Category: Radiohead

Thom Yorke discusses the band’s future, fatherhood and his song about a weapons inspector’s suicide
ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
From Wednesday’s Globe and Mail
Everything in its right place. That catchphrase from a Radiohead song (and its inevitable ambiguity) seemed to summarize the direction of Thom Yorke’s thoughts as the band’s lead singer sat in a Toronto hotel recounting his recent adventures as band-mate, musician, citizen and father.
Encountered after breakfast on a sunny day, during a break in a tour that thus far has been happier than some Radiohead excursions, Yorke at 37 seemed serene and relaxed. The professional strains of past years have lessened, and family life (he has two children) agrees with him. The band has been recording again, despite (or because of) its lack of obligations to any label. He has got a record of his own ready for release next month on XL Recordings, made in a spirit of fun and exploration with Radiohead’s long-time producer, Nigel Godrich.
“It was like we’d been let loose in the tool cupboard,” Yorke said of his sessions with Godrich. It took just seven weeks to put The Eraser together — a stroll in the park compared with some of Radiohead’s gruelling studio marathons.
Yorke has spent his career blurring the boundaries between reason and instinct, mind and body, order and chaos. Dealing with computers gave him new ways of seeing how much chaos can be maintained within a situation in which precision and perfection seem so readily available.
“One of the reasons we wanted to do the project was to approach and engage with computers and not a lot else, and yet still have lots of life and energy in the music,” he said. He found it ridiculously easy to generate material — “so easy, you think it must be cheating.”
He often cut and pasted samples at random, not looking at the screen, then combed through the results to see what chance and the rhythm of the process had put down. The tricky thing, he said, wasn’t making the sounds, but recognizing which of them were right.
“It wasn’t pure chance,” he said, “because I knew basically where I wanted to end up. It’s like Nigel says: If you have an idea when you start, it’s a lark. If you don’t, it’s a nightmare. …
“I didn’t really come into it expecting to make songs. It started just with random bits and pieces. I guess I thought there would be vocals, but I was thinking in terms of using little vocal shreds, and of making them part of the tapestry, not the main thing. But as soon as we had gone through the initial sketches, it became obvious that they could be quite direct. Nigel basically dragged me kicking and screaming toward the concept of them being actual songs.”

Here’s a recent interview Thom did with the Observer:
It was the night of Monday 1 May in the cavernous indie club that is Koko in Camden Town, and Disco Dave Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party, was in the house. The occasion was The Big Ask Live, a benefit concert in aid of Friends of the Earth’s campaign to persuade the government to enact a new law on climate change.
Thom Yorke had been doing his bit. The Radiohead frontman and his guitarist bandmate Jonny Greenwood had agreed to break two years of gig-silence to headline the show. Gruff Rhys from Super Furry Animals was on the bill, as was folk singer Kate Rusby, while curly-headed TV pop presenter Simon Amstell was the compere. Not that it mattered. The 1,000 people who had snapped up tickets for the charity event – some gladly hornswoggled to the tune of £150 by eBay scalpers – were only there to see the guys from Radiohead.
Yorke, an ‘ambassador’ for FoE, had written to the leaders of the three major political parties, inviting them to the gig. ‘Well, obviously I didn’t write to Tony,’ the 37-year-old singer said. ‘I wrote to Gordon Brown instead.’
‘Obviously’ because Thom Yorke hates Tony Blair; because he thinks the PM has ‘no environmental credentials’; because Yorke is viscerally opposed to the Iraq war and to current global trade practices. And because the rock star had already declined an invitation to meet the Prime Minister last September.
Why miss the opportunity to lobby the chap on the political throne? Given his passionate espousal of these causes, isn’t it Yorke’s duty to at least engage in a conversation?
‘Not when there were all sorts of conditions being put up.’
Such as?
‘[Blair’s advisers] wanted pre-meetings. They wanted to know that I was onside. Also, I was being manoeuvred into a position where if I said the wrong thing post-the meeting, Friends of the Earth would lose their access. Which normally would be called blackmail.’ Yorke flashed a humour-free smile.
So Yorke wrote to Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown instead, and Brown (says Yorke) said he would send Environment Secretary David Miliband. The singer’s letter to David Cameron, meanwhile, elicited an eager response. The Tory leader wrote back, Jim’ll Fix It-style, raving about Radiohead’s ‘Fake Plastic Trees’.
‘I sent this rather sad letter saying I’d love to come to the concert, thank you for asking,’ Cameron told Sue Lawley on Desert Island Discs four weeks after The Big Ask Live. ‘PS: please play this, my favourite song, and he did.’
Sadly for the rather starstruck Tory leader, Yorke’s PR subsequently issued a statement denying this causal link. The choice of songs on the setlist had ‘nothing to do with any special guests’.
After the Koko show, the VIP mingling. Yorke met the politicos. He found that both Miliband’s and Cameron’s wives were ‘big Radiohead freaks, so that was quite interesting’.
What did he make of Cameron?’
‘He looked very nervous. As you would.’
A politician Yorke could do business with?
‘Nnnooo,’ said Yorke with pained emphasis. ‘But then it’s not my job to do that bit. I wouldn’t do that with any of them.’

Thom and Jonny recently did a 40+ minute interview and performance for the radio music talk show, Sound Opinions. It will air in Chicago this Saturday at 7 PM CT. If you’re not in Chicago or won’t be able to listen, the interview and performance will be available on the Sound Opinions website as a podcast download on Monday. We’ve also been told that they will release a 70 minute separate podcast of the full interview.
Check it out! It should be an excellent listen.
http://soundopinions.org

Ben Mathis-Lilley from New York Magazine wrote to us about an interview he recently did with Ed. Entitled “Secrets of the Radiohead Set List”, the interview details how the band chooses their set list and the significance of certain songs played.

Along with front man Thom Yorke and drummer Phil Selway, O’Brien puts together set lists after lunch on the day of each show. “For this tour, we have about fifteen new songs, and before the tour, we went through a list of about 100 old ones, then whittled it down and rehearsed 45 songs, and we draw from those.” We asked O’Brien to go through the list after last Tuesday’s show at the Theater at Madison Square Garden.

Check out the interview here!

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