Radiohead (originally titled ‘On A Friday’) formed in Oxfordshire in 1985. Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Phil Selway and Ed O’Brien first experienced commercial success with their single ‘Creep’ from debut album ‘Pablo Honey’ in 1992. The exposure of the song gave birth to a bizarre situation of Thom Yorke performing an acoustic version of the song at some horrific MTV style pool party like the most out of place house party guest in history.
The band reached new levels with second album ‘The Bends’ which featured the classic ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ and ‘Just’, however for many their defining moment came with ‘OK Computer’. Arguably one of the greatest albums of all time, it launched the band into a new stratosphere, headlining Glastonbury in 1997 with what was voted as the greatest Glasto performance of all time. Tracks like ‘Karma Police’ and the epic prog influenced ‘Paranoid Android’ have not aged one iota since the day of release some seventeen years ago.
Following Yorke suffering a bout of severe depression after touring the album heavily the band nearly split but ended up releasing ‘Kid A’ in 2000 and ‘Amnesiac’ in 2001. Incorporating electronic sounds into the mix the two albums split the opinion of their fanbase, even if ‘National Anthem’ and ‘Idioteque’ still receive huge receptions at live shows to this day.
‘Hail To The Thief’ was released later followed by ‘In Rainbows’. ‘In Rainbows’ is not only an album of astounding beauty but when you play track one of ‘OK Computer’ followed by track one of ‘In Rainbows’ with a five second overlap (and then onto track two of each album and so forth) also acts as a companion to their classic release years before. This was called the binary theory and is well worth searching out.
You may wonder why I am waxing lyrical about Radiohead but quite frankly ‘All Beginnings Are Illusions’ by Farrago is such a risible Radiohead-by-numbers “effort” that it barely warrants any of your time whatsoever. ‘Red Rag To A Rainbow’ definitely took the same bus as ‘Weird Fishes’ and ‘This Spark’ is far too reminiscent of ‘Lucky’ for its own good. On the whole, the EP is almost totally devoid of merit.
Don’t waste your time with poor imitations, give your ears a treat and enjoy the real thing instead.