Green Plastic Radiohead

Listen to Hail to the Thief in its entirety at MTV.

There will be a Radiohead party in Barcelona, Spain this Friday night (6/6/03) at the Razz Club. There will be some DJ’s (Airhole, Amable, One Siamiss, & Gato) playing Radiohead songs all night long, including songs from Hail to the Thief. There will also be promotional Radiohead giveaways for the first ones to arrive at the club plus a special surprise: a trip for two to see Radiohead in Madrid this July. Wait, that’s not all! A screening of Radiohead videos and Meeting People is Easy will also take place. More information can be found at www.salarazzmatazz.com.
(thanks to Marc)

In an interview in today’s Toronto Sun, Ed O’Brien confirmed that the band were playing Toronto’s Molson Amphitheater on August 16.
(thanks to Sean)

We’ve received the following email today from Warner Chappell:

TO: Jonathan Percy @ Green Plastic Radiohead
Dear Jonathan:
We are writing to you on behalf of Warner Bros. Publications and Warner/Chappell Music.? We are the worldwide copyright administrators for Radiohead.? Rather than sending you an overblown “legal” letter filled with threatening language, we would simply like to ask you to remove the LYRICS & TABS archive from your website; as their distribution constitutes an infringement of our rights under U.S. Copyright Law.? More than that, the availability of these files have a direct impact on our ability to market and sell our musical arrangements and songbooks, and that adversely affects the royalties that we are able to generate and pay to the band.
May we count on your cooperation?
The foregoing is without prejudice to any right, remedy, action, claim or defense otherwise available to us under the circumstances, all of which are expressly reserved.
Sincerely,
WARNER/CHAPPELL MUSIC
??? & Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc.

This email came to me as a shock as I’m sure it is one to you. Apparently other Radiohead fansites got a similar email. While we figure out what to do and what future to take GP, let it be known that Radiohead fansites do more than just spread the news and provide information about our favorite band. It is understandable that Warner Chappell would be concerned that the hosting of lyrics and tabs would hurt their sales of Radiohead songbooks. My feeling is that we (the fansites) are helping Radiohead by marketing and promoting the band for free. It’s no doubt that without the help of the Internet, Kid A would not have hit #1 in the United States in 2000.
Nobody buys songbooks for lyrics. That’s what liner notes are for. But as you know, Radiohead doesn’t really put their lyrics in liner notes and if they do, they’re usually incomplete or cryptic. That’s where the beauty of the Internet comes in to play. By telling the sites that they cannot host lyrics, which accounts for more than half of the traffic to this site, it is pushing us to just shut the whole thing down, which I believe hurts everyone. I don’t pretend to be blind to the fact that my site is used as any other marketing tool to promote Radiohead. I do it while making no profit because I love Radiohead’s music and want to provide a free resource to fans out there. If someone needs lyrics at 3am, they’re going to turn to the internet and not try to find a store that sells Radiohead songbooks.
I’m not out here to start a legal war. If I have to shut the lyrics section down, I will… I just hope that we can work this out diplomatically and fairly for the band, Warner Chappell, and most importantly, the fans.
Jonathan Percy
In the meantime, you can sign this petition.

The Slate has an interesting week-long review of Hail to the Thief.

Here’s the review from Entertainment Weekly:

FOCUSED GROUP The graceful ”Thief” proves Radiohead aren’t the incorrigible weirdos their last two CDs made them out to be
Radiohead’s sixth album opens with the amplified thump of a cable being rammed into the jack of an electric guitar, followed immediately by a barely audible voice noting ”That’s a nice way to start.” Could there be a more perfect kickoff for a record that supposedly heralds Radiohead’s return to old-fashioned rock? Except the disc does no such thing. The band has described Hail to the Thief as a throwback to the guitars-and-songs format of 1995’s ”The Bends,” but a back-to-back listen of the two CDs renders that notion absurd. ”The Bends” captures an enormously talented alt-pop quartet playing traditional songs with traditional instruments. Despite a stronger emphasis on guitars and acoustic drums, ”Thief” (out June 10) sounds — on the surface, at least — pretty similar to Radiohead’s last two albums, ”Kid A” (2000) and ”Amnesiac” (2001). Back are the skittering digital blips (”Backdrifts” and ”Sit Down. Stand Up,” for instance); the extended, slow-moving song structures (”We Suck Young Blood” and the adjacent ”The Gloaming” meander tunelessly for nearly nine combined minutes); and ear-tweaking studio tricks cooked up by the band and longtime producer Nigel Godrich (at one point, it actually sounds like somebody’s shooting off a cheesy sci-fi laser gun).
But while references to ”The Bends” are misleading, the band does seem to have recaptured some of the spirit of that era. Maybe what they’re trying to express is that they’re finally feeling comfortable just being Radiohead again, allowing more focus on writing songs — icily elegant compositions that move and build on themselves and carry you along with them, not just out-there textures and effects. A lot of credit goes to frontman Thom Yorke, whose coolly serpentine voice is once again front and center, giving ”Thief” an emotional and melodic anchor absent from recent albums. ”Where I End and You Begin,” for example, features a syncopated guitar-and-drum groove and spacey keyboard washes, but Yorke’s sweet, clear melody keeps the tune grounded. First single ”There There” boasts the sort of gorgeous, gliding Yorke vocal seldom heard since the bridge on ”Paranoid Android.” And ”Scatterbrain” is as simple, bare, and affectively graceful as Radiohead get, with Yorke crooning plaintively over bass, fingerpicked guitar, and a rim-shot drumbeat.
The album was recorded quickly, assembled in a fraction of the time it took to concoct the self-consciously arty ”Kid A” and ”Amnesiac.” The willful inaccessibility of those hit-and-miss records felt like something of an attempt to deflate impossible-to-live-up-to expectations following the colossal success of ”OK Computer.” (Hey, if people didn’t like it, well, they just didn’t get it.) And if that meant making weird music took precedence over making great music, then so be it.
”Thief” also has plenty of weird, but there’s considerably more great. Like all Radiohead albums, it’s a slow grower, a densely packed collection of rapidly mutating sounds and surfaces that takes a while to comprehend. Though it drags a bit halfway through, the record starts strong and finishes even stronger. Opener ”2 + 2 = 5” begins with a simple vocal line, kicks into a surging guitar chorus, and eventually spirals seamlessly into the manic electronics of the next track, ”Sit Down. Stand Up.” Later on, ”A Punchup at a Wedding” showcases a killer bass groove, and ”Myxomatosis” is a thrilling prog-funk nightmare that spins an obscure rabbit disease into what appears to be an elaborate metaphor for pop star alienation.
But the real highlight is the closer, ”A Wolf at the Door,” a soaring paranoid fantasy that captures Radiohead at their spookiest and most beautiful (and somehow makes the slapstick image of a custard in the face seem truly terrifying). Any time the final track on a band’s latest album is this good, how can the group not be headed down the right path? Here’s to the future, then.