Book Review: Exit Music: The Radiohead Story
I’ve owned this book for over ten years without ever cracking its spine. Almost eleven, to be precise. Apologies to author Mac Randall and Delta Books for the delay. It’s been a hell of a decade…
When I was the music editor at The Nervous Breakdown many years back, I received advance copies of books — usually music biographies, with the odd self-help book and quirky novel mixed in — all with the hope of a favorable review at TNB. I often obliged but was sadly unable to keep up with the demand. Occasionally I withheld a review as a favor to the publisher.
In March, 2012, I received an updated copy of Exit Music: The Radiohead Story, by longtime music writer Mac Randall. An accomplished musician in his own right, his latest version followed the Radiohead story through the 2011 release of The King Of Limbs. For reasons entirely obscure to me here in 2023, I neither reviewed nor read the book at the time. Not out of disinterest; quite the opposite, Radiohead are a band whom I’ve long admired and whose story has remained largely unknown to me. I suspect the decade-plus delay was occasioned by my move from my music editor position into more regular work as a contributor to Metal Hammer and other magazines. I positioned the volume prominently on my main bookcase, confident that the day would one day arrive when I would be ready to dive into what I hoped would be an arresting foray into the creative processes of one of the most forward-thinking artists of our time. Credit to Mac Randall, my hopes came largely true. This weekend, I removed the book from its home for the past eleven years and three days later, I was done.
For all of their critical aplomb, their commercial successes and their rightful esteem as vanguards of modern music, Radiohead remain known more as a collective than as a group of individuals, at least beyond the perimeter of diehard fans and industry observers. Whereas casual music fans of the 90s could likely tick off the names of at least one or two members of Pearl Jam, Nirvana or Oasis, you’d be hard-pressed to find fans of that ilk who could likewise name two members of Radiohead. From the outside looking in, where Radiohead are concerned, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Considering that the book omits only 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool, Exit Music… recounts the lion’s share of the band’s story to date and certainly its most vital chapters.
This is not an authorized biography and as such, Randall is limited to his own research, interviews he conducted with the band over the years while writing for other publications and other magazine features throughout the years. Consequently, there’s no original content here with regard to the members of the band or their organization. There are, however, some incisive observations and the most thorough analyses one will ever find of Radiohead’s first eight albums. Randall delves into the music theory, compositional strategies and the individual performances of each song with a jaw-dropping level of detail. Journeyman music journalists would do well to read the track-by-track assessments of each album for inspiration on how to thread the technical elements of a song into its emotional context.
However, repeating this approach for each album eventually grows formulaic; a synthesis of magazine articles and old interviews recount each album’s inception, pre-production and recording, followed by a detailed analysis of each song in the order that it appears on the album. This repeats for all eight albums and considering that the author lacked the band’s input, the material takes on the vibe of a long feature rather than a firsthand account.. Which isn’t bad for a magazine, but stretched across 280 pages, it does wear a bit thin with the technical deconstruction of each composition accounting for the lion’s share of the book — a least after the band’s 1993 debut, Pablo Honey.
Missing are the narrative moments that one finds in other music biographies — fly-on-the-wall interludes that put the reader in the room with the subjects. Instead, we’re constantly reminded of the author’s role as intermediary. At times, he drops into the first person, talking about attending album premieres or in one case, recounting stories of the band happily greeting him in Barcelona and taking photos of him. Again - this is pure gold for a magazine feature; the stuff that causes editors to salivate and that gives readers a valuable window into the unguarded personalities of the artists. But as a full-length biography, it doesn’t always feel organic.
These are relatively minor quibbles, however. Randall does a bang-up job of getting the timeline right and stacking plenty of facts and interviews along the way, tying them together with probing observations and genuinely thought-provoking insights. Most importantly, Exit Music… leaves the reader with a potent understanding of the inner workings of Radiohead and precisely how and why they eventually emerged as one of the most important artists of their generation.
I’m always in search of a new album obsession. Singles are fine but I grew up when albums reigned supreme and there’s just something uniquely fulfilling in the experience of absorbing an entire album in one sitting. Which is why Radiohead have always fascinated me. They’ve managed to evolve dramatically over the years without ever losing the ability to present fully-formed albums in exciting new forms. Exit Music… ticked all of the boxes for me and sent me back down the Radiohead rabbit hole. To its immense credit, it’s not a fans-only read; anybody who fancies themself a creative or who enjoys music biographies will find much to love within its pages.