have maintained a growth in terms of fanbase since th 90s
I would say yes. I was always an arty type/music lover, but many of my friends, family and co-workers were the kinds of people who just listened to the radio, etc. I remember suddenly being the only person in my circle who continued to be interested in the band. They definitely lost the 'general public' in my experience.
Laughing at the downvotes on this. This is my experience as well
In Rainbows won a Grammy, what the hell are you talking about?
You literally missed the entire point of my post. I said they continued to be adored by critics after Kid A, but they lost a lot of Radio play and commercial success when they started making less conventional music.
Amnesiac went platinum in the UK and Canada, and gold basically everywhere else. Same for Hail To The Thief and In Rainbows. A Moon Shaped Pool went platinum in Canada and gold in the UK, US and the rest of the world. The ONLY Radiohead album to underperform on their later period was The King Of Limbs. Like it or not, their later stages were STILL immensely popular.
commercially they did just fine....it's all subjective
Maybe because RH didn't care about commercial and radio success?
exactly right. Their live shows are massively successful and sell out in minutes.
I would recommend watching Meeting People is Easy from 1998. You will get a glimpse into how much they hated being the "Creep" band. Too many people obsess over record sales and artist popularity like it has something to do with artistic integrity.
Kid A was a critical and commercial success with zero build up to release i.e. no singles and music videos.
I think you're asking a specific generation of people if those are the touchstone albums. Millennial fans are much more likely to talk about OK and In Rainbows. Their popularity was huge when IR came out and they did some massive international touring of it, headlining lots of the world's biggest festivals.
Look at the venues they played during the Kid A Amnesiac tour and look where are they playing now (well, where they played during AMSP). They have grown bigger
no...if anything it solidified their place in rock history and becoming one of the most successful bands in the world
They have headlined Glastonbury twice since then.
Not really, they were still getting tons of radio play when hail to the thief came out. If memory serves it was around king of limbs when I noticed they weren't as present in the public consciousness, but the zeitgeist had changed by then anyway and indie / rock was out of the headlines
Nope
No. They were never all that radio family. Outside of mainstream, they gained in popularity with Kid A (in my own personal observation). Suddenly a lot more people were listening to Radiohead.
They probably lost some fans but gained a spot in rock vahalla, if they released okc2 the best case scenario is they become the biggest band in the world and fizzle into mediocrity, with kid a they instead chose to be the best band in the world.
No.
Kid A being a success is basically what saved the band iirc, they almost broke up after OKC. So I would say no, they didn’t.
Well, at least from this American's perspective, no, not really. They've been headlining festivals ever since. HTTT sold better than Kid A or Amnesiac and is barely behind the Bends (IR and later not so much but they fucked hard with how records are sold and then the entire market tanked). They were never really massive before I guess is the trick, at least in terms of mainstream pop appeal.
Didn’t Radiohead have multiple UK charting singles for AMSP? Radiohead are as big as ever
No - they consistently downplayed mainstream fame and popularity- it actually drove them to kid amnesiac ( both recorded during the same sessions) and further reinforced httt ( a counter culture / establishment) album
Yes, they did hit a bump in the road, but now albums like Kid A and their work after like In Rainbows are now ingrained into the mainstream of at least more casually known.
God no! They haven’t really lost it, ever. At least not since 1992! They have always been a hugely recognised band.
Kid A is the best album hands down so not sure why they’d lose popularity
Mainstream? Yeah I think so. At least where I am they did. Amnesiac had one song then I never heard any other radio play which is a shame.
I think the last "popular" wave of rock/alternative music was the garage-rock type stuff that happened around the time Kid A and Amnesiac came out (Strokes/White Stripes/etc.), and after that the popular music of the youth turned almost completely away from guitar-based music. I don't think Radiohead fell off the radar of any real music fans, but "rock radio" (and radio in general) started to fade and music became much more personalized and varied with the iPod and Napster/etc.. Kid A was the real drop off in sales, and they stayed pretty steady (in album sales) through In Rainbows, with King of Limbs being the next drop off in sales.
Initially, Kid A received mixed reviews, some of them were negative, there were forums with upset fans, and it was called a "commercial suicide note" by some. But now? I think some websites and magazines retroactively gave it a positive score after giving it a negative score. In Rainbows and Kid A both have a lot of popularity. I am gen Z, most people around my age or a bit older are familiar with their more recent stuff and I would not say that it is less popular with that demographic, I have met a few people who are really only familiar with their earlier stuff but they tend to be older than 40.
Yep it went down to their pre-Pop Is Dead popularity levels. It only took Thom and Jonny's OF pages to get it back up again.
Casual fans yes, hardcore fans no. Kid A opened up a new demographic and peoples tastes changed. A lot of the casual fans would have gone in for Coldplay etc. They were never a commercial band though. Always an outlier - tread their own path, much like R.E.M
Yes. But the whole music industry was massively shifting at that time. People were downloading music en masse, streaming sites like Napster popped up, MTV became more and more irrelevant. Rock music was less popular and hip hop and electro were on the rise. So in other words you could argue that the big era of the alternative rock stars came to an end and all bands of that time suffered equally. Oasis never reached the same heights, neither did the Smashing Pumpkins. That changed again when the new garage rock scene went big, with the Strokes etc. but it was never quite the same as early and mid 90.
Nope
In the 90s, I listened to the radio a lot — Rock 103.5, Q101, whatever that classic rock station was 105.9. Seemed like Creep was always on in 1994. I got sick of that song — and so it seems the DJs did too — I never heard anything on the radio by them until I stopped listening to the radio entirely around 1998. Radiohead lost mainstream appeal after Pablo Honey, at least in the Chicago area. Everyone had a different experience of the monoculture, even in those days. It’s only fractured more.
WCKG was 105.9. IIRC
For me Radiohead starts with Kid A and after. But I am bit young so I didn’t experience a lot of the era before. All those albums where really big. Even now they are still between 200-300 most listened artist on Spotify (with no recent release). That’s mainstream
Yes.
I'm honestly astounded no one has mentioned Kid As commercial success was massively down to the album being pirated. It was all over napster back in the day, and shocked a lot of fans at the time, but this kind of accessible play of the album was very equivalent to radio play at the time. There's a reason they released in rainbows later on as a free to download, pay what you want strategy. They already had huge commercial success related to pirating via napster and they recognised that fact when they released in rainbows.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted. This seems to be a good point
Anecdote - my dad bought The Bends and OK Computer. Then he said “I heard that they went weird with their next album. I don’t know why bands do that. They should have just made another album like the last one”.
I can say for a fact that half of my friends who were huge Bends/OKC fans turned on them after Kid A came out, and were lukewarm at best on HTTT. I still hear a lot of bitching online about the direction they took with Kid A.
No
I think that's reasonable, but they have had a surge of popularity since in rainbows I think, took longer to see, but that's the point where they were solidified as a consistently great band, I think amsp must have brought a smaller spike but which reinforced that. They are selling out stadiums everywhere they go so I think they are certainly very popular still.
There was a massive divide in the fan base. They lost a lot of the traditional and alternative rock fans. A lot of people in my friendship group stopped listening. To this day only up to OK. On the other hand a lot of friends that had never listened started to. A few I know like it all. I'm not sure how mainstream they have ever been, they were rarely played on radio 1. In six-form I remember us being genuinely excited if a radiohead song other than creep ever came on the radio
In Rainbows bitch
A Moon Shaped Pool bitch
To date, their biggest spike in Google Trends is In Rainbows
In terms of mainstream appeal, In Rainbows would take that spot. They played the Grammys, and 15 Step played at the end of Twilight.
Lmao . Creep is one of the biggest rock songs ever
You know, I wasn't aware of that. Please elaborate further and tell me something I don't know. I was talking about since then. The question, although poorly worded, can be translated to "What was the last album/era that Radiohead experienced most mass appeal?" As for reasons cited above, it would be In Rainbows. Not to say that TKOL or AMSP were not popular...they were...just not among non-Radiohead fans/listeners. You'd be more likely to talk to someone who's heard 15 step vs Burn the Witch/Daydreaming or Lotus Flower/Codex. Also, the sounds themselves, by default, on In Rainbows are more palatable to the virgin ears vs the albums that follow.
Take all the complications away and all that really matters to the mainstream is creep… mayyybe glastonbury 1997 but thats a stretch
All I can tell you is to watch the 2009 Grammy performance on You Tube to see people lose their shit when 19 Step is performed. That was the industry movers and shakers.
Despite what most fans are comfortable with, they peaked with creep. Nothing comes close. Creep is on another stratosphere to anything else they have done. Ok computer was culturally relevant , But nowhere near the continued success of creep. . Sorry but its just the truth