If you are a game-changing artist, then you have to accept that there will be a wave of acts who follow in your wake that, to put it one way, will be influenced by you or, to put it another, completely rip you off. That is the way it goes, a tale as old as time.
Take a band like Radiohead, who reinvented rock in emotive new hues in the mid-90s and then had to watch as a load of bands watched what they did and copied it. Their combo of moving, poignant falsetto vocals, acoustic guitars and gently soaring ballads was only a part of the sound that made up their masterpiece second record The Bends, but it became a very appealing one.
Asked in the early 00s what he thought about inspiring such a number of bands, with the interviewer namechecking Coldplay and Travis, frontman Thom Yorke was quite sanguine. “They haven’t got to OK Computer yet, poor chaps,” he began. “They’re still stuck with The Bends, aren’t they? If The Bends had sold as many copies as a Travis record I’d be alright about it. But I don’t get too stressed about it because when we were touring with R.E.M., I watched Michael Stipe all the time and he was such a massive influence on me, I couldn’t help trying to imitate him, which is maybe a mind-boggling concept so everybody imitates everybody and everybody steals. It’s simply a question of how blatant you are about it and how comfortable you feel with it.”
But then Yorke remembered Muse and he became, um, not so sanguine. “There’s one band called Muse,” he said. “I draw the line at Muse because they openly slag us off as well as openly ripping us off. That’s like, How fucking dare you.”
It should be pointed out that Muse sound nothing like Radiohead anymore. Radiohead have never titled a song We Are Fucking Fucked, for example, although maybe they considered it when they realised they were pretty much responsible for Athlete. But there was a very strong taste of Radiohead in Muse’s early output, particularly in Matt Bellamy’s anguished vocal delivery. And Thom was not happy about it.
“There’s one thing to imitate and then to slag off the person you’re imitating, well, go down in a ball of flames, you deserve it,” he raged. “That’s just not cool, that’s incredibly bad karma.”
He brought up the Teignmouth rockers again almost two decades later. In an interview with The Sunday Times, Yorke used the band as an example as to why he doesn’t trust the algorithms on streaming platforms. “No,” he said flatly. ‘If you like this, you’ll like this’, and then it gives me… Muse.”
Thom isn’t the only member of Radiohead who was a little miffed at the copycats, either. Mild-mannered bassist Colin Greenwood let ‘em have it. “I’m not interested at all in a band like Muse,” he said. “We are trying to get away from that sound and do another thing… In England the situation is despairing. When a band like Travis are considered refreshing, what can I say? There friends of mine, I like them, but I’d never play their album. And Nigel Godrich has produced it! They use Fake Plastic Trees as a blueprint for their own music. It’s all so conservative.”
Sorry Colin, did you say they are friends of yours? Imagine what he says about his enemies! In the years since, Yorke has widened the net. Comically, in an interview with Rolling Stone a few years ago producer Godrich said that the Radiohead frontman considered anyone singing softly with an acoustic guitar to be Radiohead imitators. “Something would come on the radio and he’d look at me funny and I’d be like, ‘What are you so upset about?’,” he recalled. “He’d be huffing and puffing like someone copied him. I’d say, ‘It’s a guitar with some drums behind it, you didn’t invent that, you were copying someone else, relax!’. I think it’s a by-product of being so focused on what he wanted to do that he figures he’s the only person that’s ever that idea.”
It's an insight, perhaps, into how Yorke works, a restless creative who never repeats himself, who always forges forward and who really, really doesn’t like Muse. For their part in this long-running and unexpected beef between pasty alt-rock titans, Muse explained that they met Thom Yorke once and he was mean to them.
“I respect them musically,” said drummer Dom Howard, “but the last time I met him we almost started a fight. He treated me badly, looking down on me.”
Maybe they could do a charity boxing match? It could be called KO Computer. More news as we get it.
