The electronic producer and samplist pioneer DJ Shadow was a huge influence on Radiohead as they got to work on their game-changing 1997 record OK Computer, the Oxford five-piece revealing that the stop-start grooves of opening track Airbag were them trying to ape some DJ Shadow-style rhythmics. It made sense then when Shadow, a Californian whose real name is Josh Davis, got to work on the debut album for his and James Lavelle’s collaborative UNKLE project and enlisted Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke to work on one of the tracks. The album, Psyence Ficition, was released in August 1998 and the Yorke-featuring Rabbit In Your Headlights, a plaintive ballad pockmarked with Davis’s trademark frenetic beats, was one of its standout tracks. It was released as the record’s lead single, and in a recent interview with The New Cue, Davis said watching Yorke work in the studio was one of the most impressive things he’d witnessed across a three-decade-plus career.
“This is somebody that I had a lot of respect for,” Davis said. “OK Computer had just come out and I had done some touring with them and knew their music quite well. He wrote Rabbit In Your Headlights in the studio and was very deliberate and serious about it. When he was ready to record, he just sort of went, ‘Okay, come on, let’s go’ and he did it all in one take. He held this really long note at the end and James Lavelle and I just looked at each other in the studio and just kind of went, ‘Wow, fuck, that’s it’. We had goosebumps because it was just a very cool thing to be in the studio and be a part of.”
