This is a collection of academic essays about Radiohead, bringing together close readings of the band's music, lyrics, album cover art, and music videos, as well as critical commentary on interviews, reviews, and the documentary film 'Meeting People Is Easy'.

The Music and Art of Radiohead provides compelling close readings of the English band's music, lyrics, album cover art and music videos as well as critical commentary on interviews, reviews and the documentary film Meeting People is Easy. Established and emerging academic scholars engage with Radiohead's music and art via concerns of broader implication to contemporary cultural studies. Topics range from the band's various musical and multivalent social contexts to their contested situation within a global market economy; from asking the question, 'how free is art?' to considering the band's musical influences and radical sonic explorations. Together, the essays form a comprehensive discussion of Radiohead's entire oeuvre, from Pablo Honey to Hail to the Thief, with a special focus on the critically acclaimed best-selling albums Kid A and Amnesiac.

Everything in its Right Place identifies the secret to Radiohead's immense commercial and critical success in the band's ability to navigate a sweet spot between expectation and surprise. The author uses tools from musical perception, semiotics, and music theory to demonstrate this reconciliation of extremes, and analyzes musical meaning with lyrics, biographical details, and intertextual relationships.

Seemingly granted ‘classic album' status within days of its release in 1997, OK Computer transformed Radiohead from a highly promising rock act into The Most Important Band in the World - a label the band has been burdened by (and has fooled around with) ever since. Through close musical analysis of each song, Dai Griffiths explores the themes and ideas that have made this album resonate so deeply with its audience, and argues that OK Computer is one of the most successfully realized CD albums so far created. EXCERPT But then ‘Karma Police' changes. After the second chorus the track lifts, in various ways. Harmonically, there's a key change of sorts (the sheet music charmingly follows the convention of preparing the reader for the new key signature), from E minor to B minor, although in truth both sections use similar chords. Then vocally or melodically, the key change takes Thom Yorke to his angelic register. Texturally, there's a big shift, with all the instruments doing lighter things. Best to my mind though, there's the one word, phew. Phew's great: it's a cartoon word, like ‘gulp' or ‘zzzz' or ‘bah'. Its precision matters, the fact that it's really there, properly pronounced, not just sort-of-breathed...

Whilst these records were being conceived, rehearsed, recorded and produced, Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood made hundreds of images. These ranged from obsessive, insomniac scrawls in biro to six-foot-square painted canvases, from scissors-and-glue collages to immense digital landscapes. They utilised every medium they could find, from sticks and knives to the emerging digital technologies. The work chronicles their obsessions at the time: minotaurs, genocide, maps, globalisation, monsters, pylons, dams, volcanoes, locusts, lightning, helicopters, Hiroshima, show homes and ring roads. What emerges is a deeply strange portrait of the years at the commencement of this century. A time that seems an age ago - but so much remains the same.

The talent behind Radiohead's iconic artwork reveals in his own words and for the first time the creative process that has driven his career and earned him a cult reputation.A restless and prolific figure, Stanley Donwood is widely regarded as one of the most important visual artists of his generation. His influential work for Radiohead spans many practices and ever-evolving aesthetics over a 23-year period, from music packaging to installations to print-making. Here, for the very first time, he reveals his personal notebooks, photographs, sketches and abandoned routes to iconic Radiohead artworks. Arranged chronologically, chapters are each dedicated to a major work - be it an album cover, promotional piece or a personal project - presented as a step-by-step working case study, from speculative ideas and sketches right through to Photoshop experiments and the finished piece. Accompanying narratives by Donwood explain the inspirations and stories behind his creative process and what it is like to work with the band, told with his typical razor-sharp humour and generosity of spirit. Featuring a treasury of archive material, this is the first deep dive into Donwood's creative practice and the artistic freedom afforded to him by working for a major music act. There Will Be No Quiet is essential reading, and viewing, for fans of the band and anyone interested in the explosive mix of artistic accident, musical ingenuity and creative originality.

Radiohead is simultaneously one of the most experimental and most successful rock bands on the planet. While their lyrics rarely reference religion, in this book Robert Saler argues that the discipline of Christian theology has a great deal to learn from the band when it comes to unflinching engagement with the world's brokenness and its longing for redemption. Market dynamics, the influence of capitalism on art, ecological theology, aesthetics, and Christology all come together as Saler asks what it might mean for Radiohead to "soundtrack" a theology of defiance against the forces that create death in our daily lives.