Veronica has been playing Hail to the Thief, I won’t say non-stop, but as obsessively as one of those South American birds in the zoo that hasn’t got a big enough run and keeps pecking at its reflection in its water-can. She is revising simultaneously. I’d have thought she was too old for this sort of thing, but apparently Radiohead yokes the generations in a sort of spirit of the Blitz.
Far be it from me to criticise the music of Thom Yorke and his chums, but what of the lyrics? Remember when Bob Dylan was compared to Keats. Absurd; Keats is a feeble lyricist – fancy using been as a rhyme-word in the first quatrain of ‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’. Not that lyrics of singable songs need be peculiarly elevated poetry; the words of the Marseillaise are nothing extraordinary, but the song! So it was that we all found ourselves humming ‘Rain down, rain down…’ from ‘Paranoid Android’ on OK Computer while waiting for the kettle to boil.
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