By Edd McCracken, Arts Correspondent
The voice is vaguely familiar, but the backing band is anything but. On drums, an Epson dot-matrix printer. On bass, a Hewlett-Packard scanner. On lead guitar, a ZX Spectrum. And on vocals, filtered through the innards of broken hard drives, Radiohead's Thom Yorke.
This supergroup of obsolete machinery and one of the world's most famous singers was brought together by a student at Glasgow School of Art, who over the course of last week has taken it from being his final-year video project to becoming an internet sensation.
Since their performance of the Radiohead song Nude was posted on websites last week, the video has attracted hundreds of thousands of viewers and worldwide acclaim, as well as receiving the blessing of the band itself.
Entitled Big Ideas (Don't Get Any), the four-minute video is the work of 21-year-old James Houston, a graduating visual communications student.
After it appeared on YouTube and several other internet sites, Houston, who claims he is not a musician, has been offered a record contract, been interviewed by American radio stations, had the video broadcast on Current TV, and been offered the chance to screen it at the Reading and Leeds festivals.
It attracted so many visits to one website that the counter measuring the number of views broke and, rather bizarrely, is in the top 10 favourite YouTube music videos in Russia.
"It's crazy," said Houston. "It's spiralled out of control. I'm shocked by this. But it's flattering. I'm just an arts student, but this is a monster. It's grown much bigger than I thought it was going to be."
Filming in a Glasgow studio, Houston reprogrammed an old printer and scanner to create the rhythm section of the song. He then used the high-pitched sound of a rubber-keyed Spectrum to mimic the guitar parts and played Yorke's disembodied vocals through the coils within old hard drives, creating a ghostly, distorted sound through the unorthodox speakers.
Finally, over two days of tweaking and synchronising, he filmed his makeshift band playing the song from Radiohead's latest album, In Rainbows.
"I just thought it would be nice to get all this redundant hardware, try to get big ideas and get them to do something they aren't designed to do, and make a wee bit of a mess of it," he said. "It's a nice touch. It's generated a lot of nice comments. People have seen the emotion in objects that aren't alive. They're struggling to be something they aren't."
On the same day that Houston posted the video online, Colin Greenwood, Radiohead's bassist, called it "brilliant" on their website and revealed he "had a Spectrum flashback moment".
It was David Smith, a lecturer in technology based in London and personal friend of the band, who recommended the video. He has invited Houston to come and give a lecture to his pupils about "intelligent remixing".
"The video is amazing," said Smith. "The first time I saw it I thought it had an unusual quality. It was outstanding. You see a lot of videos on the web that are clever, but this was highly intelligent, amusing and thought-provoking.
"It just struck me immediately as being a unique piece of work - a really good example of the intelligent remix. And it's a great role model to have in front of a young teenager, so they can think, I could do something as clever as that."
Academics at Glasgow School of Art have been equally generous with their praise. Paul Stickley, head of visual communication, described Houston's work as "witty" and said it contained "a very Glaswegian cheek to poke fun at celebrity status".
"We've some exceptional people, and James is one of them," he added. "But it is surprising that he now seems to have an international reputation and he hasn't even graduated yet. On the other hand, we are getting quite used to that. When one of our students puts something online, it usually goes intergalactic."
Houston received a first for his degree show. His work can be seen online at sundayherald.com and at Glasgow School of Art's Foulis Building as part of the degree show until June 21.
