READ MORE: Radiohead’s OK Computer at 20 years oldįrom the very start, the listener is made aware that OK Computer will be a more ambitious work than The Bends. Immediately, ‘Airbag’s use of sampling and the computer-constructed atmospherics that enshroud the reverberating guitars signal that Radiohead intend to diverge from the majority of concurrent mid-‘90s rock. Inspired by DJ Shadow’s groundbreaking Endtroducing… album, the percussion was built through seconds-long samples of Phil Selway’s drumming being cut-up and painstakingly re-arranged, and built on a dub-inspired stop/start bassline, ‘Airbag’ was so refreshingly different to the reductive nostalgia of Britpop.

Thom Yorke’s elliptical lyrical connections between automobile accidents and concepts of reincarnation ( “in the neon sign / scrolling up and down / I am born again”) were inspired by J.G. Ballard’s Crash, a magazine article titled ‘An Airbag Saved My Life’ and The Tibetan Book Of The Dead. Specifically, it’s about the uneasy illusion of safety offered by modern transport. In ‘Airbag’, the central paradox of the album is set up – at the same as the musicians and producers around him take delight in exploring the possibilities of technology, Yorke himself is worried by the long-term implications of it.

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