Describing the sounds that all but constructed an entire world around me while expanding my idea of what music could be and of what music could do feels fairly redundant. The disc started like any other: there was a single beep as I pushed play but then there was a measured pause, pregnant with expectations, before the swirling keyboards, channel-shifting vocals and cryptic lyrics oddly predicted the zeitgeist of the subsequent decade of music listening. The truth is, I never intended to review Kid A, though it is absolutely one of, if not the most influential album of my life: so much has been written about it that it becomes a fool’s errand; still, here I am, reminiscing on the experience as if it were a sacred event.
The effect the music had was immediate and obvious but the way it invigorated my friendship with Evan was more easily identified in hindsight. You grow up engrossed in a world that is centered around your friendships and it is difficult to see the future; to see that life changes over time. People become interested in different things and form new friendships around those interests. Something is lost as these intruders enter the world which was once fully safe and familiar.
I had developed a close group of friends who were involved in theatre with me and Evan had started playing music with some mutual acquaintances of ours on a fairly regular basis. For reasons unbeknownst to me, I was rarely invited. They quickly had their own jokes and language which I was on the outside of. I cannot say for certain, but it seems possible that Evan felt the same sense of separation when it came to me and my theatre friends. It was not too long before it seemed we had little in common beyond our shared past: Kid A changed this.
In the place we lived, amongst the people we knew, in the time that it was released: Radiohead were not the over-saturated cultural phenomenon that they are today. Wearing a Radiohead t-shirt got you odd looks and even odder questions. Evan and I ostensibly became two of their primary supporters within the confines of the environment we inhabited. It is quite easy to bond with someone over a shared interest which is not embraced by your peers and every day, Evan and I had long conversations about Radiohead. We discussed the meanings of the songs, the mythos of the band and our predictions of where they might take their sound in the future.
I remember writing a lengthy review of Amnesiac which described the way in which the songs addressed specific themes of Kid A; Evan was not only the sole person who appreciated it but he was also probably the only person who read it. I remember Evan describing to me his revelation that every even numbered Radiohead album had a title which was also a song on the album and this track ALWAYS happened to be the second song (this phenomenon was no longer true once Hail to the Thief came out). The point is that we began talking about music: passionately and I suppose we have been talking about it on a daily basis ever since.
During your life you meet many people and become friends with a few of them. Only a few of those remain your friends for an extended period of time and rarely for twenty years but here Evan and I stand, twenty years later, united in our love of music as much as our shared childhoods. I cannot wait to find out what happens next.
