Thom Yorke interview
// «Q» Radiohead special issue, jul.2003
:: translation into russian
:: by mahaon © 2004
It's 10am on a quiet sunny Tuesday morning in Oxford.
The town is unusually still today because the local students are either
in bed, at college or sitting exams. A standard sign-off on a street
conversation seems to be, "Ah well, I must go and give this lecture."
More or less everything in sight is pretty damn old, including the bicycles
stacked up against the walls of Worcester College. Thorn Yorke and I
have arranged to meet at a cafe down a side street. I wait outside.
Ten minutes later, Yorke turns a corner from where he must have parked
his car and saunters up the street, looking very small, in baggy shades
of brown. There's no one else around to check whether he's been recognised
today.
He pauses to peer at a poster for a gig
by Killa Kela "the world-famous human beat box" before walking
up to me smiling. In the cafe, Yorke has two coffees while we talk,
but nothing to eat. He looks well, laughs a good deal, seems willing
to talk about anything and everything and swears more and more as we
go along...
__________
When OK Computer had just come out, you described how Radiohead have
the kind of profile where for six months around an album you're recognised
everywhere you go and then soon after you're anonymous again. Is that
still true?
Yeah, very much. Of course, in Oxford you get the coach parties of
tourists...
Coming to look at Thorn Yorke?
Yeah [laughs]. Tenner a go. Anyway, I don't think
it'll ever be like it was after OK Computer.
Who knows? You could find yourself being very commercial
again.
Could I? [Big laugh]
I hope you're not trying to avoid it.
No, I'm not actually. It's just that I can't really
see it happening.
How did the ideas for Hail To The Thief come about?
I went through a six-month period off after Amnesiac,
went and lived in the countryside, watching my son Noah [born February
2002] grow up and listening to the radio. Musically, all I did in that
period was make three CDs for the others to listen to, of whatever I
had kicking around. It started with Ed saying, Can you just do me a
CD of all the songs that you have half-formed? And I made a very long
list of the things that came off the radio that had an effect on me
when I heard them — phrases and images and stuff, but I wasn't
working, I wasn't really writing.
So how did those CDs develop into the recording process?
Well, we had a period where we sat and talked. When
we first started the band we used to work like this. I used to have
these noisy cassettes and they'd be the starting points for some things.
So we basically sat down and talked like that. We wanted to do a record
quickly. Then we did something crazy — yes, that was Ed's
idea — booking a tour before we'd written a note of anything new.
I'm quite a lazy person, so I was constantly moaning about it, but it
was a really good thing to do.
So that was the tour of Spain and Portugal last year?
Yes. My attitude was like, OK, if nobody liked anything
on these CDs that would be fine. We'd just start again. The same with
the lyrics. There was virtually no words written and I just had these
notes, which didn't make any sense. But I had this thing where my girlfriend
Rachel said, Why don't you just let it happen this time? And that was
my big thing all the way through the record, where I didn't try to fight
whatever was happening. When we were doing the live shows I was
just thinking, Well, this is just an interesting first stage. When we
get back to the studio we'll just record, tear it all to shreds and
put it back together again. But actually we didn't. I was trying to,
but I eventually gave up and just allowed it to happen.
Kid A and Amnesiac turned out to be great records after
a long, confusing recording process. You seem to have learned from the
ideas and methods used there...
That was something we were very into. When we got
together after those six months off, I think everybody was into
the idea that it would be just nice to keep moving, rather than going,
We have to make some sort of new, very radical, big statement, la la
la. It was such a surprise to us how much we enjoyed playing when we
finished those records. We wanted it to be like that as well. The sessions
for the making of Hail To The Thief were fun. They really were [laughs].
Hail To The Thief certainly isn't as "difficult"
as Kid A and Amnesiac. I've heard about all sorts of influences: your
son, the war in Afghanistan, a Polish modern classical composer called
Krzysztof Penderecki... Yeah, all that plus the countryside, the
radio, getting to know my little boy. I was still filtering the rattling
debris from what had happened and there was this overall sense
of... foreboding. [Grins] I sort of resist saying that because
everyone goes, Aha! He's on his doom trip again! But, without sounding
like Chicken Licken saying the sky's falling in, basically that feeling
was the origin of the song The Gloaming.
Literally, the gloaming is the time just before nightfalls.
Yeah. It's about the feeling I had that we're entering
an age of intolerance and fear. I was worrying about what was going
to be there when I was gone and Noah was left. Which is quite a normal
thing for a father to think. But where we live is in the middle of nowhere
— nobody else around — and I find that really amplifies the
media. It's like being permanently on drugs. I'd go out for a two or
three-hour walk, nature all around me, beautiful scenery, but I'd have
Radio 4 on the Walkman, the war in Afghanistan had started, some crazy
lunatic in the Bush administration talking... all this shit going round
and round and round inside me.
And then there was Penderecki...
A cello concerto. Jonny would know which one.
Hard to write a cheery tune for a cello.
There is that. I was playing it on a cassette in
the car. It's absolutely terrifying. It makes The Shining soundtrack
sound mild. A whole orchestra scored by telling a bunch of guys who'd
never played their instruments before to make as much noise as possible.
It's the equivalent of a wall of amplifiers feeding back — but
with that fragile sound of the cello in the middle. And I'd listen to
that, driving around watching the animals run for cover from the headlights.
And that got me back to music. It didn't really translate on the record
but it clicked the switch back in.
So there's this extraordinary combination of feelings
going on: new child, war, cello concerto, nature...
Yes. But in the lyrics I stripped the words coming
out of the radio away from their context. They look like they're about
the war, then again they aren't, you see what I mean?
Erm... well, a complete change on Hail To The Thief
is that the lyrics do come through very clearly, whereas they didn't
on the last two albums. It was difficult to know what you were on about
because you garbled most of them and there was no lyric sheet. I know.
I am a bloody-minded person [laughs].
But now we can hear them and you've printed the lyrics
on the sleeve as well.
Like me! Please like me! [supplicatory gestures and
laughter].
Did you make a deliberate effort to get the words across
this time or was it just the way the music took shape?
How it started was that when we went on tour last
summer, I hadn't finished writing so I had the music stand in front
of me, because I was changing the lyrics as I sang, and at the end of
each new song I'd rip them up, roll them in a ball and throw them at
people. It was fun not taking it seriously and it looked good too, just
like, Oh, that's crap! [Mimes lyric tossing] And that's crap! Like the
cliched image of a writer trying to start a novel.
Then, in February, when it was all finished and we
were mixing the album in Los Angeles, I was looking through the lyrics
and I realised that there is this child story running through it, even
if it's only an element. It looked quite interesting on the page and
I decided I wanted them on the sleeve, a wall of words.
The "child story" seems to crop up intermittently
inside references like "little babies' eyes" in I Will —
it's the last line and a kind of afterthought not directly attached
to the rest of the lyric. The funny thing about that is ‘i will’
is an old song which came from the obsession I had about the first Gulf
War — you remember when a missile hit that bunker which wasn't
a weapons dump after all, it was full of women and children? That stuck
in my head ever since, but we didn't know what to do with the song for
yonks.
And Sail To The Moon directly sets your son in the context
of all these events — "Maybe you'll be President/But know
right from wrong/Or in the flood you'll build an ark".
[Laughs and goes into bucolic Oxfordshire accent]
Come on, boy! You gotta build an ark. I'll book him into woodwork classes.
That's not why you called him Noah, is it?
God, no.
Just a nice name?
Yeah.
If Sail To The Moon is the most hopeful song on the album,
Backdrifts must be the most negative.
[Quiet satisfaction] I like that one.
"We're rotten fruit/We're damaged goods..."
[Continues the quote, smiling] ‘What the hell,
we got nothing more to lose’. [Reads upside down from my sheaf
of questions] It's the end of civilisation as we know it.
Shit, you can read upside down.
Listen, if you have a little boy you get bloody good
at it [laughs].
Well, that's about what Backdrifts adds up to.
It's not angry... it's freaked-out. It's as freaked-outas
I probably was.
Or, as freaked-out as you allowed yourself to be.
Yeah. It's like trying to keep it together but...
not really...
That seems to keep popping up, among all the other emotions
and feelings.
What, the keeping it together thing? It's just me.
Welcome to my new set of neuroses, which is slightly different from
the old one. The music itself is very claustrophobic. So much of what's
on this record is about trying to keep out of the mind control. It's
like Winston Smith in 1984. For so long he's trying to cling on, to
question where he is. But after a while it wears you out, you can't
keep on doing it.
My partner Rachel is working on a PhD
and studying Dante's Inferno. It's a happy household! It is, actually.
Anyway, the thing in Dante that I really love in the translation I've
read is his word for the people who don't give a fuck. He calls them
the "Lukewarm". Brilliant. For a while, I wanted that to be
the title of the album [instead it emerges as the subtitle of the opening
track, 2+2-5]. The Lukewarm are on the edge of the Inferno, cruising
around near the gates but they can't actually get out. They're like,
What are we doing here? We didn't do anything at all. And in Dante's
eyes it's, That's exactly why you're here. You did fuck-all. You just
let it happen.
It does sound pretty much like
that "end of civilisation as we know it" cliche. On the other
hand, here we are today in Oxford, this civilised, polite place, with
no imminent threats at all.
Well, Oxford is interesting to me because it's also
a hotbed of political dissent. But, no, I'm not talking about the end
of civilisation. I am thinking about the way the UN is being dismantled
— it's really on its knees now — and that could lead to some
major disasters because of the way democracy isn't functioning...
Right now, though, all we can do about the malfunctioning
of democracy is gaze morosely into our coffee cups. The cafe is still
devoid of any other customers and as silent as a church. We order a
couple of refills and the hissing of the machine seems to reanimate
the conversation. Yorke unknots his legs having worked himself into
some uncomfortable approximation of the lotus position, while he reviewed
the emotional entanglements that accompanied the writing of Hail To
The Thief.
Of course, on paper, it can all read like
low-grade liberal pub grumbling, and with their do-no-wrong pass long
since revoked, Radiohead are not short of critics eager to scoff at
any word — or chord — that might be dubbed "pretentious".
But Yorke is not making any of this up. Because he now has a child and
has plunged himself into public activism via the Drop The Debt Campaign,
Yorke draws on a far greater range of experiences than he did in early
days when, as he freely admits, introversion was his stock in trade.
He's an odd character, but now, more than
ever, he has something of the common man about him.
So, as usual, the album does come out of you being a
right old worrier.
Oh yes. Too right.
2+2=5, which has the album title in the lyric, seems
to be your emotional reaction to what America's been doing lately.
That was totally from listening to Radio 4. All of
it, all the lyrics and everything. Seven o'clock until nine in the morning
with Noah, and one to 1:30, then five o'clock to six. Everyday, listening
to the world news.
Which means it isn't something you want to go away?
Oh, I would like it to go away. It's not healthy,
although at that time it wasn't just me. It was all anybody ever talked
about wherever I went.
It's obvious that Hail To The Thief [the title parodies
the US presidential "anthem" Hail To The Chief] refers to
Bush's election, but...
Beyond that, it's an Orwellian thing and the fairy-tale
about the emperor's new clothes — some child in the distance going,
'"Ang on a minute, he's naked!" My lunatic theory is that
our gracious leaders firmly believe they are doing the right thing.
But they are possessed by the dark shadows who have stolen and taken
over their hosts. I think we are going through a period where that's
happened.
But I don't see the title or the record
as a political statement at all. I see politics, in terms of control
of one's own life, being removed permanently anyway. Your circumstances
are no longer our own. It's tied up with the post-anti-globalisation
thing.
Which connects with your activities forthe jubilee 2000
Drop The Debt campaign. And the ongoing accumulation of power with the
very few. That to me is what the album is about.
I went to a couple of marches against the Iraq war
in America — one in San Francisco last autumn when I played at
Neil Young's Bridge School Benefit and one in LA in February. The one
in San Francisco was spectacular. Everyone comes out of the woodwork.
Brilliant. Inspiring, actually. The LA one was smaller, but interesting
too because it was so not organised. People were like, Well, this doesn't
normally happen. Hey, we're on the streets! Wow, they've shut the streets
down!
You've referred to Myxomatosis as a reaction to
your Drop The Debt experience — there's a repeated line saying,
"I don't know why I feel so tongue-tied" and it refers to
you being "edited, fucked up/Strangled, beaten up/Used as a photo
in Time magazine."
To me, this was a very simple, humanitarian issue.
Then, the more you get into it, you discover that it's straight power
politics. The IMF is a power broker — always has been, always will
be. Should be dismantled. Same with the World Trade Organisation. The
next thing I know, it's spun back in my face and, because it was inconvenient
to the political establishment, we were cast as lunatics. I found that
deeply offensive. Telling us to not get involved with, What we don't
understand. What?! You get to this point where you feel, OK, I must
have some sort of disease. You start to feel like a fucking leper.
Who did you meet with? Who was shafting you?
I'm not going to name names.
Where did it come from?
The Labour Party principally, I would say.
You just worked on it in the UK?
Yes. Bono dealt with the American side. Britain was
interesting, though. They were quite happy to give us lots of nice quotes,
but when it came down to the fact that they weren't delivering and we
said, You're not actually doing what you said you would do, they got
very upset and they cut us off just like that. The end of democratic
access.
Was the disagreement over the facts of what level of
debt relief they were delivering?
Yeah. What they did was move it behind the IMF so
that the G8 could say, “We've cancelled our bit”. But they
hadn't really, they'd moved it behind the institutions they knew we
couldn't get to. Because they have to have that debt as a power tool.
You worked with Bono — did he give you any tutorials?
He was bloody good. It's terrifying to watch. I couldn't
do it. He'd just walk into a room and start talking to some guy and
I'd be saying, You can't talk to him, he's evil, man! [laughs]. But
Bono's quite prepared to deal with whomever, whenever. I just couldn't
do it. I was the angry young man.
He does seem to have a handle on it. Though maybe even
he gets manipulated.
He leaves himself open to it. Whereas I'm the other
extreme, I put people's backs up even before I start talking to them
[laughs].
You've pulled out of it, have you?
Not really. I still totally believe in it. I still
correspond with them, but it's a much smaller organisation now.
A website quotes Jonny Greenwood saying that the new
album is "summing up what it's like to be around in 2003".
Really? Oh, don't say that Jonny. Oh God! [Clutches
head, laughs] No, if you start out writing with the objective of saying
what it's like to be alive in this world at this moment then it's going
to be dreadful.
After OK Computer, you did do almost everything except
changing the personnel of the band in order to change yourselves again.
You even considered changing the band's name. In retrospect, was that
the biggest turning point for the band so far?
Yes, because from everybody's point of view in the
band it was the last thing we wanted really. It was like everyone in
the band had found their footing and was like, OK, let's go. Unfortunately,
for me, that point was exactly the time where, having found my footing,
I had to unfind it again. Because I think that's just my problem, that's
my thing — if I know what I'm going to do, if I know how it's gonna
happen, it won't happen. Which is a sort of curse, really.
It could be seen as courageous... What's your feelingabout
where you are as a band — there's a quote here from a while ago,
I don't know if you'd still hold to it: "If you're a pop star,
all you do is search for immortality."
I'm trying not to do that any more. Fame is definitely
about wanting to be remembered. But that's not much good to you when
you're dead. I guess you could hover above... most religions would say
that you're attaching yourself to the world forever and you'll
never move on, so you'll end up in limbo because you'll want to stay
in that world as much as you can. I don't like to think about that too
much.
When Amnesiac came out, Bob Hilburn of the LA Times wrote
that "Radiohead's story is one of self-preservation by focusing
on music rather than sales".
Yeah. I don't think the band's fundamental objective
has changed over the years: it's always been survival [laughs]. To carry
on and not get damaged. Or crack up. It's constantly, Is it worth doing
this? It's a weird mix of wanting to get the music heard, but being
aware that we can do things that fuck up how people see it. Obviously,
the aim is to continue to have free licence to do what we want
artistically. [Puffs out a sigh] I don't like being the CEO of a huge
corporation...
Do you feel as if you are?
When a record comes out, there are a few weeks when
you're having to make decisions, you are basically in control of this
big bloody beast. We could do what the record company or our managers
say all the time, but obviously we don't, so that involves an awful
lot of work, coming up with solutions to problems.
Do you share the proceeds equally?
We do, except for the writing which we divide according
to who wrote what; that takes ages.
You argue about it?
We don't actually, no.
That's often a band's downfall, the area where...
Yes, we know, but we have a system and we work it
out. I think we're pretty sorted out.
You've said that Radiohead's music started out as self-expression,
with your lyrics basically saying, 'This is me!", but that you
had moved on by the time you made OK Computer.
Yeah. At first, the lyrics were more personally based,
more internal monologues.
But you've also said that songwriting and playing is
"therapy" to you.
I still think it is. But now I don't feel in any
way responsible for it. Once it's finished and I'm happy and everyone
feels happy with it then... I don't feel responsible for the lyrics,
for example.
But you wrote them.
No, I am responsible, I know. What I mean is that
I'm not personally answerable for the characters in the songs. That's
not me talking. And I think that people who listen to us know that now.
And I'm not so interested in... [pause]
In?
In myself [laughs]. I find it indulgent to be constantly
worried about that and I don't like music that does that. You always
veer towards it in songwriting, but the thing about being a dad is that
it made me think about... it made me think positively about music. I
think I finally understood why I was doing it... properly. I really
understood why I was doing it, that it's a sacred thing that I need
to protect.
Sacred?
Yeah. Dodgy word, I know.
You mean it in a religious context?
No, sacred in the sense that good music is important
to people and can make a difference. Apart from thinking about
music in the light of being a father, it was also coming out of the
Kid A and Amnesiac records and discovering there was something there
that I was really proud of, although they were really difficult to make.
And difficult to listen to for many, as evidenced
by sales. Between them they just about matched OK Computer's five million
worldwide. Which is still good business, and allowed them to exercise
their artistic freedom unchallenged. Whether a long-term perspective
will deem these albums positively adventurous or negatively lost and
confused, they did lead to a lot of people who had loved Radiohead in
the '90s beginning to wonder whether they ever would again. The question
now is how devotees will take to Hail To The Thief s return to a more
conventional sound.
The new album really does feel like a big change from
the last two.
Really? It was very much not trying to be. Just let
it happen, wherever we're at.
This one seems to have more of the dynamics of rock music.
I got really obsessed by electronic music for a long
time, but what I've discovered is that my angle in there is, if I go
into the electronic stuff, it has to have this performance thing. This
randomness.
There was some advance publicity saying, We're going
back to rock'n'roll!
We always do that! It's a running joke. A cynical
marketing ploy [laughs].
One of you had a nice line about "electronic music
takes the emphasis off personalities".
I still believe that.
What brought you back to those typical elements of rock
music? Why did they come back?
I don't know. I'm trying to think... [laughs]. I
just got back into that sort of music. I got bored with listening to
my electronic stuff, and I just stopped buying records. I was moving
house and moving around a lot, so all my records went into storage and
I was left with a few CDs.
Which were?
Er... I'm not telling you. Because that is like,
you know...
...Like advertising Thorn Yorke's desert island discs?
And I've stopped listening to music quite a lot anyway.
I listen to music at very odd times.
You mentioned Charlie Mingus and electronic laptop music
as the inspirations for Kid A and Amnesiac. After the non-listening
period you just mentioned, did you find something as well as the Penderecki
concertos inspiring you to make the music on Hail To The Thief?
I think a lot of it came out of stopping listening
to things completely. The only thing that really had made me think was
listening to The Beatles. One of the few things I retrieved before we
had to put all the things into boxes was The Beatles' stuff. There was
this simplicity thing, and I thought OK, I like that. That's done
quickly and it's very simple. And that's something I know we are very
good at, and we haven't done it for ages. It's not like "We have
to do I Am The Walrus", but it's just being ambitious about our
own music again. Whereas with Kid A and Amnesiac, I was certainly
not ambitious. I didn't give a flying fuck if anybody heard it or not.
I was even amazed that we'd kept it together and it came out. But
this time it's like, No, no, I want to be heard.
One of your most memorable quotes is, "Rock is boring,
it's crap music". But what is great is that the anarchic music
born out of that feeling ended up suggesting rock has a future after
all.
Maybe, yeah. I find it very interesting at the moment
that rock is mutating into this constant retro thing. I can completely
understand why. I think we were always destined to be the slightly mad
uncles who tried these things out and in the process we'd sometimes
not have that spontaneous "yeah!" thing. We're old guys now,
we don't have that But to me, the downside of it is that the music business
is really into that, and it's like, Oh yes, we understand this. This
band here is obviously like this band here, and this band is like that
one there, blah blah blah. I just find it so depressing. And it's quite
offensive to 30-something guys like us, saying to the kids of that age,
You'll like this, this is great, we used to listen to this when we were
your age. Fuck off. What's missing is the ability to explode in your
face. The sort of thing you get with all good music.
With your music, it seems to me you were in hiding but
now you've come out again.
Definitely. But that was a reaction to what had happened
previously in the OK Computer period. We got back into the idea of performance
in making music. The thing I was getting bored with from listening to
a lot of electronic stuff, was having to listen to the grid — as
we call it. When you record on to ProTools everything is on a grid
and everyone works to it now. Well, there's very little that's on the
grid on this record. We deliberately used old electronic systems
that went in and out of time, just because we couldn't stand the idea
of things being on the grid.
After the success of OK Computer your reputation seemed
to affect you a lot. Listen to this web review of the new LP...
I've got a policy of not reading reviews.
Well, I'm going to read this one to you.
No, no [mock horror gestures].
"Radiohead has been the yardstick against which
music in the modern age is measured... a modern musical age which
owes a significant portion of its own self-concept to OK Computer."
I think that's fucking nonsense.
Do you really, or is that just a reaction to stop yourself
getting a swollen head?
No, really. It's absolute fucking nonsense. Also,
I have a problem when people talk about music "progressing".
I don't think it does, it just shifts. Progression implies music was
stupid to begin with and then it got cleverer. That's fucking daft.
Anyway, that reputation issue you mentioned is very much a media discussion,
which we don't have anything to do with.
Except it's not just media. It's your fans as well.
Yeah, kind of.
Radiohead are revered.
[Embarrassed, adopts Irish accent] Ah, 'twon't last!
It won't last.
But you have to deal with it.
No, I don't I don't deal with it [laughs].
OK. One surprise about Hail To The Thief is that it was
recorded in Los Angeles. Allegedly, your producer Nigel Godrich dragged
you to California — kicking and screaming?
Not exactly. It seemed like such a stupid thing to
do, so we had to do it. Quite a laugh. Very expensive. Our hotel bill
cost more than the studio, which was very disturbing. I went to Ocean
Way while Nigel was doing Beck's last record and I just liked the studio.
It was lovely.
What makes a studio lovely?
It's... brown [laughs].
Can it be true that Radiohead drove around Los Angeles
in a fleet of Minis with Union Jacks on the side?
We did. Phil and Colin have got pictures to prove
it.
And there were nightly trips to Griffith Park Observatory
to watch the sun going down?
We did that. And trips to a few glamorous clubs I
can't remember the name of. Quite weird. We went to LA to be glamorous,
but we didn't really get any glamour because we were working too hard.
I'd love to be glamorous. We did try. We worked like nutters, though.
We did a song a day. We'd start at midday, finish at midnight. The excursion
to the observatory was the only time we got out during the day.
Why did you work so fast?
Because we knew it was how we worked best.
Even though you hadn't done it before?
No. Well, yes we had, you see. All the best things
we've done were recorded quickly. On Kid A and Amnesiac, all the good
bits were done very quickly indeed, it was just the gaps in between
that were long.
Did LA itself have any effect on the album?
Definitely.
That sounded sarcastic.
No, it's not! LA was like landing on Mars to us.
The things that I was singing about seemed to have very little context
there and so the album came out sounding energetic and sparkly despite
the themes.
One showbiz question from the promotional build-up
to releasing Hail To The Thief: You may not know this happened but...
[he responds
before the question is asked, having read it upside down again —
it's about Blur's set at the Coachella Festival in California being
buzzed by a light aircraft towing a "Radiohead — Hail To The
Thief banner]. We certainly didn't know about it in advance. I'm
going to have to apologise to them when I see them because that's really
bad. It was so crap. I'd be absolutely furious if another band did it
to us.
It wasn't a Radiohead practical joke?
No way, man. Christ!
Given the inspiration for the album was a combination
of personal emotions and political events back in 2001, do you find
that most of it still applies to how you see things now?
Partly. The way Blair has conducted himself throughout
this period, all the moral pronouncements when all they were trying
to do was escalate the threats, it's been theatre of the absurd. But
only yesterday I was reading the proofs of a book called The Age Of
Consent by a friend of mine, George Monbiot, a Guardian writer. He lives
in Oxford, I go out drinking with him occasionally. Although he's saying
the way states function globally is much more akin to pure anarchy than
democracy, he is really inspiring about the future. So I don't feel
like I did when I was involved with this record, I don't feel that sense
of utter powerlessness any more — because that's pointless.
It's more, OK, what are we gonna do? We're going to move
on again?
Yes. We couldn't drift back much further.
The representative from Radiohead's Courtyard Management
is making wind-up gestures. In the mood, Yorke plainly loves to talk,
but he has to get away. He apologises — equipment to pick
up and an hour's drive to a London studio where Radiohead are rehearsing
for their summer gigs. A final question? Yeah sure.
It has to be about the internet, the medium
which some claim is killing the record industry and, by extension, killing
music. No band has been more energetic and imaginative in using
the web to communicate with fans than Radiohead. However, when a version
of Hail To The Thief hit the net months before the official release
date, they did express annoyance: Jonny Greenwood took to the site to
rail against the pirates, specifically because the fans were being given
unfinished work.
What's your take on the new album leaking on to the web?
You have been approving of the internet, but it seems from various comments
the band have made that the loss of control got to you this time.
There is nothing I can do about it. I think it's
indicative of the fact that we aren't going to be able to earn a living
making music like bands used to. I'm sure in 10 years I won't earn the
living I do now, because of it. But that's OK — I'm alright, I'm
lucky. But I think it's a shame for the other people who are working
very hard. To be honest, the major record labels deserve this, and they've
deserved this for a long time. They had a lot of bad karma coming their
way, and they push it my way as well. But it doesn't upset me, it doesn't
bother me at all. I think it's a shame. I think we are just going to
have to think of another way of doing it. Ultimately, what we should
be doing is that, when we finish a record, we just put it straight on
the net. That's the problem solved [laughs]. Charge 50p a track. That's
a good price.
{the end}
