Pablo Honey

Released February 22, 1993 via Parlophone, Pablo Honey is Radiohead before they learned what to distrust. Producers Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie, who had worked with Pixies and Dinosaur Jr, set up at Chipping Norton in Oxfordshire for three weeks in 1992 and caught a three-guitar band playing to the back row: Jonny Greenwood's Telecaster, Thom Yorke's SG and Ed O'Brien's Rickenbacker, recorded bone-dry with no reverb because the band wanted the punch of an early Beatles single.

Its most famous moment is an act of sabotage. Greenwood disliked "Creep" and tried to spoil it with three blasts of dead-note noise in front of the chorus, and those blasts became the hook. The single flopped in September 1992. By Christmas, San Francisco's KITS had made it the station's most-requested song, Los Angeles's KROQ followed, and the 1993 reissue went to No. 7 in the UK. Around it, the record is loud, earnest and unusually tuneful. "Anyone Can Play Guitar" opens with guitar parts played by non-musicians, a janitor and a chef among them, and "Stop Whispering" and "Blow Out" sketch the band that made The Bends two years later. The album peaked at No. 22 in the UK and No. 32 in the US, and has since gone double Platinum in Britain.

This is the 2016 XL Recordings repress, catalogue XLLP779, pressed by Optimal Media on black vinyl with a colour printed inner sleeve and download card. It corrects the misprints on the 2013 reissue.