It has been a long and curious digital journey for Radiohead from In Rainbows in 2007, where they have increasingly treated online less as a delivery mechanism and more as part and parcel of the creative process itself.
The launch of Radiohead Public Library is the latest manifestation of that questing spirit. It is not there to promote something in particular but rather is there to pull everything about the group into one place.
Running in reverse chronological order from the top down, the webpage (that sits on top of the band’s official site) clusters everything from each album project together. There are four “content columns” which cover things like album and associated single artwork, official videos, period-specific merchandise, live performances, miscellaneous arcana like a weird unboxing video for the vinyl edition of A Moon Shaped Pool and newsletters from W.A.S.T.E. (the band’s official information service) that dates back to the their earliest days, with one trumpeting the fact they were setting off on their first headline tour of the UK, taking in venues such as The Market Tavern in Kidderminster and the Pink Toothbrush and Rayleigh.
The band announced it with the following social media post: “Radiohead.com has always been infuriatingly uninformative and unpredictable. We have now, predictably, made it incredibly informative.”
They also added, “The internet as a whole has never been a reliable resource for detailed or even accurate information re: Radiohead. Many sites that attempted to provide some measure of service have long since gone dark as well. The overall effect has been ‘Radiohead’ search results that yield random and/or abbreviated shards: songs and album titles unaccompanied by detailed artwork or any additional context, low quality videos preceded by advertisements and shuffled via algorithms, and so on…”
Of special note for fans are things that had previously disappeared or were never seen by many at the time – notably their regular webcasts from their Oxfordshire studio in the days when they were at the mercy of poor connections and plagued by buffering issues.
There are lots of nice touches here such as the fact that users can create and download their own library card with a QR code that takes them to the gdpr.eu website (suggesting the band want to reassure fans they will not do anything untoward with their data). Additionally there is a digital copy of the “secret” booklet the band concealed under the tray of the CD version of the Kid A album.
There is the option to order custom-printed T-shirts from throughout the band’s career (most of which have been out of print and unavailable since they were first sold). It is also the first place that some tracks and remixes – including their Drill EP from 1992 – have ever been made officially available online.
On top of this, for the first five days each member hand picked their own favourites from the vast archive and streamable versions of playlists made by the band over the years have been made available.
It is an enormous undertaking and puts us in mind of the short-lived Onesheet from back in 2011 that allowed musicians to pull data and content from all their social media profiles into one place. In this case, it is pretty much everything associated with the band since their earliest days.
One can draw a straight line from In Rainbows through to the band being among the first to offer stems of tracks online for anyone to remix, the massive upload of all the OK Computer sessions (after someone blackmailed them and threatened to leak them before the band beat them to the punch), the recent upload of their entire catalogue to YouTube and now to the Radiohead Public Library.
Thom Yorke’s quotes about Spotify in 2013 (“the last desperate fart of a dying corpse”) are often used against the band, suggesting they are po-faced and inaccessible. But this new site – with its careful eye on digging deep into the layers of the past for the fans – flies in the face of that and is nothing less than a triumph.
