However, where early hype for an album is often later dismissed as over-enthusiasm (see how, for example, those thunderstruck five-star reviews of ‘Be Here Now’ have been quietly rescinded over time), reverence for ‘OK Computer’ has endured, and even hardened, in the past twenty years, to the extent that in 2017 the only criticism of the album is found in wilfully contrary “sacred cow”-style takedowns. And with that, it seems, the dye was cast: ‘OK Computer’ was now shorthand for perfection, emblematic of greatness, no longer capable of being assessed purely as a piece of pop music. Before most of the general public had even had a chance to hear the album, Select called it “mould-breaking”, the NME heralded “one of the greatest albums of living memory, distancing Radiohead from their peers by an interstellar mile”, and the Guardian said it was “destined to be recognised as one of the definitive records of all time”.Ĭome Christmas, it came first or second in nearly every year-end roundup and, in perhaps the most breathless display of hysteria surrounding the record’s early life, a reader’s poll in the January 1998 issue of Q saw ‘OK Computer’, then barely six months old, edge out ‘Revolver’ as the best album of all time. Instead, within days of its release, it was being greeted almost universally by reviews that didn’t choose just to compliment it but also wanted to find it instantly totemic, of cultural and historic note far beyond its status as simply the latest addition to a then decent anthemic rock band’s fledgling discography.Īnd so it went that commentary across the UK music press in June 1997 bestowed ‘OK Computer’ with the sort of long-term significance that had last been used on ‘Sgt Pepper’, with critics citing the album as the definitive articulation of the age – of pre-millennial angst, of information overload, of capitalist homogeneity and of any other late-90s -osis that was starting to gnaw as the Y2K loomed. ‘OK Computer’ wasn’t allowed to be merely Radiohead’s third album for long.

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