HIDDEN tracks

1. Just because it’s not the record you were expecting, it doesn’t make it a bad record.

2. Streaming Random Access Memories on iTunes probably wasn’t the best way to unveil it to the world. It meant that the most hugely anticipated album of the year received its first listen on millions of shitty little computer speakers.

3a. Streaming the most hugely anticipated album of the year anywhere probably isn’t a good idea. The amount you pay for something shapes your perception of it. Sitting at your desk with your arms (figuratively) folded, waiting to be impressed is no way to listen to a record.

3b. Sorry. I know I keep banging on about this, but in a world of infinite opportunities to listen to free music, you really try harder to understand a record when you pay for it.

4. At no point did Daft Punk tell you to expect an entire album of Get Luckys. You might realise this, but quite a lot of people seem not to.

5. If the old VHS tape found by Wall-E contained not Hello Dolly but Thank God It’s Friday or Saturday Night Fever and subsequently inspired him to make his own disco album, it might sound like Random Access Memories – especially Giorgio By Moroder, Within, Instant Crush and Touch.

6. Which is to say that it’s a love letter to the disco era, a sometimes poignant memorial to the unquenchable optimism of pre-Aids dance music – but not actually a disco album per se. Its closest companion is Madonna’s Confessions On A Dancefloor.

7. Dear People Who Seem Convinced That It’s All Been Done Before. Listen to Get Lucky. Then go back to your record collection and try and find a song that really sounds like it. I tried it the other week. I pulled out all of my Chic records. I pulled out Diana Ross’s Upside Down. I pulled out Sheila B. Devotion. None of them scratched the itch that Get Lucky scratched. The deep, foetal bass of Get Lucky couldn’t have been laid down in a pre-techno era. The gradual mutation of the vocal melody into robot-ecstasy – I haven’t heard that on any other record of the era. Ditto the absolute perfection of Omar Hakim’s prolonged drum climax on Georgio By Moroder (Omar Hakim’s drumming is 70 per cent of the reason I own Sting’s Bring On The Night album); the postcoitally ecstatic lack of BPMs on Lose Yourself To Dance (which will be beyond incredible when 200,000 people join in with the handclaps en masse at next year’s intevitable Glastonbury set); and the digitised intergalactic freakout at the end of Contact. I’ve got LOADS of old records. I spent ALL OF THE 80s buying up cheap disco 12-inches. I don’t have ANYTHING that truly sounds like this.

8. Dear Columbia: A much better way to disseminate Random Access Memories would have been a vinyl release, a week ahead of the official release. By and large, people who buy records on vinyl tend to devote more time getting to them. If you buy a record on vinyl, you can’t listen to it on shitty computer speakers (see point 2). And Random Access Memories needs to be heard either on good speakers or decent headphones to be really enjoyed. If the first fans hearing it this way had then gone onto social networking sites and relayed their reactions, all those first-reaction blogs might have been a bit more positive (by the way, you might want to keep this in mind for any other “event” releases you may be planning).

If there’s a better way of promoting your new album than giving in to your laziest prejudices, could someone please tell Noel Gallagher about it? Asked by Stereogum about Kanye West’s contention that Beck should “respect artistry” by handing over his Grammy to Beyonce, Noel’s retort was unequivocal: “Someone should buy [Kanye West] a dictionary. And he needs to look up the fucking term ‘artistry’ and then see if it reminds him, in any way, of Beyoncé. If shaking your ass for a living is considered art, then she’s right up there, no?”

We’ve seen, time and time again, that the man who famously described his brother as “a man with a fork in a world of soup” can be very funny indeed. But in this case, Noel isn’t trying to be funny. The quote itself strays from Noel’s customary dryness into something jarringly sour. Even most of Beyoncé’s detractors would concede that what she does could not be reduced to “shaking your ass.” But, hey, let’s take Noel at his word. Forget about the music. Would it be fanciful to dignify Beyoncé’s “ass-shaking” with the term ‘artistry’? To take the most celebrated example of her “ass-shaking”, we’ll look at the Single Ladies video, in which Beyoncé pastiches the dance that Bob Fosse choreographed for a trio led by Fosse’s wife Gwen Vernon on a 1969 episode of The Ed Sullivan Show. Despite several million YouTube plays, its impact remains undiminished. Beyonce saw the original clip and immediately singled it out as an aspirational piece of “urban choreography.” The video shoot saw Beyoncé go through the extraordinary routine several times, with the final version switching between the different performances from different angles. When I interviewed her on the week that Single Ladies went viral, she said it was “the most tiring video I’ve ever done”, but it was necessary to keep it relatively unadorned, “because the great thing about the Bob Fosse film is the way the personalities of the dancers shone through ’cos there wasn’t any tricks.” Beyoncé didn’t stumble into the Single Ladies video shoot, read the synopsis, and say, “Ok. This sounds nice.” She micromanaged the entire thing, from conception to execution.

Even if Beyoncé had done nothing else, I’d say there’s enough there for Beyoncé to earn the title of “artist” – and famously Kanye West thought so, when he staged the first of his two interventions at the VMAs six years ago. Given that Taylor Swift won for the video to a song no-one remembers, Kanye had a point. Shifting our attention to the music, Beyoncé also co-wrote the song – as, indeed, she does with the majority of the songs she has recorded: among them, Independent Women, Survivor, Say My Name, Crazy In Love, Freakum Dress, Pretty Hurts, Drunk In Love and XO. For Noel Gallagher, the fact that other people’s names are on the credits warrants some sort of points deduction when determining the true nature of artistry. “We could boil this down to two separate things,” he continues. “Beck writes all his own music, OK? There you go, the end. You have to employ a fucking team of songwriters and eight producers and nine engineers, or you can sing it, hum it, play it yourself, I don’t know. You decide. I know what side of the fence I’m on.”

So now we’re burrowing into the outmoded, faintly misogynistic assumptions that really lie beneath Noel’s “ass-shaking” dismissal of Beyoncé’s oeuvre: it’s cheating to get help. But these are weird rules, aren’t they? Imagine opening the hatch of Room 101 and waving goodbye to every great song that wasn’t wholly written by the person who sang it. We’d have to keep Badfinger’s version of Without You but lose Nilsson’s version; we’d have to keep Peter André’s Insania but lose Jimmy Ruffin’s What Becomes Of The Broken-Hearted. The rules of great pop don’t adhere to Noel Gallagher’s meat-and-potatoes notion of what warrants artistic commendation and thank God for that. Even when singers don’t have any hand in the songs that are written for them, their mere existence can draw something great from journeyman songwriters. Kylie inspired Stock, Aitken and Waterman to write What Do I Have To Do and Shocked for her – while the best that Big Fun could get out of them was Can’t Shake The Feeling. Britney Spears’ hellish Beverley Hill meltdown inspired an army of shit-hot songwriters and studio magicians to write an incredible album for her – Blackout – one that simply wouldn’t exist had she not been there to inspire it. Would I call the resulting album a great work of art? Absolutely. Does it matter that Britney probably has no recollection of making it? No more than Marilyn Monroe not having posed for Andy Warhol’s depiction of her diminishes its worth.

And if records bearing the imprint of Kylie and Britney can be called great art, it goes without saying that we certainly shouldn’t have any problem applying the same criteria to, say, Beyoncé’s magnificent self-titled double album – a personal but never self-indulgent exploration of modern femininity which produced some of her most inarguably affecting music: Pretty Hurts; Blow and Superpower, to name but three standouts. One of the many co-writing credits that seem to trouble Noel goes to Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. On the song in question ***Flawless, a sampled Adichie begins, “We teach girls to shrink themselves/To make themselves smaller/We say to girls, ‘You can have ambition/But not too much…’ and ends, ‘We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings/In the way that boys are/Feminist: the person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes.’” Even without factoring into the equation the fact that the album came with a simultaneously-released complement of films to accompany every song, this is clearly the work of an artist steering her own narrative into bold uncharted waters. Now, I love the Beck album too, but on this occasion, even Beck had to concede that Kanye once again had a point when he staged the second of his pro-Beyoncé interventions: “I thought she was going to win,” admitted Beck afterwards, “Come on, she’s Beyonce! . . .”

By contrast, I woke up at 5am on Wednesday and saw that iTunes had started streaming of Noel’s new album. One and a half times I listened. I had to listen one and a half times, because halfway through the first time I realised my attention had wandered and went back to the start. In his misguided attempt to play Kanye to Beck’s Beyonce, Noel turns his nose up at the sort of songwriting assistance from which his music could almost certainly benefit, thinking this makes him superior, and that his way constitutes “artistry.” While he’s got the dictionary open, he might want to look up the difference between artisan and artist. And if he still isn’t clear about which of the two categories his brand of honest-to-goodness indie rock comes under, I’m more than happy to help.

It rose up and dispersed like a vapor that enveloped the world outside: the Chrysler factory in the rain; the sulphur light of the subways beneath the Bull Ring.”

Growing up in Birmingham at the age of ten, I knew what reggae was. Reggae was the music I heard booming out of upstairs windows on when my dad drove through Balsall Heath. Reggae was the sound of the occasional chart hit on the radio speaker, straining to be heard over the pinball machines in my parents’ chip shop. Reggae was Uptown Top Ranking. Reggae was Jamming. It was Now That We’ve Found Love. What did this music sound like? I probably wouldn’t have been able to put it into words at that point. But it sounded like it had come from a hot and far away place. In my childhood imaginings, reggae was Jamaica.

The reason I have a clear memory of hearing UB40 for the very first time though, is that UB40 did not sound like Jamaica. On a March evening in 1980, I found myself returning from a school trip in a transit van that had crudely been converted into a school minibus – just two benches running along the length of either side of the vehicle. When Food For Thought came on the radio, it rose up and dispersed like a vapor that enveloped the world outside: the Chrysler factory glistening in the rain on Coventry Road; the sulphur light of the subways beneath the Bull Ring; black kids and white kids hanging around on every street corners because there quite simply wasn’t that much else to do.

Listening to UB40’s debut single and the album that followed it, some thirty years after they first appeared is a deeply evocative experience. This is music that effortlessly catapults you back to a Britain we recognize from grainy footage of picket lines and overcrowded benefit offices. Signing Off may not have been intended to document much beyond the sound that eight young men from Moseley made when they played music together. But that’s neither here nor there. Without knowing it, they were merely following the advice laid down by Ernest Hemingway when he suggested that your first and foremost duty as an artist is to write down the truest thing you know.

For UB40, growing up in Moseley and the surrounding neighbourhoods, the truest thing they knew was reggae. There was no discussion about what sort of music they would play. That Ali and Robin Campbell’s father Ian was a well-known folk singer may have informed the seam of social awareness that prompted Robin to write about famine in Africa on Food For Thought. The lyric famously misheard as “I’m a prima donna/Standing in the dark” is actually “Ivory Madonna/Dying in the dust/Waiting for the manna/Coming from the West.” As the oldest of the Campbell brothers, Robin had been already been playing guitar for a few years when the ripples of the splash made by punk pushed out as far as Birmingham. “I only knew half a dozen chords,” he remembers, “But it turned out that they were the only half a dozen I needed to know.”

Forming a band was less about wanting to become famous or take over the world, more just a function of friendships that already existed. As a teenager in nearby Acocks Green, Brian Travers remembers donning his crombie jacket on a Friday night and dancing to reggae, bluebeat and soul at Crosby Hall youth club. “Because music is so readily available these days, it’s perhaps hard to convey just how important it was to people back then. All my friends were black or Asian. You had television, but television was white. There was no black TV; no Asian TV. So black kids turned to music to find a representation of themselves. For that reason, music was more important than telly. And, in turn, what your mates are into is more important than anything else. If you’re part of something, you’re part of something.”

Brian may have felt part of something, but the roots of what was to become UB40 were germinating two miles away. From where he grew up, it was a three mile ride on the number 1 to Moseley. A short walk from the bus stop in Moseley village was the flat at 106 Trafalgar Road, where Earl Falconer lived. Earl knew Brian (along with Jimmy Brown and Ali Campbell) from their time at Moseley School of Art. When a room became available next door to Earl, Brian moved in.

With unemployment surging upwards, Brian and Earl would have to travel beyond Birmingham, getting casual work on building sites as far afield as Leeds and Coventry. With their savings and the criminal compensation money awarded to Ali Campbell after he was attacked in a pub, they bought their first instruments. For Travers the soul fan, saxophone was a logical choice – although, as he explains, his reasons were more practical. “I had been an apprentice electrician, which fuelled my hatred of electricity. Choosing to learn the saxophone meant that I didn’t have to rely on electricity.”

In the summer of 1978, the first rehearsals of what became UB40 took place in the basement of Earl’s flat – initially just Earl on bass, Jimmy Brown on drums and Ali singing. Robin remembers them trying to learn by copying their favourite records – “there was one by Bim Sherman and another by Gregory Isaacs. It was just three songs that they copied parrot-fashion. Earl had his bass tuned wrong. We had already come together once before, but I had left saying that it would never amount to anything. They stuck to it though, and when they asked me to have another listen, it suddenly started to sound something like music.”

“The basement was only accessible from the outside,” remembers Brian, “You went down these steps and it was completely derelict – just leaves and dirt. But we cleaned it out and worked hard at getting better. Robin knew the chords to House of the Rising Sun, so when he joined in earnest, that’s what we would base a rehearsal on. It was all basic stuff, but we worked really hard at it.”

Had UB40 been well-versed with their respective instruments, the incentive to write original songs might not have been as great. It would be four more years – with the release of 1983’s Labour of Love – that the group felt sufficiently emboldened to record an album of covers. Be that as it may, that intense early period of rehearsals yielded dramatic results. By any stretch of the imagination, the soulful small-hours instrumental reverie of Signing Off and King ­– which illustrated the degree to which James and Earl had gelled as a rhythm section – were a phenomenal way for any band to open their songwriting account. Written collectively at around the same time, Burden of Shame addressed the misdeeds committed in the name of colonialism, portending sentiments that many would have cause to feel anew at the height of the Falklands conflict.

Among many young musicians at that time, Margaret Thatcher had quickly become an unlikely muse – a folk devil for the politically disenfranchised – and UB40 were no exception. A vocal double-hander featuring Ali and Astro, Madame Medusa was another stellar leap for the eight piece group, using their repulsion at how – Robin’s words – “the country had been taken in by this horrific woman” as a jumping-off point for a magnificently heavy thirteen minute dub-reggae excursion. “We didn’t consider it real music if it didn’t have a degree of political content,” remembers Brian, “The mere fact that a band like us even existed was political. That’s how we saw it.”

In a short space of time, UB40 had improved beyond all expectations. All young bands tend to be convinced of their own greatness – aren’t youthful chutzpah and self-belief the qualities that make you form a band in the first place? In this case, however, there were plenty of witnesses to the band’s progress. “In the basement, all our mates from Moseley would hang out and watch,” recalls Brian. After months spent raising their profile via an assiduous local fly-posting campaign, the next step was to play a show. Ahead of their maiden concert in February 1979 – a private party for a friend’s birthday – Robin remembers being a “total bag of nerves, expecting it all to go wrong.” In fact, the 40 minute set went down “amazingly.”

Over the next few weeks, the co-ordinates of UB40’s trajectory would be charted by the increasingly feverish reaction that met their three-night residency of shows at Moseley’s New Inn. As Jimmy recalls, “the first was a good crowd, the second was sold out and on the third, you had more people locked out trying to get in than were actually in the pub.” One person quick to cotton on to their potential was local producer Bob Lamb. “By the time I happened upon them, they were writing quite prolifically, he remembers. “They came to my studio and the first song they recorded was King. They laid down the backing track, which was beautiful. When Robin, Ali and Jimmy sang the vocal together around one mic. I nearly fell off my chair. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was just amazing.”

The serendipity of having Bob Lamb nearby meant that UB40 could engineer their ascent whilst barely having to leave their own postcode. Even if London-based major labels had registered their existence, the group felt that they had good reason to keep them at bay. “It was brave of them to keep it independent,” says Lamb. Their determination to do just that was, according to Robin, a result of the Campbells’ upbringing. “I remember my dad telling me that all record companies and publishers were evil,” he smiles, “So, when some labels finally did approach us, we made all sorts of demands. Nothing too extreme – just things like total artistic control.”

When the time finally did come to make a record, the group elected to do so with Graduate – a small independent label run by Dudley-based record shop owner David Virr. The immediate success of Food For Thought/King vindicated their self-belief, vaulting them into British top five – an unparalleled feat from a completely independently run label. As Ali Campbell points out, “That was when calling the band UB40 instantly came into its own. We instantly had three million card-carrying fans.”

Even getting the chance to make a record represented untold excitement. “As far as I was concerned,” remembers Brian, “only really famous people made records, not the likes of us! Bob got the first pressing in and we all went over to his place in Kings Heath. We were elated.” As the man responsible for the song’s yearning saxophone hook, Brian had particular cause to take pride in the song’s nationwide ubiquity. “I remember standing at the bus stop and hearing it coming out of cars sitting in traffic jams. I couldn’t believe that was my record.”

Between the winter and spring of 1980, the airwaves belonged to Food For Thought. The ascent of 2-Tone had propelled The Specials and Madness into the charts, but their sound at this time was revivalist at its core, centering around ska and bluebeat. Food For Thought and King presented an altogether more uncompromising noise – one that reflected the sound system culture of UB40’s immediate locale. Listen to those songs with fresh ears, and what strikes you is just how ­– by any conventional criteria – uncommercial they sound. Once in a while though, a song captures the public imagination by virtue of what it [italic] doesn’t [italic] do. Whither the notion of “commercial” when applied to Otis Redding’s Sittin’ On The Dock (Of The Bay)? – a song about homelessness which boasts no chorus and a whistling solo. It’s no exaggeration to say that Food For Thought struck a chord of similar proportions. The exact numbers differ, but common consensus puts the song’s sales at around half a million.

A second top ten single, My Way Of Thinking kept UB40’s profile high while they completed work on their debut album. By all accounts, the sessions for Signing Off went by in an idyllic haze, with many individual tracks recorded in Bob Lamb’s garden! Percussionist and trombonist Norman Hassan has even claimed that if you listen hard to some of the tracks, you can even hear the birds tweeting in the background. “The vision everyone had for Signing Off was so pure,” says Bob. “A major label would have totally screwed it up.” Or, at the very least, diluted their uncompromising vision. Take for instance, the cover. One of the truly iconic record sleeves of its time, the blown-up facsimile of brown card that every jobless person had to bring with them when visiting the dole office anchors Signing Off to the very circumstances that informed its creation.

But, of course, it was the music which ultimately ensured that the album – voted by Q Magazine in 2000 as one of the hundred greatest British albums of all time – would go on to spend 72 weeks in the album chart. That would have counted as a hell of an achievement for any album. If you listen to Signing Off with fresh ears, thirty years after its original release, that feat seems more astounding than ever. Little By Little and a well-chosen cover of Randy Newman’s I Think It’s Going To Rain were sonic barometers of Britain between the winter of discontent and the decade of desolation ushered in by Thatcherism – whilst Tyler showed a group that was no less adept at addressing subject matter that lay further afield. Once again, the influence of the Campbells’ father manifested itself on Tyler. “Police gun was planted/No matching bullets/No prints on the handle…” sang Ali on Tyler, outlining the suspicious grounds upon which teenage African-American Gary Tyler was sentenced for murder by a Louisiana jury.

Younger music fans who associate UB40 with huge number one hits such as Red Red Wine, Can’t Help Falling In Love and their duet with longtime fan Chrissie Hynde on I Got You might struggle to reconcile that band with earth-shaking dub explorations like Madame Medusa and Reefer Madness. Both tracks originally appeared on the 12-inch that accompanied the original issue of the album. As Jimmy says, “Dub was the formative thing for me: Lee Perry, Prince Jammy – that was the music that you had on when you were smoking your spliffs. You listen to these amazing sounds achieved with really basic equipment on old King Tubby records, and through sheer force of will, you would set about doing the same thing.”

Bearing testament to Jimmy’s words are the two extraordinary recordings that comprised the UB40’s third single. Most bands, having hit the top ten with their first two singles, would surely set about trying to consolidate that early success with something more outwardly commercial. The third single released by UB40 confirmed that when it came to such matters, they simply didn’t appear to give a f***. Featured on the second CD here, the 12-inch versions of Dream A Lie and Earth Dies Screaming rank as arguably the heaviest recordings committed to vinyl by the group. With Earl Falconer’s near-subsonic bass rumble masterfully underscoring the whole thing, Dream A Lie locks into the sort of blissful dub groove that presaged the later critically-acclaimed work of sonic explorers like Mad Professor and even Massive Attack. Tapping into the collective cold war anxiety of the age, The Earth Dies Screaming paid host to one of Campbell’s most soulful vocals, attesting to Lamb’s claim that listening to him sing for the first time was an experience comparable to hearing the young Steve Winwood. Once again, this sort of fearlessness paid off, scoring UB40 their third top ten single in a row.

Thirty years on, it’s a purple patch from which UB40 take immense pride, and rightly so. Signing Off would be a staggering achievement from any band, let alone finding their way in a studio for the first time. “In one sense, the music might evoke dark times,” says Ali Campbell, “But there’s also an immense positivity about what UB40 did that has since been lost. Back then, Birmingham was a genuinely multiracial place. We’ve gone backwards in that respect. If you go back to our old stomping ground – Balsall Heath and Sparkhill, those places – black kids hang around with black kids and white kids stick with other whites… Hip-hop came along and we inherited the segregation that it promotes.”

For Brian Travers, listening to these songs again has been a humbling experience. “We tried to keep everything as simple as possible, because we wanted to be able to play these songs when we went on tour. In some ways, I think we were smarter then than we are now! Because that simplicity helps give these songs their power.”

“I can’t explain the feeling we had that summer when Signing Off was coming together,” smiles Bob Lamb. “Everything about it felt perfect. We knew that we were making the right record at the right time. It felt like Britain was waiting for a record like this. And, in our little corner of the world, we knew we were about to deliver it.”

So this is where epiphanies happen, and few people are better placed to tell you about that than Kate Bush. On July 3rd 1973, she came here, to the Hammersmith Odeon, with her brothers to see David Bowie declare on stage that Ziggy was about to die and he was taking The Spiders From Mars with him. In that moment, she cried (as she later recalled, “it looked like he was crying too”) and the dramatic expiry of one pop star acted as the catalyst for another. Six years later, Bush concluded her Tour Of Life in Hammersmith. Between Ziggy’s swan song and what for the longest time people imagined to be her own live swan song, punk had happened, leaving seemingly little impression on Kate Bush. In truth, it had nothing to offer her.

Kate Bush’s love of Bowie had led her backwards to the beginnings of his fascination with mime, dance and conceptual theatre, locating Bowie’s dance teacher and mentor Lindsey Kemp in 1975 and hoofing up from her flat in Brockley to attend Kemp’s 50p open classes in Covent Garden. After two hours which had variously seen her pretending to be a magician, wearing a winged leotard and dressing as a World War II bomber, the final song of her final Hammersmith turn saw her rising through the fog in the guise of Catherine Earnshaw, singing Wuthering Heights into the one of the modified wire coathanger headsets – soon to become standard issue at gigs – that she had specially invented so that she could sing and dance at the same time.

Because, then as now, Kate Bush was the entire fruit bowl all at once. Mere singing could never communicate the tidal surge of creativity that overwhelmed her in the preceding years. As John Lydon (also quoted in this brilliant piece by Simon Price in The Quietus) pointed out, Kate Bush was “too much” for a lot of his friends. Kate Bush was clearly also “too much”, at times, for her record label, whose ambivalence about her relentlessly surprising musical left-turns remained a constant right up until she bitterly agreed to change the title of her 1985 song Deal With God to Running Up That Hill.

In the foyer of the Hammersmith Odeon before the third of Kate Bush’s first shows in 35 years, it’s hard to make generalisations. But I’ll allow myself this one about the guy next to me who, despite never having met me, keeps passing his binoculars to me so I can see what he’s seeing. And the male twentysomething fan who will brave the tube home dressed in a white cotton tunic, black tights, face painted in white and silver, his hair wreathed by leaves and twigs. And the woman who has gone to the trouble of having a dress made just like the one festooned with clouds on the sleeve of Never For Ever. And the woman who rushes from her seat during the encore of Cloudbusting to hand a bouquet of lilies to Bush (who, in turn, receives it between bows). “Too much” is why we came. There’s nothing more antithetical to Kate Bush’s music than sensory temperance. For three hours, it’s like finding out there was a Dolby switch pressed on your consciousness. The moment that Bush, draped in black and barefoot, marches in a soft, shuffling procession, flanked by her five backing singers, you turn it off. You might need it for the journey to work on Monday, but it’s of no use to you now.

She smiles beatifically throughout Lily – the invocation to guardian angels which originally appeared on The Red Shoes and, in 2011, The Director’s Cut – apart from when attacking the top notes, which she does with the phlegm-rattling zeal of a seasoned soul singer. The love in the room is unlike anything I’ve seen at a live show. Given free rein, it would surely result in an instant surge to the stage, but it’s tempered by a deference which extends to uniform acceptance of Bush’s stated no-cameras request. As a consequence, the first three songs are bookended by a total of six standing ovations. Hounds Of Love is exactly what it should be given the passage of three decades: drummer Omar Hakim and perma-grining percussion talisman Mino Cinelu hold back the rhythmic landslide, creating space for a vocal pitched closer to resignation than combativeness. Eighteen months ago, when Bush’s son Bertie McIntosh (then 15) finally persuaded her to return to live performance, the first two people she pencilled in for the project were the lighting designer Mark Henderson and Hakim. Within the opening section, it isn’t hard to see why Bush wanted to assemble her band around Hakim. Running Up That Hill is every bit as unyielding and startling as it was the very first time you heard it: doubly so for the incoming storm whipped up from the back of the stage. On King Of The Mountain, he reprises the freestyling pyrotechnics of his turn on Daft Punk’s Giorgio By Moroder. Everything about King Of The Mountain, in fact, is astonishing. Bush navigates her way around the song’s rising sense of portent with a mixture of fear and fascination that puts you in mind of professional storm chasers. When they’re not singing, her backing vocalists dance as if goading some unholy denouement into action, before finally Cinelu steps into a misty spotlight. On the end of a rope which he demonically twirls ever faster is some sort of primitive wooden cyclone simulator.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing of all is that this – King Of The Mountain and the preceding songs – is a preamble to the first act. In 1985, as Hounds Of Love was being readied for release, Kate Bush sketched out a putative film script for The Ninth Wave – the 30 minute suite of songs, which shared its title with Ivan Aivanovsky’s 1850 painting of a group castaways clinging to floating debris as dawn approaches. But, as she writes in the programme, “In many ways, it lends itself better to the medium of stage.” She’s referring to the conceit at the heart of The Ninth Wave and, yes, she’s right. What would have been impossibly confusing on film is only occasionally confusing when played out on stage. On a screen, we see the stranded protagonist in her lifejacket in palpable distress, relying on scenes from her past and future to keep her from slipping under. On stage we see those feverish visions played out before us. If Bush’s distress looks unsettlingly convincing on the screen, that might be because the 20ft deep tank at Pinewood Studios in which she had to be immersed for several hours pushed her to method actor extremes: singing live whilst gradually succumbing to a fever which was later diagnosed by her GP as “mild hypothermia.”

With the stage bathed in low blue light, Bush cuts a disembodied presence on screen, singing And Dream Of Sheep, all but unreachable to the singers who impassively assume the role of Greek chorus to her plight. What ensues is heartbreaking, frightening and funny, often at the same time. There’s the seismic din of a helicopter provided some huge piece of cuboid god-knows-what machinery which glides over the audience with searchlights blazing (the voice of its pilot supplied by Bush’s brother Paddy). There’s a blizzard of tissue-thin pieces of ochre paper bearing the excerpt from Tennyson’s The Holy Grail which is also featured on the sleeve of Hounds Of Love. There’s a deliberately mundane sitting-room exchange between her husband (Bob Harms) and son (McIntosh) about a burnt toad-in-the-hole to which she can only bear witness in ghost form (Watching You Watching Me). Then, of course, there are the fish people: skeletal fish-headed creatures that lurk elegantly around the action. That, in 2011, Bush called her record label Fish People – predating the first meetings about these shows by two years – suggests that these guys were probably present on Bush’s very first sketches for The Ninth Wave 30 years ago.

At times you imagine every prog-rock star who reluctantly had their wings clipped by punk feeling a sense of unalloyed vindication at the scenes being played out here. After the release of 2011’s 50 Words For Snow, I interviewed Kate Bush and asked her about recent musical inspirations. I figured that someone must surely have played her Joanna Newsom’s Ys whilst exclaiming, “Look! A kindred spirit!” (they hadn’t) But actually, she probably has no need of new input. It’s increasingly apparent that Bush’s musical hard drive was full by the time she made her first record. As Watching You Without Me modulates into Jig Of Life, I try and pin the musical sense of deja vu to an actual memory. Finally it comes to me. This sort of spectral somnambulant ceilidh was precisely the sort of thing which arty stoners in the early 70s – arty stoners such as Bush’s older brothers – would have sought out in the albums of Harvest Records outliers Third Ear Band. Except, of course, the one thing that Third Ear Band lacked was a cosmically attuned sensualist to act as a smiling Trojan horse to her own avant-garde sensibilities.* And so, here we are. A generation of pop fans suckered by Wuthering Heights, Wow and Babooshka. And we’re watching four people in fish heads wheel in a floating bit of rig illuminated by red flares. In a moment, she will climb aboard before the fish people claim her, carrying her aloft away from the sea, and among us through the aisle before, finally, The Morning Fog. This is perhaps as beautiful as anything we have seen up to this point. Dancers and singers take their partners. and, bathed in golden light, Bush exchanges glances with her fellow players. Everything you have seen in the preceding hour is the result of more than a year of drilled, deliberate meticulous planning. And yet, on the back of such vertiginous terrain, Bush gazes at her fellow performers with the relieved air of a trainee pilot who had to land a Boeing Airbus after the rest of the cabin crew had passed out.

It could end there. It really could. That was a whole show, right there. But on the other side of the intermission, it’s all change once again. Comprising the second half of 2005’s Aerial, A Sky Of Honey emerged from Bush’s fascination with the connection between light and birdsong and then, as she puts it: “Us, observing nature. Us, being there.” Without realising it, with those last three words, Bush may have propelled us to the essence of our connection with much of her most affecting music (The Sensual World, Breathing, Snowflake). The Ninth Wave is really about the miraculous, ungraspable nature of human consciousness. And, if the subtext – intended or otherwise – of that piece is that only we humans can reflect upon what it means to die, then the subtext of A Sky Of Honey is that only we humans can reflect upon what a gazillion-to-one miracle it is to be alive. Us, observing nature. Us, being there.

Up on stage, it’s left to Bush’s son – playing the part of the painter, a role assumed on the album recording by Rolf Harris) – to be that observer. But before all of that, it’s just Bush at the piano for the first time, encircled on the left hand of the stage by her band, with the right side left empty for the ensuing action. Controlled by its puppeteer, a black-clad Ben Thompson, a wooden artist’s model – perhaps the size of a ten year-old child – walks inquisitively around the stage during Prologue until finally it alights upon the singer. As Bush sings “What a lovely afternoon” and the drums come in, it appears startled. All the time, the backdrop shows birds in slow-motion, while the backing singers (increasingly, given what they have to do, “backing singers” doesn’t begin to cover what they have to do, but “chorus” is unhelpfully ambiguous) move gingerly around each other in painters’ garb. A slowly moving sky descends to fill the space on the right. The palette-wielding McIntosh dabs at the canvas with a brush, attracting the curiosity of the wooden model. “Piss off! I’m trying to work here,” he exclaims, while his mum – dressed in an Indian-style black and gold outfit – moves around him in slow motion.

If it’s surprising to see McIntosh rise to the challenges set before him so fearlessly – “A kind of ‘Pan’ figure” – it’s worth keeping in mind that he’s already the same age that his mum was when she started recording her first album. In a voice at least two octaves deeper than the one he used for Snowflake on 50 Words For Snow, Bush’s son bemoans his rain-splattered work on The Painter’s Link (“It’s raining/What has become of my painting?/All the colours are running”). But here, as on the record, there are no mistakes, just serendipity. The colours run and dusk magically materialises; the redemptive downpour brings all the musicians to the front for almost Balearic, flamenco-flecked stampede of Sunset. As a succession of joyous falsetto “Prrrrrraaah!!”s attest, the moments that see Bush at her most unguarded are the ones where she gets to commune with the twenty-odd players around her.

From hereon in, the Aerial segment of the show – co-directed, as is The Ninth Wave, by former RSC honcho Adrian Noble – is an object lesson in sustained rapture. No less a highlight than it is on the record, Somewhere In Between sees its creator transported by the power of her own song and, in doing so, transports you to the fleeting magic-hour reverie it celebrates. There is also a new song, Tawny Moon, for which McIntosh confidently takes centre stage and climaxes by effectively acting as ringmaster to the huge full moon rising from the back of the stage.

Few musicians are more adept at conveying a sense that something good is going to happen than Kate Bush. We know what Nocturn sounds like on record, so a certain sense of expectation is unavoidable. On either side of the stage, we see arrows fired from bows into the firmament, where they turn into birds. For reasons I couldn’t honestly fathom, we see the painter’s model sacrificing a seagull to no discernible end. Over a rising funk that defies physical resistance, Bush makes a break for transcendence and effectively brings us with her: “We stand in the Atlantic/We become panoramic,” she sings, with arms aloft. Like the rest of the band, guitarist David Rhodes has donned bird mask. As Bush is presented with vast black wings, she and Rhodes circle elegantly around each other, before finally, briefly, she takes flight.

Just two songs by way of an encore – which, after what has preceded them, seems generous: Among Angels from 2011’s Fifty Words For Snow is performed solo at the piano, before the entire band return for Cloudbusting. Once again, we’re reminded that, almost uniquely among her peers, Kate Bush goes to extraordinary lengths in search of subjects that hold up that magic of living up to the light for just long enough to think that we can reach it. But, like the beaming 56 year-old mother singing, “The sun’s coming out”, that too dissipates into memory. And, after another 19 performances, what will happen? In another 35 years, Kate Bush will be 91. Even if she’s still here, we might not be. Perhaps that’s why tonight, she gave us everything she had. And somehow, either in spite or because of that, we still didn’t want to let her go.

*At times, it still seems miraculous that she crossed over into fully-fledged pop star ubiquity, Delia Smith guest spots and all. Look at the sleeve of Never For Ever: that dress and emerging from beneath it a nightmarish picture-book assortment of swans, monsters, cats, whales, monkeys and butterflies. It’s precisely the sort of sleeve you see hanging up behind the counter of a second-hand record shop with a £400 sticker attached to it, next to records by Mellow Candle and Jade Warrior. Except that, somehow, these records – no less weird than several dozen cult artefacts that didn’t cross over – spawned hit singles.

Yes that’s exactly what it was And then I went through a period of deep depression

STUDIO ONE, BBC TELEVISION CENTRE. Radiohead have been standing on stage for half an hour while technicians work out how best to light them for their appearance on Later. There isn’t a huge amount to do, but Thom Yorke has mastered the art of waiting. He sits cross-legged on the set, like a studious seven-year-old, absorbed in Scott Ritter’s War On Iraq- an extended interview with a former UN weapons inspector who claims America went to war under false pretences. Beside him, Radiohead’s bassist, Colin Greenwood, opens up an Apple G4 Powerbook and places it on a floor amp. Naturally, you assume that some kind of last-minute adjustments need to be made to the programming on one of Radiohead’s notoriously outre electronic excursions. In fact, he’s uploading another day’s worth of snaps taken on his brand new digital camera. “They’ve taken to calling me Dave Bailey,” he says, mock-aggrieved. “Not even David Bailey, but Dave Bailey. They won’t be laughing this time next year when my exhibition hits the galleries of Europe.”

“Yes we will,” says Ed O’Brien, guitarist, placing a line of tobacco onto a small rolling paper.

“Oh, that’s right. You will, won’t you? What was I thinking of?”

Finally, they get the signal to run through “There There”, the first single off their latest alburn, Hail To The Thief. O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood grab their drumsticks and hypnotically beat out a path for Thorn’s somnambulant ramblings. The following evening, when they perform this for broadcast, it’s worth noting the physical discomfort which spreads across the features of erstwhile Smashing Pumpkin Billy Corgan. Given that his group Zwan are on directly after Radiohead, it’s hard not to draw parallels. Here are two of the biggest ‘alternative’ figureheads of the last decade attempting to move forward in very different ways. But by the time the spooked, spastic magnificence of Yorke’s performance reaches its conclusion, it’s as though any inclination to compete has drained out of Corgan. As a result, his band’s wilfully unshowy brand of college rock recalls nothing so much as the poorer bits from Radiohead’s Pablo Honey.

Yorke himself seems unerringly bullish throughout the three days Mojo has spent with him. This is something he attributes to his diet – although, later, some more deep-rooted reasons surface. He’s been wheat-free for the last two years and, as a result, feels sufficiently energised to make it through the longest of days. All of which is just as well, because for Hail To The Thief Radiohead have hit the promotional trail with a fervour that would shame the politicians Yorke wrote about on OK Computer’s “Electioneering”. The group chortle their way through a Time photo-shoot by discussing their alleged invitation to play at the Hollywood wedding of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston.

“If they sent us an invite, it never arrived,” says Colin Greenwood.

“We were gutted!” exclaims Thom. “Really! We were fully expecting it. But, you know what? To be honest, I don’t think Jennifer was quite as into us as Brad was. I know he’s a big fan, because I met him once. What did he say? ‘Great show, man!’ It was brief, but beautiful.”

So you really would have done it?

“Fuck, yeah!” he says, and, for that moment, he appears to believe it. “We could have played on the back of a truck. I don’t know why, but that’s how I imagine it. A truck with Brad Pitt on it, announcing our arrival. Now, wouldn’t that be cool?”

I DID ONCE meet Thom Yorke in similarly easy spirits, but that was in January 1993, shortly after he’d left art school – when the idea of rock stardom appealed to him so much that he even wrote a song about it called “Anyone Can Play Guitar”. Like many of their songs at that time, it was good rather than great. Sounded brilliant when they played it live. But if all their tunes were of a similar calibre you wouldn’t have fancied their chances above those of long-lost contemporaries like Kingmaker or Silverfish. When we left Georgina’s cafe in the covered market of their native Oxford, our walk to Ed’s car was interrupted when Thom and Jonny spotted someone wearing a Radiohead T-shirt. Their immediate reaction was to hide behind me and watch their unwitting fan from a safe vantage point. At this point in Radiohead’s existence, it seemed that this level of success was plenty enough to be getting on with. And were it not for “Creep”, this is about as far as they might have got. After our first meeting, it seemed like every time I met Thom Yorke he was a little more confused, a little more lost than the previous time. On their first visit to Los Angeles – a trip hastily scheduled to capitalise on “Creep”‘s “most-added” status on KROQ – Thom seemed to cut a strangely solitary figure. Asked by one of the KROQ DJs to sing a jingle to the tune of “Creep”, he refused – only to have the DJ question whether it was him that really sang it. Fearful of the consequences of upsetting America’s most influential music station, he swallowed his pride and sang some pre-prepared rubbish about how, if you didn’t listen to KROQ, then you were a weirdo. That same evening, I saw the first bona fide example of what Colin Greenwood delicately refers to as Thorn’s “unique ability to project what he’s feeling outwards into a room”. At a corporate barbecue held in Radiohead’s honour, he shut down and retreated into himself, murmuring just enough expletives to ensure everyone left him well alone.

What was his problem? He had a record deal, but quite what it was he wanted to do with it – beyond holding on to it – was unclear. If they made it to a second album, he joked, it would probably be called “Unit”. As in, “We shifted 100,000 units.” At the time, that seemed a very Thom sort of thing to say. After “Anyone Can Play Guitar”, their next single in Britain was to be called “Pop Is Dead” and it was all about, um, pop being dead. The video depicted the rest of Radiohead carrying Thom away in – geddit? – a glass coffin. At times, it seemed like he was treating being in a band as though it were just another art school project. Critiquing it rather than attempting to do something amazing with it. An early photo is especially revealing, a shorn Thom brattishly sticking his middle finger up at the camera. It was the kind of thing you’d expect someone in a Hungarian punk band to do. As he later admitted, “We were trying to make statements all the time – to justify, to annoy, to fuck people offf. That seemed like the only thing worth doing, really.” With 10 years hindsight, the memory affords him a rueful chuckle. What was he trying to say at the time? “There was definitely a lot of ‘LOOKATME! C’MO-O-ON!!!’ going on.”

Privately, he was found out. He once confided his envy of artists like P.J. Harvey, who “appear[s] on the scene and it’s perfect, fully formed”. By contrast, Thom had announced himself to his public with a song called “Creep”, a patchy debut album and little else to justify his platform. At the end of 1993, after a year spent playing the same song across the TV studios and radio stations of America, Thom – now sporting an inexplicable bleach-blond rock barnet – looked like a man in the throes of a titanic confidence crisis. “I think a sense of panic overtook things. The songs I was writing were drunken consolation songs. It just seemed like there were a million ways we could go and the easiest one was into oblivion, never to return.”

It’s all there on the songs that emerged from the tortuous recordings for The Bends. Written at the height of the band’s obsession with Morrissey’s Vauxhall And I (and, according to Thom, you can hear as much), “My Iron Lung” remains an alarming metaphor for the success of “Creep”: “Here is our new song/Just like the last one/A total waste of time/My iron lung.” “High And Dry”, by contrast, is heavy with the weariness of 300 nights away: “Kill yourself for recognition/Kill yourself to never ever stop.”

Following his return to his basement flat in Oxford, one evening saw Yorke falling into “a sort of drunken coma and singing a song which became ‘[Nice Dream]’. That song refers to a story by Kurt Vonnegut where this crystal’s been found that turns all water completely solid and someone drops it into the sea. If you want to kill yourself you just put your finger into the water.”

If there was one piece of advice Thom could have given his younger self, what would it be? “Um, you know when you grow your hair long…”

ARTISTS often have a thing. A thing that they keep close to them. A thing where the magic lies. Damon Albarn has the beads his mother gave him as a child. Jim Morrison had his imaginary Red Indian friend. For Thom Yorke, it’s notebooks.

Ed O’Brien: “Thom always says that the best thing they ever taught him [at art school] was the notebook. He’s always done that. It’s not the same as going back and writing what you remember. With Thom, it goes straight in. What you’re left with is a moment in time.”

Those who mourn the passing of Radiohead’s “classic period” – from The Bends to OK Computer – tend to view its two albums as two halves of a piece. Spooked, soul-baring millennial masterpieces to take rock into the 21st century. It’s not a view that the group’s singer particularly shares. The way Yorke sees it, he’s only ever made one album about going to America for a year and turning into “a human jukebox”. And the moment he finished it, he had no plans to write another one.

Much more than a series of musical diary entries, OK Computer was the first album which saw Yorke effectively utilising methods taught to him at art school. Worried by a comment from a friend that his lyrics were “too direct and leave nothing to the imagination”, his note-taking set the agenda. The list of characters became wider; those “moments in time” to which Ed refers captured forever by lyrics like “The Tourist” and “Paranoid Android”.

While recording the album, Yorke enlisted the help of one of his old Exeter University mates. Rescued from the nomadic life of “a busking fire-breather”, Stanley Donwood had been asked to provide cover art for The Bends. This time around, though, his brief was to formally sit in on the sessions and render what he heard in images that eventually appeared on the album’s artwork – something Donwood has continued to do up to and including the conceptual aerial city view which adorns Hail To The Thief. Yorke says that Radiohead simply wouldn’t be the same band without Donwood. “This sounds pretentious, but fuck it. It’s often been the case for me that I don’t know if [the song we’re working on] is any good. But if I’m shown some kind of visual representation of the music, only then do I feel confident. Up until that point, I’m a bit of a whirlwind.”

There’s plenty at this point to ponder for anyone seeking to draw a connection between Yorke’s increased politicisation and Donwood’s involvement with the group. “Hippy idealist” and “art dreamer” are two phrases used to describe him by one friend of the band. For his degree show in 1991, Donwood put together a series of photographic screen prints of policemen at the poll tax riots attacking protesters.

Simon Shackleton, who played alongside Thom in university band Headless Chickens, remembers their association. “They were both very involved in all sorts of forms of direct action. One time, we took over the vice chancellor’s office and stayed there for a few days. We did all sorts of road painting. Painting massive slogans on roads and putting different road markings up.”

“Stanley’s hard to pin down,” says Ed O’Brien. “I’ve just been reading Bill Drummond’s autobiography, 45, and Stanley’s kind of similar to that in many respects. In Bath, where he lives, he’s printed up a load of made-up histories of the place, which he sells to tourists. It would be very strange to imagine us making an album and him not being there.”

What seems clear is that, after Donwood and Yorke’s reacquaintance in 1994, Radiohead seemed to represent something much greater than a bunch of Yorke’s songs played by five old school chums. The two began collaborating closely on the group’s merchandise and website. Be it a record, a T-shirt or five minutes on the group’s website, every enterprise seemed to act as a vehicle for Thorn’s increasingly bleak view of our place in the modern world. For the first time, Radiohead seemed to stand for something – even if it was just a vague sense of millennial anxiety. Yorke was reading up voraciously on politics. Will Hutton’s The State We’re Inand Eric Hobsbawm’s Age Of Extremes: The Short History Of The Twentieth Century – both of which depict a world run not by governments but by oil barons and multinational conglomerates – blew him away. For the first time the world was really as he always felt it had been. We really were all going to hell in a handcart. Perhaps he should have gone home and spent some time with his friends and family. Certainly, a year-long world tour was not going to mellow him.

Five months after OK Computer appeared, when I caught up with him in Strasbourg, he had all but turned into one of his own songs, “buzzing like a fridge… like a detuned radio”. “Sanity for us is sleeping on the tour bus and not staying in hotels. You feel a bit more of your soul ebb away every time you check out of a hotel. But in periods of crisis and difficulty, you just fall back on the usual crutches. You end up drinking a lot.”

A month later, following one British show, he found himself unable to speak. “That tour was a year too long. I was the first person to tire of it, then six months later everyone in the band was saying it. Then six months after that, nobody was talking any more. I remember coming off stage after the Birmingham NEC show. I could hear people talking, but I could not speak – and if anybody tried to touch me I think I would have strangled them. That was quite a scary thing. It was like, ‘Please can we get the fuck out of here?'”

Was there a single biggest sacrifice that he’d made in order to get to this point? In Strasbourg, his answer was immediate. “Yeah, my life’s a mess. When I go home, I’ve got everything everywhere. I’ve got six years’ worth of life to sort out and I never get to sort it out because I’m working.”

To which the obvious answer would have been, Well why not stop? According to one friend, it wasn’t merely a matter of removing him from the situation. “He simply didn’t know how to stop. He always used to carry notebooks around. I don’t think it started out that way, but in the end, those notebooks became the prism through which he viewed everything.”

“You need to switch off once in a while though,” says Thom. “I read this autobiography of Miles Davis and in it he’s taking these huge breaks where he won’t go anywhere near his work. All right, he can’t help thinking about it all the time, but he’s not actively doing it all the time – which is what I used to do. And after OK Computer came out, I had drawers full of notes just about everywhere. Just frantically writing all the time. And although 99 per cent of it was fucking nonsense, everything just seemed to have this profound significance.”

As fans attempting to understand the dynamics of our favourite groups, it’s tempting to imagine that only those within the group know “what’s really going on”. But as Yorke himself says, “People in bands don’t have the kind of conversations people might think they have. The best things about being in a band are the things that are unsaid. You click together in the studio or whatever and that’s enough to make you feel close to each other. There are no long nights of bonding where you tell each other your innermost fears.”

When the OK Computer tour came to a close in 1998, all five members of Radiohead readjusted to domestic life and assumed their frontman was doing the same. In fact, Thom Yorke went home and simply carried on doing what he had been doing on tour. Chronicling everything he was seeing, thinking and dreaming.

All the time?

“Oh, constantly. Absolutely constant. It was absolutely out of control.”

What were you like to live with?

“You’d have to ask other people. It ranges. You’re definitely not in control of what’s going on. You can flip pretty quickly.”

The between-albums sabbatical works along roughly the same lines with most bands. You all go home and cease contact for a while. Then, one day the call comes and there are some demos for the rest of the band to listen to. This was how OK Computer and Hail To The Thief were born. But forKid A and Amnesiac, no demos arrived from Thom.

His voracious scribbling had found another outlet. A look on the group’s website at that time yielded page upon page of writings, their tone oddly reminiscent of Syd Barrett’s solo outpourings. Though uncredited, they had clearly emerged from the same source as OK Computer’s “Fitter Happier”. Typical of the prevailing mood was a dark piece of prose titledWe Dug Into The Meat: “i sit here feeling my pulse/wondering what it would be like if it stopped/i write a list of stuff i need/ice cubes/neil young/toothpaste.”

On something entitled Just For My Own Amusement, he wrote, “there is a certain time of year/when all the cows on the farm/go to slaughter, jersey cows/trample you under foot, you have to let them know/that/gods/voice is on your side/howl/and make them realise, you aint havin none of it. otherwise theyll trample you under foot as they stampede as they run screaming wailing with sad panic in their eyes as the farmer hangman comes for them to lead them to the electric exterminating thunderbolt.”

Interspersed among such writings would be quotes from Dante’s Inferno, John Pilger’s Hidden Agendas and a telling gripe from the aforesaid Miles Davis book, questioning just what it is that audiences want from their artists: “By now they had made me a star, and people were coming just to look at me, to see what I was going to do, what I had on, whether I would say anything or cuss somebody out, like I was some kind of freak in a glass cage at the motherfucking zoo… man that shit was depressing ” It wasn’t just the content that prompted alarm, or the sheer amount of late nights that must have gone into writing this stuff – but the decision to post it on the internet for his fans to see.

One such fan was the frontman of R.E.M. Michael Stipe and Yorke had already established a friendship after Stipe had asked Radiohead to support his group in 1995: “We’d already had a lot of conversations actually,” remembers Yorke. “At the beginning I think he was just trying to stop me going round the twist. He was sort of saying, ‘It’s OK. These things have happened to other people and there’s a reason why.'”

When Stipe saw what Thom was posting, he immediately got in touch. Thom remembered the exchange. “Stipey thought I was crazy,” he laughs. “He mentioned it and he was like, ‘How can you do that? You’re going to end up saying everything!’ But it totally made sense to me at the time. It was the logical conclusion of that art college dictum. At Exeter there was a stipulation that when you had a show, you had to leave all your sketch books on the table – and I would do a show where I just had the sketch books and nothing else. I’d photocopy them up. It was all ideas that I couldn’t get into practice because I couldn’t get near the video equipment or whatever.”

In rock, certain precedents for this kind of frantic creativity spring to mind, Richey Edwards being the most obvious. Although generally a more combative character than the fatalistic Manic Street Preacher, the prodigious output – coupled with the compulsion to quote illuminating passages from key texts – was a trait common to both. In Spike Milligan and Dr Anthony Clare’s 1994 book Depression And How To Survive It, the comic legend and the psychiatrist attempt to ascertain the link between depression and creativity. Clare cites a study of prominent British writers and artists undertaken by American psychologist J. P Guilford, in which “an attempt was made to establish whether there is any association… between certain aspects of manic depression – most notably the heightened mood, word fluency, thought acceleration – and creative output. Almost all of the 47 subjects reported have experienced intense, creative episodes, the duration of such episodes varying from 24 hours to over a month. These episodes were characterised by increase of energy, enthusiasm, fluency of thought and a sense of well-being.”

The more commonly known term for such periods of frenetic activity is hypomania. When a person is in a hypomanic state, they may not appear outwardly depressed. Indeed, the world may appear to make more sense to them than it has done for a long time. Guilford pinpoints the role of hypomania in the creative process by alighting on two terms: “spontaneous flexibility (the ability to produce a rich variety of ideas and to switch from one area of interest to another) and adaptive flexibility (the ability to come up with unusual ideas or solutions).”

Anthony Clare adds, “There is more than a suggestion that they can be heightened or facilitated by the quickening of cognitive processes and the surges of mental energy that are a feature of hypomania.” At its most extreme, hypomania can precipitate a depression that can – although in Thorn’s case, did not – result in paranoid schizophrenia. He expresses momentary surprise when the term is mentioned. “Hypomania. Yes, that’s exactly what it was. And then I went through a period of deep depression.”

It was another two years before the discovery of Clare and Milligan’s book would reveal to Thom not only that his activity had a name – but that actually it was common among people who created for a living. In the meantime, he decided that if being in Radiohead was to be bearable, they had to fundamentally change the way they worked. The Thom Yorke that entered into the Kid A/Amnesiac sessions was a walking contradiction: on the one hand throwing his hypomanic writings open to public scrutiny (although ironically no one outside their circle of fans happened upon them); on the other hand, desperate to eschew the soul-baring role which he felt had made him so vulnerable.

“As much as anything,” says drummer Phil Selway, “that’s what motivated him to reinvent [the group]. He wanted to find a way of disguising his voice, or at least no longer making it the focal point of the band.”

Was there some vestige of self-preservation finally kicking in here? On the website, where his fans weren’t likely to judge him, he seemed happy to reveal the extent of his instability. Perhaps at some level, he knew that if he did the same on the records, the reaction might all but destroy him. If the idea was to turn Radiohead into a Trojan horse for his neuroses, Thom found an indispensable ally in Jonny Greenwood. After years of being lauded as the group’s guitar genius, Greenwood – a classically-trained pianist and violinist – was tiring of the old way of working. As Yorke, quoting Greenwood, puts it, “there’s a worthiness to a lot of rock music which makes us wanna puke. It’s nostalgia, pure and simple.”

Up until this point, Yorke’s colleagues had been largely unaffected by his attempts to reconcile what he did to who he was. Hereon in, though, the effects were to radiate outwards to the rest of the group.

ED O’BRIEN IS MOST immediately identifiable as the tall good-looking one in Radiohead. Whatever Thom Yorke’s ghost of a handshake lacks is more than made up for by Ed’s presidential grip. His team are Manchester United – although a recent move to north London means an increased interest in the exploits of Arsenal. In contrast to the Greenwood brothers – both of whom own flats in Primrose Hill – Ed chose the Turkish kebab shops and all-night grocers of Stoke Newington. Late at night, he likes to roll a joint and wander the locale listening to The Streets’ Original Pirate Material. He studied in Manchester, but in every other respect, he’s a university-of-life kind of guy. At Abingdon Boys School, where he was a weekly boarder, he remembers getting into trouble after a short-lived sideline as a 14-year-old porn gopher to sixth formers. “It was just an attempt to become more well-liked. You see, I was the only person in the third year who could reach the porn magazines from the top shelf. So I’d get them and lend them out to the older kids. Then one day, one of them left one on his bed and I got hauled in to explain myself. My parents were divorced so I had to tell them separately. I remember my mum’s disappointment, but the following week, when I told my dad, he was like, ‘That’s my boy!'”

It’s hard to imagine a story like that coming from any other member of Radiohead. He’s immensely likeable, and even more so when he addresses the lows of 1999 and 2000 with the same openness. “You all carry your own baggage, that’s the thing. And for me, not feeling like I was part of the session – well, I’ll put my hand up and say, yes, that was massively depressing.”

Colin Greenwood agrees. When it transpired that Thom wanted to operate in small units – essentially, he and Jonny Greenwood in one room and the remaining three in the other, awaiting instructions – he had misgivings. “It’s almost always a disaster when bands write in the studio, isn’t it? It usually coincides with their cocaine period. Someone decides that now is the time to do the big studio record and this becomes a huge creative ark. And we lead our ideas in two by two. The only problem was that we weren’t taking cocaine, so didn’t have the necessary confidence to work out which of it was any good. “

The facts, of course, have long passed into band lore. Fragments of songs were painstakingly put together using equipment that Radiohead were learning to use as they went along. Three hundred and seventy-three days elapsed between the conception and execution of “Knives Out”, a pretty Smiths-influenced tune which finally appeared on Amnesiac. Ed O’Brien felt so sidelined in the group’s Oxford studio that he started keeping an on-line diary of the sessions, highlighting the band’s apparent dissolution.

With no clear plan, everything seemed like a good idea. Adjourning one evening to watch a Channel Four documentary on the history of hip hop, Thom saw an exposition of the way Public Enemy recorded Yo! Bum Rush The Show and decided there was no reason why Radiohead shouldn’t work like that: “They’d sort of record everything for 50 minutes, edit the segments where a cool thing happened, and turn it into a song.”

If ever a band sounded adrift in a sea of infinite possibilities…

Colin: “We were clutching at straws.”

Ed: “Yeah, definitely. On one level, I didn’t care if I didn’t play a single note on the album. This was about Radiohead, not about me – and whatever we did, I wanted to be part of it. But at the same time, I don’t want it to be someone sitting in a room with a laptop, getting off on it. That’s not what Radiohead’s about.”

Colin: “There was a lot of turning up and hanging around and wondering what to do next and not doing anything, and then going home. Every day. For weeks and weeks. It’s very soul sapping.”

“There were some fairly major barneys,” remembers Phil, who had just become father to a second child. “Whatever heaviness was going on in the studio inevitably had an imprint at home. That’s why things couldn’t carry on as they did.”

Was there a point at which any of the band said, “Look, I can just leave”? There’s a certain amount of nervous laughter from Phil and Ed. “Not really. That never came about.”

Colin: “Errrrrrm. Ummmm. We had this sense of duty that you should sort of hang around, which was probably not necessary at all. Sometimes it was a bit like two years of intense manual reading. You felt like an underpowered middle manager for, I dunno, a shoe company, who the bosses are trying to edge out. So they tell you they’re moving you to Tokyo and you have to learn Japanese in a week, or else. And you’re on the language course, and you haven’t got a hope in hell, but you have a go.”

Later, when this is relayed to Thom, he erupts into hysterical laughter. Finally, when he gathers himself, he says, “I should just add that there were some really good days too.” He mentions the completion of “Everything In Its Right Place”; successfully communicating to a sessioneering brass section that he wanted them to sound like traffic on “The National Anthem”; and “watching a really amazing thunderstorm approaching over the valley”.

In spite of this, you can’t help wondering whether his experience of the sessions remains different to that of his colleagues. If you have a genuinely obsessive nature, the studio camouflages it better than most places. As he admits, “I would have stayed there forever. It was Jonny who called time on the whole thing.” As one source close to the band puts it, “Thom just couldn’t leave it alone.”

Among all the elliptical murmurings and childlike electronica on Kid A and Amnesiac, one line from “Optimistic” seems to leap out with unmistakable poignancy. “You can try the best you can/The best you can is good enough” – an assurance given to him by his partner Rachel, when he felt that “nothing we’d done was releasable”.

“In the end,” observed their manager Chris Hufford, “they just had to look at what they had and go with it.”

IT’S A PLEASANT SUMMER’S evening drive to the village where Colin Greenwood and his wife Molly live. There isn’t, in fact, very much to the village itself. Just a car showroom and The Harcourt Arms – a pub set amid gardens with several fibre glass constructions for small children to climb on. One of these is a tree. If you stood inside it, you could create your own low-budget version of the “There There” video, in which some manner of woodland voodoo leaves Thom rooted to the spot.

It’s the release date of Hail To The Thief, and tonight Colin’s holding a party from which Steve Lamacq will be broadcasting live. The gathering also doubles up as 50th birthday celebration for the band’s co-manager, Bryce Edge. Everyone’s here, including Stanley Donwood – his shining pink head a testimony to three days spent at a cider festival in Bath. Jonny, a father of six months, repeatedly checks his mobile phone, lest the babysitter calls. He talks breathlessly about the learning curve of fatherhood. On stage, that molten vinyl fringe obscures his eyes, but when you talk to him, you realise he shares with his elder brother a yearning gaze which makes you feel oddly protective of him.

The house itself is amazing – ’60s modernism set amid fertile forest aand lush greenery. In the main living area is a balcony which houses an upright piano and Greenwood’s record collection: Kraftwerk, Weather Report, various post-rock 7-inches and a compilation of indigenous British fishing songs given to him by Sparklehorse’s Mark Linkous. Directly underneath, Steve Lamacq is conducting an interview with Ed in which the guitarist bemoans the lack of currency that hit singles hold in the modern age. “I mean, Westlife had 10 Number Is in a row, but I couldn’t hum a single one of them. I bet I sound like an old git, don’t I?” Flanked by assorted pals on the sofa, an amused Yorke nods so vigorously that his whole body is bouncing up and down.

Away from the hubbub, a wooden pathway leads us past the vegetable patch and into a candlelit grotto. Hidden amid the trees at the end of this is a sunken rectangular pit which, tonight, pays host to a crackling bonfire. Yorke attempts to put into words what has been so remarkably evident over the time Mojo has spent with the band. There’s a touching dedication to Spike Milligan on the CD insert of Hail To The Thief – this, says Thom, “because that book finally helped me to understand what was happening. In a way, it’s lucky that [his depression] results in something because, for a lot of people [who don’t make music], it’s just depression and that’s all you’ve got to show for it.

“Also it taught me a lot about the nature of what you create. When I’m writing, I think that everything I do is shit. And that’s all tied up in the fact that it’s not mine. I’m tearing it to bits because I’ve yet to work out where it came from. It’s like an Ouija board, but these days I try and have a positive outlook to the hand-pushing. Which, in a way, was what Michael [Stipe] had been telling me all along. You sort of have to learn to stop for a bit. You can’t just be receiving this stuff 24 hours a day.”

“It’s a very particular thing that we do,” Stipe recently told Time magazine. “It’s different from playing guitar or acting or painting, and Thom just needed someone who had been through it to kind of bring him back down to earth and overstate the obvious, which is that you can’t believe your own hype. His material explores darker aspects of walking the Earth, and people project that onto you. It takes some work not to project it back.”

It’s one thing, of course, to know what the problem is – but another thing to implement that knowledge. Yorke’s friends unanimously alight on a more practical explanation for the singer’s emotional stability. Shortly before the release of Amnesiac, Yorke’s partner, Rachel, gave birth to a baby boy – a change which, according to Phil Selway, has allowed Thom “to let go of things in a way that he was never able to before. You can’t just disappear into yourself. There’s simply too much to do.”

Radiohead may go on to make a better album than Hail To The Thief, but it’s hard to imagine a more complete representation of the man who wrote it. It’s the record on which Art School Thom, Father Thom, Paranoid Thom and End-Of-The-World Thom finally found a way of occupying the same space without taking it out on the rest of his band.

Ed O’Brien, for one, is relieved. He says he knew Radiohead was back to being “an inclusive rather than exclusive thing” when a courier arrived with a bunch of demos. “We went into the studio with the songs already in place.” Nigel Godrich persuaded the band to fly out to LA after a series of live shows and record the album in a fortnight. Following a couple of abortive attempts, it was in similar circumstances that they finally nailedThe Bends.

In rock, there’s a grand tradition of artists having children and running into the studio at the first opportunity to make unbearably drippy albums: Van Morrison’s Tupelo Honey, John Lennon’s Double Fantasyand Richard Ashcroft’s Alone With Everybody to name but three. Not so Yorke. His apocalypse fixation dates all the way back to 1980 when, aged 11, he wrote his first song, “Mushroom Cloud”. That two decades on he chose to call his son Noah bears testimony to that enduring fixation. Tonight, when Lamacq persuades Thom to play something on Colin’s piano, he chooses to sing “Sail To The Moon”. The chattering throng is gradually brought to silence by the barely amplified sound of Yorke’s vibrato quivering on the lines, “Maybe you’ll be president/But know right from wrong/Or in the flood/You’ll build an ark/And sail us to the moon.” When he finishes, a visibly moved Colin Greenwood strides over and hugs him like just another Radiohead fan. At which point you realise that Yorke is conceivably the only songwriter in the world who can portray his two-year-old son as the saviour of our doomed planet and not make you retch.

“I don’t see why people are no longer scared in the way that they were when I was a kid,” explains the singer. “Fundamentally, nothing has changed. We’re the first generation who lived under the bomb, and that was it. We knew that any day now, some loon could press a button and that would be the end of that. The cold war might have ended, but in fact things have got worse. Because both parties believe they’ve got God on their side.”

There’s little by way of explicit political content on Hail To The Thief. In fact there’s very little on the album that is explicit, period. And yet at the same time, the global climate of political uncertainty pervades every note. Far from having mellowed Radiohead’s music, fatherhood has enabled Thom to draw a direct connection from the “blind terror perpetrated by maniacs” to the future of his children. Inasmuch as it has vindicated his paranoia, becoming a parent in such troubled times is one of the best things that ever happened to him: “Someone gave me a tape a few years ago. It was an interview with John Coltrane, and he’s saying, ‘I got into politics for a while and then I just decided to channel it down my horn because, ultimately, it was the best place for it to be. Everywhere else was ugly.'”

While writing the songs, Yorke embarked on several long drives in “wild countryside”, listening to Radio 4 in the weeks following September 11, memorising key phrases and mixing them up with other half-formed ideas and “images that seemed to fit the current climate”. Before he could analyse what it all meant, he put his scribblings to one side and resolved not to return to them – something, he says, he felt unable to do at the height of his obsessive years. “Then a few weeks later, I would look at what I had and it would all make sense to me.” “The Gloaming”, he says, is about the rise of the far right. Fragments of children’s stories – Chicken Licken and The Bony King Of Nowhere from Bagpuss – add to die pervading sense of unreality.

And what of the unhinged website writings of a few years ago? A couple of these have found their way into the music. Fragments of something called She Ate Me Up For Breakfast appear in “Myxomatosis”. Two songs -Kid A’s “Everything In Its Right Place” and the otherworldly funk of “Where I End And You Begin” have their roots in a posting entitled The Ashes Of The Gap In Between You And Me: “He was a good man they said/He was a gentleman they said/Even when life spat in his face/He put everything back in its right place.”

When cajoled by Steve Lamacq to play one more song on Colin’s piano, it’s “Everything In Its Right Place” that Thom plumps for. There’s a looseness and fluency to the performance which seems light years away from the padded cell production of the Kid A version. For want of a less cheesy term, it grooves. By the time it reaches its conclusion, it’s five minutes past midnight. Yorke’s decision to play another song has delayed the news update. He descends the steps to delighted applause.

One last exchange as he prepares to leave. It seems salient to point out to him that hearing a song like that on an old upright piano exposes the lie that Kid A and Amnesiac were bereft of tunes. There’s more than a hint of anger about his response. “You know what? It doesn’t bother me any more, because I don’t read any of it.”

Some reviews of Hail To The Thief suggested that it’s been so long since Radiohead made a normal album they’ve forgotten how to.

“Well, they’re bound to, aren’t they? It wasn’t their fucking idea, was it? Ultimately, it’s quite funny because I distinctly remember when OK Computer came out and you had people going, ‘Yeah, but it’s not The Bends, is it? It’s got all this weird stuff on it.'” His voice mutates into a contemptuous whine. “‘Why are they being weird? Why can’t they just be normal?’ Fuck it. It’s just nostalgia. It’s like telling painters how to paint. It’s not my problem.”

HOW WILL THE DIVIDE between Vintage Radiohead and Experimental Radiohead play out at this year’s Glastonbury? Thom Yorke’s plans for the festival suggest there’s nothing to worry about. There may be some work to do, but he has carefully set aside the entire weekend so that the Yorke family can fully absorb the festival experience. “It’s something I should have done years ago,” he says. “But doing it with Noah there will be great. I think he’ll have the time of his life.”

So, what’s the plan? Headlining at the Pyramid Stage on Saturday night; then off to the kids’ field on Sunday?

“There’s a kids’ field? Climbing frames? God, I have to keep him off those. He’s happy on bouncy things. Are there any bouncy things? A library tent? Wow! He loves reading. Especially in bed. He chooses a book, usually The Cat In The Hat, and goes and sits in his bed. Then he falls asleep on it.”

Six years have now elapsed since Radiohead’s last Glastonbury – an appearance which, says Colin Greenwood, “was akin to having a huge reception planned for you, regardless of what you feel you’ve done to deserve it. Everyone seemed to have decided that OK Computer was going to be a big album. So there was a lot riding on that evening because it had only just come out. And for a time we thought we’d blown it in the biggest possible way.”

If you were there, you’ll remember it as the point when the mud ceased to matter. For the first – and arguably the last – time in their career, Radiohead did precisely the right thing at precisely the right time. The stoned starlit drama of OK Computer tracks like “Subterranean Homesick Alien”, “Paranoid Android” and “Exit Music (For A Film)” effortlessly catapulted them into the big league. Onstage, though, Thom Yorke was trying desperately to keep it together. “It was only at the end when Rachel said, ‘If you think it was a nightmare, look at the audience!’ and she showed me the TV monitor. But by that time, it was practically over.”

“Well, he couldn’t hear himself,” explains Ed. “And because we had the lights right in our faces, none of us could see the audience from the stage. So it was like being in a void. We had no idea what was going on.”

Eventually, Yorke’s anger got the better of him and, as O’Brien puts it, “a little piece of Glastonbury folklore was created. It’s one of the great moments of televised rock swearing, isn’t it?” laughs O’Brien. “‘Turn the fucking lights on!’ It’s up there with Bob Geldof shouting ‘Give me the fokking money!’ on Live Aid. You’ve got to hand it to Thom. He does a good swear.”

It’s in allusion to that moment that, halfway through this year’s Glastonbury set, Thom gazes ahead at the lighting desk and says, “I’ve got a good idea. Hey Andy – remember that thing we did last time?” But, this time around, Thom can see beyond the main arena, all the way up to the top of the hill. A scattering of single flickering flames illuminates the valley just enough to reveal the enormity of the crowd gathered to see Radiohead.

As promised, he’s been here for the whole weekend. Initial plans to camp in the Tipi Field have succumbed to an inevitable compromise – his tipi has been erected in Michael Eavis’s garden. From here, though, it’s a fairly short walk to the Kidz Field [sic] – “Admission: Free for children, one smilee for adults” – where a man called Bodger and his mashed-potato loving dog Badger entertain the tiny revellers. The best way to relax before entertaining 80,000 people is to mingle freely amongst them. Well, that’s the theory, but by the time Thom and Noah make it up to the toddlers’ discotheque, the DJ clumsily acknowledges his presence by hastily steering his set away from “The Wheels On The Bus” and “Eh-Oh! It’s The Teletubbies!” – and puts on “Planet Telex”. One child instantiy bursts into tears; the rest scuttle off to their parents, and Yorke and son retreat to the relative anonymity afforded by the interior of a huge climbing frame.

Received wisdom advises against returning to the scene of past victories, but Thom Yorke has the air of a man finally able to accept the good things that the world has to offer him. Maybe that’s why Radiohead’s performance that night is so moving. For “Karma Police”, Yorke drinks up every note as though it was his first taste of water in weeks. As he likes to remind people, this little retribution fantasy was never meant to be taken too seriously, hence the sing-along disclaimer which ushers the songs to its conclusion: “Phew, for the minute there/I lost myself.” But meanings, unlike notes and words, can change over time and – at no notice – shower poetry on the most unexpected of moments. So when the song finishes and Thom returns a cappella to that line, just so he can lose himself all over again, you’re left with no option but to lose yourself with him. Which, stage right, is what the three members of R.E.M. are doing too. Twenty years ago, Thom Yorke bought the band’s first album, Murmur, and decided that this was the kind of group he would like to front. Tonight, he dedicates “Lucky” to his heroes-turned-mentors, with a look that suggests this might be the best evening of his life.

As for that divide between Vintage Radiohead and Experimental Radiohead, it’s the only muddy spot of the weekend. Five seconds in, Kid A’s opening track, “Everything In Its Right Place”, receives a Stars In Their Eyes-style cheer of recognition. That he has problems keeping a straight face throughout the song is due mainly to his own, looped, digitised scally voice calling “Hash for cash” over the backing track. Rather thinner on laughs are the panicking pulses of “Idioteque” and “The Gloaming”, which see him all but consumed by the bleakness of his own words: “When the walls bend/Will you breathe in?” Driven to new heights of catharsis by the percussive landslide of “Sit Down Stand Up”, he reminds you of the Sufi dervishes who attempt to channel divine energy through their own spinning bodies. Except, of course, that this energy is anything but divine: it’s the kind of energy that drives insomnia and reduces fingernails to stumps. It’s the intangible fear felt by the little man trying to do good things; the suspicion that, in the final analysis the karma police may be cancelled out by far more illiberal forces. Or, worse, that they never existed at all.

So, what does it say about these times that a songwriter who uses fear, paranoia and foreboding as his muses – Mother Shipton locked in the flailing body of Ian Curtis – attracts such incomparably intense devotion? It says that his truth accords with ours; that he gets us just as much as we get him. These times have paid host to unparalleled strangeness: we’ve seen the unhappy invention of the pre-emptive war; the nearest that the British Government now has to a credible Opposition is the BBC; American liberalism is seen as unpatriotic; and all that any concerned person can do is sign endless petitions, hoping that someone somewhere acts against their own self-interests to make the world a better place.

In 2003, the madness of Thom Yorke doesn’t seem so very mad after all.

Vince Clarke and Alison Moyet don’t strike you as the sort of people who play mind games with each other. But if they were, Clarke would be winning right now. Twenty minutes after Clarke was due to turn up at this Covent Garden private members club, there’s no sign of him. As a result, Moyet – already nervous about seeing her sometime Yazoo sidekick for the first time since they both attended a friend’s wedding 18 years ago – simply doesn’t know where to put herself. Seeking to reassure her, I implore her simply to pick up where she left off with him. “Um, we don’t want to do that,” she jokes, though quite why, she doesn’t explain.

At the beginning of the synth-pop era they helped to popularize, fans and critics referred to Yazoo – the songwriter who left Depeche Mode aged just 20, and the ballsy soul voice known to Essex punks then as Alf – as the odd couple. True to form, there’s no shortage of oddness about this reunion. There have been no phone calls, no protracted negotiations prior to this moment. Just three emails exchanged between Moyet, Clarke and their promoter have taken us to this point. After holding out for 25 years, the stars (or, rather, their schedules) aligned for Yazoo’s second life. Moyet had finished promoting her acclaimed solo album The Turn, while Clarke – now in his 23rd year with Erasure – fulfilled his outstanding obligations. Before proceeding, Clarke asked Erasure singer Andy Bell if he had any objections to the reunion. Bell apparently said, “Only as long as you get me tickets for the show.”

She’s such a formidable presence. Clarke is anything but. And yet, when the small, unassuming, shaven-headed Clarke ambles into the room, and addresses Moyet with a simple, “Hello, mate!”, this 46 year-old mother of three children – all by different fathers – all but falls apart. It’s very sweet. “I just… that really freaked me out, actually.” She turns around to a cameraman, who is here to film the moment for the website. “I’m sorry. I can’t do that,” she tells him. He leaves the room. I offer to do the same, but she says it’s fine. “I suddenly felt all stuttery.” Then, as long-estranged friends are wont to do, she reaches out for the first piece of conversational driftwood she can find and goes with the flow. In this case, it’s a conversation about Clarke’s other home in Chertsey, Surrey. Does he still have it? Yes, but it’s been on the market ever since he and his wife moved to Maine.

Some reunions reek of desperation. Others merely scratch the itch of nostalgia. The funny thing about the Yazoo one is that it merely formalizes something that is already in the air. The duo’s stock seems to be at an all-time high. Andrew Butler, the DJ mastermind behind Hercules & Love Affair cited Only You and Don’t Go as the first formative pop experiences of his life. LCD Soundsystem explicitly referenced them on their universally acclaimed Sound Of Silver album. But then, they were no less hip the first time around. The synergy of soul power and sequenced beats presaged the emergence of house music by five years. Moyet remembers David Bowie, Joey Ramone and members of Talking Heads in the audience at their first New York shows in 1981. “We were supported by rope climbers,” she confides, “Although I can’t quite remember why. They had everything but their twats hanging out.”

Just because Moyet was hip though, it doesn’t follow that she was happy. “That’s one of the funny things about the intervening years,” she explains, “I’ve constantly had people asking me to do those 80s package tours – and I’m sure Vince has as well – but my love of music isn’t determined by the era in which it was recorded. For me, the 80s was the era in when I was a miserable cunt, so why would I want to go back there?”

Why was she so miserable? In two decades which have seen Moyet move away from airbrushed pop via a well-received run in Chicago and into her own niche as a great modern torch singer, the answer seems no more simple to Moyet, but time has allowed her to get a better handle on the reasons. “If you think that we got our deal because Vince already had a deal [through Depeche Mode] then that already puts me in a vulnerable position. And then, to suddenly become well-known on top of that…”

What’s easily forgotten is just how well-known they did become. Yazoo’s debut album Upstairs At Eric’s spent well over a year in the British top 40. And yet, in the austere indie microclimate that was Mute Records, Clarke’s pop sensibilities were treated no differently to the musical whims of lesser-known artists. If Yazoo wanted to record, they had to wake at dawn and fit their schedule around that of labelmates Fad Gadget, who recorded between 11am and 11pm. And yet, having already written New Life and Just Can’t Get Enough for Depeche Mode, Clarke was already a proven hitmaking prodigy. Nevertheless, Yazoo required a leap of faith from their label boss Daniel Miller – one which took a while to come.

“When I did our first demo – which was Only You – I tried to give it to Daniel and he didn’t show much interest.” Moyet is amazed at this point: “Wow! I didn’t know that!” Clarke continues: “Yeah, I brought it in and put it on, and the whole time it was playing, Daniel was messing around with a synthesizer. He said he liked it, but carried on doing what he was doing – and that was it. Only when the publishers took and interest did he brighten up.”

Despite losing their songwriter, Depeche Mode were a known quantity in the eyes of a world mostly oblivious to songwriting credits. With their rejection of Only You cited as the catalyst for Clarke’s departure, Yazoo naturally took an interest in how Depeche Mode were coping without them. Moyet mischievously notes that “there was obviously an awareness that Only You was far superior to [Depeche Mode’s first post-Clarke single] See You.” Moyet turns to Clarke, suddenly unsure that she should have said that at all. “Is that really bad?”

“No, it’s all right,” says Clarke, drily, “No-one in Depeche reads The Times.”

Whatever it was that bonded Yazoo to each other at the beginning of their alliance, had vanished by the time their posthumously released second album You And Me Both appeared. In 1983, appearing on Top Of The Pops for the last time, the body language between singer and keyboard player as they played Nobody’s Diary told its own story. Sporting a giant, meticulously teased quiff, Clarke cut an impassive, emotionless figure and Moyet looked anguished and uncomfortable. It was a perfect microcosm of their brief alliance. “He was creatively very encouraging, very open to hearing my ideas for songs. The thing I found difficult was the lack of warmth. I wanted to feel more likeable, and you can’t feel likeable if someone doesn’t want to interact with you.”

If Clarke is an altogether different creature now, he puts it down in part to his sidekick in Erasure. “Andy Bell is the most laid-back person you ever met, and over the years that has rubbed off on me.”

This isn’t without a certain irony. Bell freely admits that his early years were spent in absolute thrall to Moyet. “As far as singing goes, I absolutely wanted to be her,” he says, “She was my heroine.” Despite or because of that, Moyet admits to feelings of envy as Erasure notched up a string of hits. She adds, however, that “I stopped feeling that way the moment I met him. He’s the loveliest guy you ever met.”

Post-Yazoo, of course, Moyet hit the ground running with a high-profile career of her own. Eager to hand the reins to someone who might be able to marshall what she saw as the chaos of her own life, she chose CBS over Virgin, even though the latter were offering her considerably more money. The reason? “Because Virgin had boxes all over the floor and at CBS, everything was tidy. That’s just where I was at.”

Hits such as Love Resurrection and All Cried Out propelled her to a plum spot on Live Aid. Fearing what the answer might be, it turns out that she never dared ask what Clarke thought of such airbrushed solo efforts. Clarke, nonetheless, elects to volunteer his thoughts. “I loved all the songs on that album [Raindancing],” he says, turning to face her.

Moyet can barely scrape herself up off the floor at this point. She says that, at that time, she had read an interview in which Clarke was asked what he thought of her album and he reportedly laughed. “So I always assumed you thought it was shit.”

Clarke is horrified. Far from being dismissive of her efforts, he says that her transition to solo stardom sparked feelings of jealousy in him too. Not least because she had procured the services of Spandau Ballet’s producers Jolley & Swain. “Well, it wasn’t like Daniel Miller, was it?” he explains, “They were properly famous.”

Both seem to find this hilarious: the glacial synth genius gazing longingly at the mainstream success enjoyed by his old singer; while his old singer assumes that her old Basildon mates must be repelled by her new mainstream cachet. It’s hard to imagine that they were ever this comfortable in each other’s company the first time around. “I lacked the life-skills of communication in a relationship,” he admits, “I felt confident in the studio, but starting a chat with somebody…” His voice trails off.

Does this amount to a tying up of loose ends or a second life for the duo whose influence seems to expand with every passing year? Tantalisingly, Moyet reveals that she has retained a total recall of several unrecorded songs that Clarke played for her without ever having committed them to tape. “I can remember not only tunes that we never recorded, but tunes that he played to me on a guitar that I would have sung twice and then he changed his mind about recording them.”

It isn’t too late to take care of that, I suggest. “I’ll sing them to you later,” she says to him.” Then, in almost perfect synchronicity, both remind me that we’re getting ahead of ourselves somewhat. “For God’s sake, we’’ve only just met!” It’s true. They have only just met. But had I not been there to bear witness to the moment, I would never have guessed.

I returned with a brightly-painted bag, which was made out of a goat – and in it were all sorts of flutes and drums and a gimbri.”

Post-Pepper, London may have been swinging, but in the suburbs bordering Edinburgh, the evenings were silent. As Mr and Mrs Heron were getting ready for bed, their son Mike removed a tab of acid from an envelope and waited to see what might happen. In the centre of town, this sort of activity was commonplace. Robin Williamson – Heron’s accomplice in the Incredible String Band – lived in a squat where the humdrum routines of post-war life had long been left behind. However, there was little about what Heron calls “the sad suburban houses” of Portobello, to suggest that – behind red-brick terraces – hallucinogenic epiphanies were taking place.

Mike Heron knelt on the floor in the corridor by his parent’s bedroom and listened to the radio. And then? Well, what happened next is a matter of public record. The centrepiece of The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, A Very Cellular Song chronicles the dramatic undulations of Heron’s twelve hour trip in sublime detail. The warm waltz-time oscillations of the small organ that Heron kept upstairs – that’s where he knelt to tap out a tune as, in the background, Radio 4 play piped out of a transistor. “See the line, ‘Oh mother, what shall I do?’ That came from there. All sorts of things were feeding in, like, ‘Lay down my dear sister” – that was from Music of the Bahamas by the Pindar Family.”

As the sun started to rise and Heron gradually returned to his natural state, 5am ruminations such as, “Amoebas are very small,” gave way to a sense of beatific resolution. You can hear that, too, on the song’s coda adapted from a Sikh spiritual: “May the long time sun shine upon you/All love surround you/And the pure light within you/Guide you all the way on.” Then, Mike Heron padded downstairs and ate the breakfast his mother had cooked for him. “My parents had probably realised [what happened] as they listened to things unfold. But nothing was mentioned.”

To borrow from another Incredible String Band song, back in the 1960s, you really did made your own amusements. By the time The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter’s appeared, Robin Williamson and Mike Heron had become dab hands at making their own entertainment. Their self-titled debut album, released in 1966 may have seemed, to the outside world like the beginning of something. But to Williamson, Heron and short-lived member Clive Palmer, it was the culmination of two years spent playing music with like-minded beatniks in Edinburgh’s bohemian scene. Williamson and Heron barely knew each other when they gravitated towards Palmer’s Incredible Folk Club, a weekly night accessed only going up a lift to the fourth floor of a building in Sauchiehall St. “It was one of those wee silly lifts you don’t see any more,” recalled Edinburgh contemporary Billy Connolly, a regular to the club, “There’s only four people at a time, so it would take all night to get everybody up there.”

You wouldn’t call it commercial, but somehow they inked a record deal. Though he had never produced an album at that point, Joe Boyd – a young American emissary keen to make his mark as Elektra records’ first UK-based talent scout – convinced the musicians on stage at the Incredible Folk Club that he could steer them to enormous success.

Incredible String Band emerged to positive reviews, but Palmer didn’t stick around to read them. He packed the tent which – erected in the front room of his Edinburgh squat – had acted as his living space, and headed to Afghanistan. On leaving, he told his colleagues not to wait for his return. After some thought, Williamson decided that he too would retire from the music business. His reasons? “Well, let me see now,” he says, between sips of coffee in a North London café, “I wanted to buy an Arabic flute. And a lute as well.” So, off he went to Morocco. For want of a better idea, a solo Heron hit the folk club trail. End of story.

At least it would have been, had Williamson not run out of money a few months into his adventure. “I returned with a beautiful brightly-painted bag, which was made out of a goat – and in it were all sorts of flutes and drums and a gimbri. I stumbled back to Edinburgh and said to Mike, “Well, what do you reckon about some of this stuff? And we began to make this sort of stream of consciousness music that went through all sorts of styles.” Released in 1967, the resulting album The 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion represented a colossal leap. With Williamson’s goat of many colours, the Incredible String Band set about their business with fearless abandon. And out there, countless young minds looking to a new generation of musical expeditionaries for inspiration, sat up and listened. “Forget the clichés about psychedelic and hallucinogenic vagueness,” wrote Archbishop Of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, 35 years later, “This was work of extraordinary emotional clarity and metaphorical rigour.”

At the eye of this lysergic folk storm, Williamson and Heron remember not stopping to consider their rapidly expanding success. In the year that The Beatles made Sgt Pepper, Paul McCartney hailed The 5000 Spirits Or The Layers Of The Onion as a comparable achievement. Mick Jagger must have agreed because he tried and failed to poach the String Band for his label. But if songs like My Name Is Death and The Eyes Of Fate sketched out their intentions, the events of 1968 constituted a full-on aesthetic assault, compressing more activity in a year than some bands manage in entire careers.

In April, The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter commenced the first of its 21 weeks in the chart, peaking at number five. By contrast, 1968’s other seminal stoner album Astral Weeks – released eight months later – failed to trouble the charts at all. In return for their 30 shillings, ISB disciples would have wasted no time in replicating the conditions in which A Very Cellular Song was written, before immersing themselves in acid-folk fantasias like The Water Song and Koeeoaddi There – songs which saw their creators meshing the temple-throbbing drone of the psych-geist to the primordial modal hum from which all music was evolved.

A week previously at the Royal Festival Hall, fans got a chance to see the band’s expanded line-up for the first time. Formerly Bert Jansch’s girlfriend, Licorice McKechnie had accompanied Williamson in Morocco. Heron doesn’t remember exactly when she joined the group – although Boyd remembers Heron hurriedly teaching his own girlfriend Rose Simpson bass guitar, so that she could join the group in time for the next album.

Adrian Whittaker, editor of beGlad – An Incredible String Band Compendium remembers borrowing the newly-released Hangman’s Beautiful Daughters from Blackheath library and “being seduced by this thing… Four or five of us fifth formers having devotional evenings around a turntable, burning incense and just listening, imagining that the people making this music lived communally, with their girlfriends. I remember thinking that this was what I wanted to aspire to.”

In reality, three hundred miles separated Heron and Williamson. While Heron continued to live in Edinburgh with Rose, Williamson and Licorice – together with assorted friends from a London mime and dance group called Exploding Galaxy – commenced a three day odyssey to a cottage in Penwern, in mid-Wales. “It was a house which had remained uninhabited since 1928. There was just one lightbulb and the toilet was outside. If you wanted to go in the night, you had to carry a torch and kick the sheep out when you got there.”

By all accounts, it took the locals some time to get used to Penwern’s new inhabitants. “I remember going into Newport to open a bank account with a £50 cheque,” says Williamson, “and they were contemplating calling the police because they didn’t think I could have that much money. How could somebody that looks like that have a £50 cheque? There was a lot of that sort of thing. One time, the police came to visit…” Williamson slips into a Welsh accent, “… ‘We hear, down in the village, that you boys have been practicing witchcraft.’ Lots of that sort of thing.”

Was Heron not tempted to drop out with Williamson? Beyond entertaining the notion on Mercy I Cry City, apparently not. “He wanted a commune life,” says Heron, who stayed with Rose in Edinburgh, “but I didn’t fancy living in a farmhouse and fighting over the kitchen, that kind of thing. They were into macrobiotics and chocolate was banned. They would live on brown rice, which was where the song Big Ted [from 1969’s Changing Horses] comes in. They had their whole winter’s supply of rice stored, and the pig got in and ate it all.”

Far from acting as a deterrent, the Incredible String Band’s Blakean reconfiguration of acoustic music seemed doubly exotic to American ears. The compounded sense of cultural removal, however, didn’t always play out to their advantage. Arriving at their hotel for a show in Dallas, Williamson espied a swimming pool, he went into a nearby shop and bought what he thought were trunks. “A policeman walked over and told me to get out,” he remembers, “Apparently, what I had purchased was a pair of swimming trunk liners, which were entirely transparent in the water. It only got better when the Dallas Chief Of Police turned up and revealed that his son was a fan.”

In the wake of the Monterey Pop Festival the previous year, Los Angeles was becoming the epicentre of the music industry. It seemed logical for the String Band to play there. No sooner did they arrive, however, than Williamson once again found himself attracting the attention of the police. “He was walking down the street without any shoes or money,” remembers Heron. “It turns out that you’re not allowed to do that, so they jailed him. We kind of had to rescue him.” Nevertheless, this increased level of attention – of all sorts – seemed to reflect the fortuitous timing of their arrival.

From a fourth-floor sweatbox to billboards on Sunset Strip in just over two years, The Incredible String Band were, albeit briefly, rock stars – albeit rock stars who stopped short of playing actual rock music. To the policemen who seemed to take regular exception to their appearance, they were hippies. Heron points to a mutual respect between American and British musicians in the counterculture – “and yet,” he adds, “the music was very different.” It was a difference embodied at the Fillmore West shows which saw them co-headlining with Country Joe & The Fish. American longhairs had something far more palpable to rail against. “Conscription and what came with it was an absolute reality for Americans,” says Heron, “and the music had a more combative edge as a result.” In the Incredible String Band’s resolutely metaphysical world, new songs like The Half-Remarkable Question and Air were increasingly beginning to seem like neo-Dadaist declarations in a world defined by the cold war and the nuclear threat. “That’s it,” says Heron, “We didn’t have the Government telling you that you had to go out and die.”

“In a way, it made people playful,” says Williamson, “You knew that something was about to happen and the reaction was sort of the opposite of angst.” In Penwern, this attitude pervaded every waking hour. Director Peter Neal discovered as much when he arrived there to make Be Glad For The Song Has No Ending – a proposed BBC documentary about the group. Reflecting Williamson’s increasing interest in multi-media presentations, assorted String Band musicians and associates – Boyd being among them – staged a self-devised fable entitled The Pirate And The Crystal Ball for Neal’s camera. The plot revolved around a pirate who attempts to hijack destiny by stealing a crystal ball from the three fates. Happy with the fable’s conclusion, the group duly marched off in search of a meal – only to discover that no restaurant was willing to accommodate them in their costumes.

Somewhere amid all this, enough material for a double album accumulated. Released as two single albums in America and one double in Britain, Wee Tam & The Big Huge cemented their status as the band by which the countercultural credentials of any young head could be measured. One such head at the time, Billy Connolly, remembered hearing these songs for the first time, in particular, Williamson’s opening shot, Job’s Tears: “There’s something extraordinary when you’re from my background about listening to these lyrics about people being stabbed with a sword of willow, and Robin’s singing then was just to die for, from incredible depths to incredible heights. He always had a lovely sense of comedy, you know: ‘I hear my mother calling and I must be on my way’.”

Perhaps more than any of Williamson’s other songs, it’s the The Iron Stone that sees the scope of its creator’s vision matched by its mesmerizing execution – a wonder-drunk freak folk liturgy which achieves vertical take-off when sitar and guitar cut loose from the low lugubrious pulse of the gimbri. As if counteracting the sprawling nature of Williamson’s efforts, Heron turned in some of his most memorable compositions: You Get Brighter, Greatest Friend and, in particular, the Scottish Appalachia of Log Cabin Home In The Sky. If the Caledonian excursions on The White Stripes’ Icky Thump are anything to go by, it would seem that Wee Tam & The Big Huge has notched up several miles on Jack White’s turntable.

Wee Tam & The Big Huge appeared in October. November was spent on the road once again. Three nights at the Fillmore East in New York had sold out; so, closer to home, had The Royal Albert Hall. Williamson remembers Licorice turning up to the latter show with a box of puppies she had just acquired. No-one remembers what happened to them after that. Happy times? Joe Boyd isn’t sure. “Given what happened to them by the end of the year, you can’t help but wonder if there was a sort of a submerged anxiety awaiting resolution.” The Incredible String Band may have been souls adrift, awaiting a mooring – as one Williamson lyric put it, “What is it that we are part of/What is it that we are?” – but Heron points out that they were far from alone in this respect. “Every album that anyone put out had that questing sort of thing about it. But we were happy.”

However happy (or otherwise) the four String Band members were at this point, it seems that there was room for improvement – and their producer was the unwitting catalyst of that change. After the third Fillmore East show, Boyd says he had to catch a flight to Los Angeles, which left him just enough time to leave his charges at a vegetarian restaurant called The Paradox. On arriving at The Paradox, Boyd apparently realised that the mâitre’d there was an old friend of his from Cambridge, David Simons, who seemed more thrusting and together than he had ever been when the two had been friends years previously. The reason Simons had turned his life around so dramatically? Scientology. “I kind of set up their conversion,” smiles Boyd ruefully, “I left the restaurant and, basically, let David get on with it.”

Neither Williamson or Heron will do much to dispute the notion that, after that evening, Incredible String Band never reached the giddy creative heights that they sustained throughout 1968. Nevertheless, Heron maintains that Boyd’s version of events serves the story better than it does the facts. “Rose and I were back in London,” he contends, “I got this self-analysis book – kind of a lifestyle improvement book. I mean, we were reading all sorts of spiritual tomes at this point – Indian and Chinese philosophy and Buddhism. It all seemed to tie in. So, we made this decision to get involved – and then Robin and Licorice returned from New York and he was like, ‘Oh, you’ll never guess what we’ve been doing.’”

When the subject of Scientology is raised with Williamson, he borders on taciturn. “Joe’s surmises are Joe’s surmises, you know? I haven’t much to say about that really,” he says. If the Incredible String Band really did suddenly believe that human beings are unwitting vessels for the souls of ancient Thetans, it wasn’t immediately obvious on their first post-conversion album Changing Horses. If you look closely on the sleeve photo of The Big Huge – taken in Frank Zappa’s garden – you’ll notice how dilated Heron’s pupils are. On Changing Horses, the foursome look clean-cut by comparison.

Though no longer involved with Scientology (neither is Williamson), Heron’s view is that something had to give. “We really couldn’t go on doing these mind-expanding drugs forever. Also the comedowns were getting less and less pleasant every time.” They had stumbled on commercial success making some of the strangest music of their career, so it made a peculiar sort of sense the Incredible String Band should have dissolved after putting out 1973’s emphatically pedestrian Hard Rock & Silken Twine. Their final recorded output comprised three reworkings of old songs on an L. Ron Hubbard tribute album.

As with any artist who has ever sought to capture the essence of the times in which they had come of age, it was difficult to imagine an era in which Incredible String Band’s music might one day flourish again. But as generic indie music has found itself being co-opted into the mainstream, countless other bands have sprung up to fill the void with a new kind of outsider music. And, to anyone who owns those early String Band albums, much of it will seem awfully familiar. It’s inconceivable that the likes of Espers, Six Organs Of Admittance, Tunng and Joanna Newsom don’t have at least one Incredible String Band album in their collections. In ISB fanzine beGlad, one contributor pays tribute to a late-60s oeuvre “rich exultant Earth-scenes of hazard-free spiritual abundance.” It occurs to you that such a phrase could have just as easily been invented for 21st century freak-folk icon Devendra Banhart.

Heron remembers, “There was no sense of an album-tour-album-tour division like you get with bands these days. What you did away from your music was reflected in your music. In fact, you were never really away from your music. That’s how we made three albums in a year. That’s gone now, hasn’t it?” Speaking from the same Edinburgh house where he wrote many of his best songs, Heron now spends much of his time helping look after his 95 year-old mother and occasionally takes to the road with his guitar, sometimes accompanied by his daughter. He seems utterly content with his lot. Long since separated from him, Rose Simpson went on to become Lady Mayoress of Aberystwyth. Licorice McKechnie, sadly, is no longer thought to be alive. She was last heard from, when her sister received a letter from her in 1990, postmarked Sacramento.

As for Williamson – who now tours mostly as part of a duo with his wife Bina – he will tell you that looking back holds little fascination for him. But politely insist and his eyes will twinkle as he recalls the bigger picture. “Do you know,” he confides, “I honestly believed that the world was about to come to a crossroads, where money, war and society were all about to be forever altered. In the face of that absolute inevitability, the most logical thing seemed to sing.” He puts his coffee cup on the table and ambles over to a small stage where his Celtic harp sits.

“After all that time,” he smiles, “I’ve yet to come up with a better idea.”

It’s April 1994. Kurt Cobain has already taken a gun to his head, but his body won’t be discovered for two more days. In Glasgow, Radio One-sponsored indie festival Sound City is into its third day. Almost all the bands playing there – among them Pulp, The Boo Radleys and The Wonder Stuff – are staying at the same hotel. On the second floor, the doors of a crowded lift open and Britain’s next rock’n’roll star walks in. No-one speaks to him. With his Burnage pimp roll, Liam Gallagher is more than a little intimidating. Huge things are predicted for Oasis, whose debut single is out this week, but they seem an odd fit for Alan McGee’s Creation imprint. They seem to align themselves more closely to football casuals than any of the art-pop ingenues who once gave a Creation catalogue number such cachet.

But if 20 years of hindsight has taught us anything here, it’s that Oasis had their sights set higher than anyone in that lift could imagine. By the time they shoved gak up its nose and gave it the full Adidas makeover, this version of indie – brash, leery, antagonistic and (thanks to a secret deal struck between McGee and Sony) corporate – had come to represent everything it once stood against. Just as the ubiquitous grey squirrel was to the red, so were Oasis and their lad-rock imitators to their indie predecessors.

From hereon in, term “indie” would be forever freighted with connotations that would change according to the person using it. On Spotify, the first two results yielded by a cursory search for “indiepop” playlists feature Ed Sheeran songs. Egged on by proud dads in Ben Sherman tops, teenage X-Factor contestants stride in with guitars and cite Jake Bugg as their favourite indie artist. Indie implies all the honest-to-goodness authenticity that older generations of music fans would gather under the umbrella of plain old rock. If I sound like I’m slagging that off, I don’t particularly mean to. No genre name can circulate for more than a few weeks without starting to imply a set of values. And these just happen to be the ones attached to “indie” in 2014.

When I first alighted upon the same word in 1981, printed on the pages of my brother’s NME, it sat at the top of the independent charts. I assumed that, in some way, it must have something to do with the Indian subcontinent, and yet it didn’t really seem as though band names such as Crass and The Fall could have very much at all to do with exotic far-away places. At the end of 1985, I had left school and enrolled at a college of further education in order to retake all the O-levels I had failed. A few months previously, I had been to Live Aid and declared it the highlight of my young life. But I was already trying to put a bit of distance between that person – proudly daaaayo-ing at Freddie’s behest along with a stadium full of newly-converted Queen fans – and whatever newer, cooler thing was about to supplant it.

Early in 1986, I noticed that in my Sociology class, a girl called Angela with punky shaved-at-the-sides hair had written three band names on her folder: Primal Scream; The Soup Dragons and The Wedding Present. I hadn’t heard of any of them. Where could I find this music? It was a Thursday. She told me that if I listened to the Andy Kershaw show that night, I stood a good chance of hearing all of those bands. This being before Kershaw gave over himself entirely to overseas music, Angela was right. Well, not exactly. That night, Kershaw played one of those three bands. The song was Once More by The Wedding Present and it sounded unbelievable to me. A scintillating citrus shower of youthful longing played with finger-shredding abandon. That night, for the first time, I also heard Spring Rain by The Go-Betweens, Rolling Moon by The Chills and Somewhere In China by The Shop Assistants. As well as these, Kershaw played two American songs about remembering childhood that somehow also resonated with this new sense of imminent change: The Backyard by Miracle Legion and The Byrds’ version of Going Back. I taped the entire show and, the following day, on the Aiwa imitation Walkman I got for Christmas, listened to it on the one hour bus ride from Acocks Green to Bournville and back. Until the next Andy Kershaw show, it was all I listened to.

In pre-internet times, I’m not entirely sure how we amassed so much knowledge so quickly. I remember several key moments: my brother Aki coming back from Manchester where he was doing a fine art degree and pulling two records out of his bag. Both were on a label I had never heard of: Creation. The Bodines’ Therese was and remains a landslide of longing with a record sleeve that looks as perfect now as it did 28 years ago: an austere-fringed indie girl in black top and leggings, flat shoes and obligatory cigarette – “Therese” written to the left of her in lipstick. Alas, I had no idea what was on the outer sleeve of Different For Domeheads – the budget-priced sampler which featured The Loft’s Why Does The Rain, Biff Bang Pow’s Love & Hate and Primal Scream’s It Happens – because Aki had already lost it. Nevertheless, he placed it on the turntable. Every day, I felt like I was recruiting a team of trusty allies to help me through the existential no-mans-land between this place and adulthood. All these songs would be coming with me.

Within two months, I had decided I was going to start a fanzine – and, it turns out across all of Britain, in one of those strange spells of cultural psychic attunement that are necessary for any subcultural movement to gather pace, dozens of other people were doing the same. Kvatch. Are You Scared To Get Happy? Bleating. Ridiculous Boyfriend. Caff. Perturbed. We all sent off for each other’s fanzines and then we all started writing to each other, exchanging C90s, playing each other songs by all the new bands who seemed to be forming on a weekly basis. The upshot of all this was that throughout 1986, indie music seemed to undergo an aesthetic software update. The inclusiveness of its newest practitioners assumed an almost political dimension. The de facto uniform of the bands that rose to prominence in the wake of NME’s C86 compilation – Soup Dragons, The Primitives, Mighty Mighty, The Sea Urchins, Razorcuts – was the unisex anorak, accompanied by similarly non-gender-specific haircuts. Certain fanzines such as Are You Scared To Get Happy? and releases by Talulah Gosh and The Pastels were rendered in childlike handwriting. Originally a b-side, Velocity Girl’s sweet brevity seemed like an emphatic statement in the climate of post-Live Aid pop. With just three chords and a lyric of defiant loneliness, the 82 seconds of Primal Scream’s Velocity Girl encapsulated the fundamentals of indie music in the 80s. This was a curiously asexual movement. Singing about love was ok. Singing about sex was crass and rockist – and standout songs like The Clouds’ Get Out Of My Dream, Talulah Gosh’s Talulah Gosh, Razorcuts’ I’ll Still Be There and My Bloody Valentine’s Sunny Sundae Smile observed that distinction. These were preconditions seemed to take root in the early heyday of labels like Cherry Red and Postcard, the first album (released through Chrysalis) by the pre-sideburns Del Amitri and even in the music of The Smiths, where sex was referenced but in terms so problematic that it seemed to explain Morrissey’s ongoing celibacy.

It wasn’t that everyone had stopped having sex. It was about eschewing a vernacular that seemed ugly, predatory and anachronistic. In the indiepop bubble, men stopped singing about what they wanted to do to women. By a strange unspoken consensus, the vernacular of girl groups, early Motown and teen-pop became the language of indie pop. “In love or in despair, you know I’ll still be there,” sang Razorcuts. “Let’s fall in love, it’s exciting,” went the chorus of My Bloody Valentine’s Sunny Sundae Smile. When The Lightning Seeds appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, on Top Of The Pops with Pure – an actual proper hit! – it felt like the drafting of an eleventh-hour manifesto for this nationwide agglomeration of kindred musical souls: “Lying smiling in the dark/Shooting stars around your heart/Dreams come bouncing in your head/Pure and simple everytime/Now you’re crying in your sleep/I wish you’d never learnt to weep/Don’t sell the dreams you should be keeping/Pure and simple everytime.” More than anything, this music was in love with the idea of being in love.

Some of those early 80s releases were important precursors. Fantastic Something’s If She Doesn’t Smile (It’ll Rain), a folksy paean to new love that could penetrate the most heavily armoured heart; Jane’s a cappella single It’s A Fine Day is a fleetingly perfect memory detailed with all the aching stillness of John Berry’s Ladybird Book illustrations. As far back as 1978, The Go-Betweens had written a song about a librarian called Karen. Had they gone on to do nothing else, this much alone would have given them the keys to the city. Orange Juice’s first album You Can’t Hide Your Love Forever was already mythical enough to prompt an awed cover of Felicity by from The Wedding Present. In Birmingham where I lived Tuesdays at a city centre club called Burberries were given over to an indie night called The Click Club. This was where all my new friends went; where I interviewed bands for my fanzine; and where, once the fanzines were printed and stapled, where I would sell my fanzine. One September night, in the toilets behind the cordoned-off backstage area, I interviewed Primal Scream and their support band Pop Will Eat Itself. Another night it was Edwyn Collins. I didn’t know what a press officer was. I didn’t need to. When you’re 17, you have no idea that the mere fact of being 17 endows you with some measure of charm. No band I approached ever refused me an interview. I thought it was this easy for everyone.

At this point, independence was still a precondition of being indie. This wasn’t straight-ahead anti-corporate snobbery. Aztec Camera, The Go-Betweens and Pale Fountains had all attracted the overtures of major labels who had no clear idea how to nurture them. And even the groups that went on to make great records on majors did so by reversing the ratio of naive gusto to virtuosity. After signing to Fontana, The House Of Love re-recorded Shine On to within an inch of its life, in the process jettisoning its bloodthirsty attack. James’ Hymn From A Village is a savage evisceration of pop in a post-Thatcher climate that sounds just as startling in 2014. It got them a deal with Sire which plunged them into such poverty that Tim Booth had to volunteer for medical experiments in order to keep the band going. The Soup Dragons fared little better when they signed to Sire. As with James, they would only save themselves by jumping onto the indie-dance juggernaut – and who, at this point, would have held it against them? Adapting to survive was also Del Amitri’s big idea. After the rhapsodic romantic idealism of their self-titled first album, they returned at the end of the 80s with a sound that was retooled to break America. The Bodines reissued Therese on Magnet – home to Chris Rea and Matchbox – in a heartbreakingly horrible sleeve, released one underwhelming album and fell off the face of the earth. Alan McGee signed Edwyn Collins to Elevation – his Warner-funded fake indie – and moved Primal Scream and The Weather Prophets there too, but the sleeves were made of paper, not lovely Creation cardboard and, caught between non-eligibility for the indie chart and invisibility in the proper chart, every one of their records stiffed. Only The Jesus & Mary Chain managed to cross the border (to Geoff Travis’s WEA-funded Blanco Y Negro) and stay intact, thanks to the support of Smash Hits and the value-packed release of the five-track double seven-inch release of Some Candy Talking.

As major label limbo beckoned for most of the aforesaid artists, newer adherents rushed in to take their place. In Birmingham, The Sea Urchins were something of a local joke. They were terrible live and habitually paraded around The Click Club like superstars. We were surprised when a new label called Sarah, run by two fanzine editors called Clare and Matt, decided to release one of their songs as its first single. And then, when we heard the resulting song, we were flabbergasted. Produced by a pseudonymous Hugh Harkin from Mighty Mighty, Pristine Christine set the standard which all future Sarah releases had to try and meet. And, of those releases, it was the singles released by Bobby Wratten’s group The Field Mice which came closest to matching Pristine Christine’s melodic sunburst. Sensitive (1989) was a guilty-as-charged declaration of defiant wetness spiralling upwards into a squall of distorted guitar noise over an impassively crude programmed rhythm. Two years later, Wratten bested it with Missing The Moon an arpeggiating autumnal electro-pop monster which sits as singularly in his canon as pearlescently as, say, Primitive Painters does in Felt’s back catalogue.

After Manchester reasserted its supremacy with Happy Mondays and The Stones Roses, a new, more boorish orthodoxy supplanted the post C86 indiepop wave. For those who didn’t want to play that game, My Bloody Valentine’s evolution presented an alternative route forward: FX pedals and gauzy atmospherics seemed a logical progression from indiepop. Both subgenres, in their way, were an opting out, retreat from hoary rock phallocentricity. In the ensuing decades, a steady scattering of releases has kept the indiepop aesthetic alive. I’ve included some – among them, Mirrorball by Australia’s Crayon Fields, Velocette’s Bitterscene and Orange Juice by Stanley Brinks & The Wave Pictures – in the playlists that accompany this piece. Some bands, in particular, Belle & Sebastian, Camera Obscura and Butcher Boy, have consciously placed themselves at the end of a lineage that takes in Orange Juice, The Go-Betweens, Felt and The Smiths. There have even been a couple of number one hits from musicians whose own outlook was forged in the positivism of post-C86 independent music: White Town’s Your Woman and Cornershop’s Brimful Of Asha. Then as now, the very quaities to which detractors take exception, are the foundation stones of indiepop’s aesthetic. Either you’re in or you’re not. And for what it’s worth, this uncompromisingly fey, militantly lily-livered movement seems every bit as radical to me as it did 28 years ago.

This Sunday from 3pm-7.30pm at Spiritland, I’ll be hosting a session of indiepop tunes. More details here.