We never wanted to be a garage band. We wanted to get as quick as we could out of the garage...Rock music was most exciting when it was in the 45 [rpm single], when it was disciplined into a single. When the wind starts blowing in the hair, and it meanders off, you can get some great [stuff], but it doesn't interest me as much. The 45 is the pure rock to me. That is why I wanted to be in a band.
Radiohead just looked at the pop machine and the machinations of pop and just said, we don't have it in us, we don't have the energy, to have our way with that. I don't hear [Radiohead's] Thom Yorke singing on the radio. I want to hear Radiohead, extraordinary band that they are, on MTV. I want them setting fire to the imaginations of 16, 15, 14 year old kids.
We did all the things (on Bomb) that we would have done in promoting our first, or second or third albums. There's this poverty of ambition, in terms of what rock people will do to promote their work. That's a critical issue to me. The excitement of punk rock, in the Irish and UK scene when we were coming up, was seeing our favorite band on "Top of the Pops," right next to the "enemy." That would be exciting. We did talk shows, TV shows, back then. It was proof that you believed enough in what you did that you would go out and do this stuff. It was the same with the Beatles. The great moments of rock 'n' roll were never off in some corner of the music world, in a self-constructed ghetto. I don't like that kind of thinking. I know some of it exists, and some of our best friends are part of it. It's not for me.
I used to love Kurt Cobain, when he was telling people "we're a pop band". People would laugh, they thought of it as good old ironic Kurt. But he wasn't being ironic. He was a songwriter, he understands that when a guitar solo is playing the melody of the song, that's pop. That's what the Buzzcocks taught him, who learned it from the Beatles. That's what makes him a pop star, that's what makes it pop music. He wanted to be on MTV, he wanted to be stirring things up. He surprised us all with where he did come out from.