interviews

2008-01-29

2008-01-30T09:18:00.000-08:00

2008 February | Rolling Stone

2008-01-25T08:36:00.000-08:00

M.I.A.'s Arular

"I really try to limit [listening to other people's music while working on new songs], but M.I.A.'s first record really seeped in. M.I.A. takes this complete block and chop repeat, chop repeat, chop, not finished [method]. Which really reminds me of that thing of just picking up a guitar and the first three chords you write and being like, yep, that's good. Stop. End. Not sort of sitting there fifteen hours later agonizing over the hi-hat sound. That seems to be what happens with programming and electronica a lot of the time. You can feel the pain going on." — Thom Yorke

The Liars' Drum's Not Dead

"On Drum's Not Dead in particular, their method of putting things together was so fucking out there. It was like something from the Seventies." — Thom Yorke

The Smiths

"I only went to Manchester really because of the music scene and really because of the Smiths. And when I got there, within a month I got seven Smiths shows." — Ed O'Brien

"I think I went [to Smiths shows] about ten or fifteen times. I'd stay with him and we saw a couple of shows." — Thom Yorke

Happy Mondays

"The Happy Mondays were amazing. I never saw them, I had the records. And when they were on, they were incredible and when they were off, they were incredibly awful." — Ed O'Brien

"In terms of musical appearance, that was the most influential, informed period for all of us." — Thom Yorke

Pixies and Throwing Muses

"Our teenage years we were all about going down to London and seeing all of favorite Boston bands, Throwing Muses and Pixies — that sort of music, really. Boston is so much cooler. I had no idea, I had never been anywhere near America." — Jonny Greenwood

Fleetwood Mac
"Well I try to tell everyone, I'm a complete fan of Fleetwood Mac. I put a couple of thing on the webcast and I thought I would hear some mutterings about it. I didn't say what it was, and they'd say, 'Wow, that was great, what was it?' and I would say, 'Fleetwood Mac, you bastards!' Our manager introduced me to Fleetwood Mac years ago because he knows Peter Green-era, sort of psychedelic folk blues. Just the way it was recorded with the drums, the dry drums with the percussion in the background. Just really amazing and it sounds really modern to me as well. I just think it's great." — Colin Greenwood

Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow

"I just started Gravity's Rainbow. I tried reading it once before, but this time around it's much more fun. It's a really early one, isn't it? This one seems easier to get into than V." — Thom York

Viktor E. Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning

"I just finished a Viktor Frankl book, Search for Meaning, which is an amazing story. He was in a concentration camp in the second World War and he was also a psychiatrist, so he was able to be sort of objective about the human spirit and why some people fell by the wayside and why some survived and how they did it." — Ed O'Brien

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine

"And I just bought The Shock Doctrine. I knew it was out and I haven't read one of those kinds of books for a very long time. I'm ready for it." — Ed O'Brien

Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner

"And now I'm reading The Kite Runner, which I hard was just made into a film, it's about Afghanistan. Which is an amazing story. It's not very good bedtime reading 'cause it's a bit, you know. It?s really interesting, the tensions between the Pushtans and the Hazaras — we just think of them as a bunch of Afghans, but of course they?re a tribal people. And it goes from pre-Soviet invasion to Soviet invasion, to post and the Taliban." — Ed O'Brien

George Monbiot's Heat

"The one that finished me off was George Mombiat's book Heat. The most sort of radical I've read on the climate change, which totally blew my mind. It's just really very frightening. It's very stimulating but very frightening." — Thom Yorke

Pixies Documentary loudQUIETloud

"I'll tell you if anyone wants to understand what it's like to be in a band, is this Pixie's documentary that Jonny brought in that we watched. That's what it's like, a group of people working in a close proximity for fifteen years together and going through a lot of emotion and stuff and essentially being people and coming out from the experience not to get too damaged from it and I thought that was very very very good. Really tender and accurate and I know some universal truths about it and not just about the Pixies." — Colin Greenwood

--rollingstone.com

2008 February | Rolling Stone

2008-01-25T08:26:00.000-08:00

The Future According to Radiohead
How Radiohead ditched the record business and still topped the charts

MARK BINELLI

Posted Jan 23, 2008 5:45 AM

Sunday afternoons,Thom Yorke enjoys taking his kids to Oxford University's Museum of Natural History, a stately, neo-Gothic building on the outskirts of the city center. They wander around the grand atrium, past the skull of the humpback whale, propped up like a massive bear trap, and the stuffed dodo bird behind glass, and the creepy statues of Great Men of Science. The statues are extremely lifelike except for their eyeballs, which, thanks to some odd sculptorial decision, have been rendered as entirely blank orbs, giving boyish, pensive Newton and bearded, stoic Darwin and an unreasonably furious-looking Aristotle all terrifying dead-eyed stares. And, of course, Yorke's kids love the enormous dinosaur skeletons, which dominate the room, rearing up in fearsome poses.

Approximately 150 years earlier, a sickly, stuttering Oxford mathematician named Charles Dodgson would come to the museum with his college dean's young daughter, Alice Liddell; to entertain her, he would make up fantastic stories about the dodo and various other animals, which he eventually published under his pen name, Lewis Carroll, as Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Yorke, who is thirty-nine – he has a three-year-old daughter and a six-year-old son — also occasionally writes about animals, though not in a way meant to delight children. "Myxomatosis," from the 2003 Radiohead album, Hail to the Thief, is named for a horrible disease that kills rabbits and opens with the line "The mongrel cat came home holding half a head. . . . " Then there is "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi," a track on the most recent Radiohead album, In Rainbows, in which Yorke imagines himself at the bottom of the ocean being nibbled upon by fish and worms. Pluralizing "fish" as "fishes" is an unusual choice, and whenever Yorke howls the words "weird fishes," the questionable grammar makes him sound like a demented schoolboy.

The rest of the song has a muffled, underwater quality, with the titular arpeggio underlaid by a spare, insistent percussion and the guitar notes occasionally warping to sound like a steel drum might be buried deep in the mix. In another strange turn of phrase, Yorke croons, "Your eyes, they turn me," creating an interesting tension by never adding the expected "on." With all of the references to freedom — "why should I stay here"; "everybody leaves if they get a chance" — the song could almost pass for a morbid parody of early Springsteen, as if the protagonists of "Thunder Road" had busted loose from small-town Jersey by throwing themselves off a bridge.

"Hit the bottom," Yorke sings in the final lines, "and escape."

Excerpt from RS Issue 1045

--rollingstone.com

2008 February | Mojo

2008-01-25T08:20:00.000-08:00

CHASING RAIN_BOWS

Four years in the making, In Rainbows is both tortured and triumphant... Here, for the first time, is the unexpurgated inside story of the album that nearly destroyed RADIOHEAD and gave the music industry a heart attack...

Words: MARK_PAYTRESS
Pics: KEVIN_WESTENBERG

THEY WENT DEAF DURING THE SESSIONS. Imagined themselves as the Monty Python team with guitars. Battled rat poison and, more deadly still, their own desperately doubting ways. They thought it was all over (it wasn't). Four studios, two producers, endless tweaks and retakes followed. But now, four years on from 2003's Hail To The Thief, Radiohead are back with a record that even they themselves grudgingly admit has left them feeling "really excited and really proud". That record is, of course, In Rainbows, MOJO's album of 2007.

As well as shaking up the industry itself with its pay-what-you-want model, it's an album that artfully distils the band's very essence while at the same time avoiding the customary curses of cliche or complacency. And then, of course, there's new eight new tracks on the bonus CD Discbox edition available exclusively via the band's own website which paints an even more panoptic picture. A picture that will fully reveal itself during a week-long round of interviews with all five members of Radiohead as they unravel the titanic tale of their creative rebirth.

"I GUESS WE HAD HIGH EXPECTATIONS THIS TIME round," shrugs Thom Yorke, in the quiet of a book-lined private room in The Old Parsonage Hotel ("The Old Parsnip," jests Jonny Greenwood), an establishment with the ambience of a country house on the outskirts of Oxford city centre. In the relative tranquillity of the city Yorke still calls home, he exudes a warm glow, one that's accentuated by the generous stubble of an incipient beard. He's so relaxed, in fact, that he takes MOJO for a short tour of the city centre at the end of our interview. "Now that's where several students were executed by the locals," he says with a glint in his eye, while pointing at a blink-and-you'll-miss-it bricked-out patch of Broad Street. Actually, the youthful-looking Yorke blends in perfectly here; all that's missing is the college scarf.

Back at the Old Parsnip earlier, Yorke unleashes the first of several loud laughs that belie public perceptions of him as an arch, lemon-sucking miserablist. We're talking about the difficult days of Hail To The Thief. "Yeah, we knew that was a lower part of the curve," he says after a characteristic pause for thought, "and, yes, we knew we'd carry on. But it felt very much that the branch had become a twig - and that we could fall off the tree at any point!"

Yorke can laugh now, but on reflection the Hail To The Thief experience almost brought Radiohead to their knees. Indeed, no one could have foreseen the car crash ahead when, in July 2002, the band road-tested the material for two months before decamping to Los Angeles in September where they laid the basis of the album down in one two-week session. "It was very much a reaction to the protracted recording of Kid A," says drummer Phil Selway, referring to the three years it took the band to follow-up 1997's standard-bearer, OK Computer. "It was also a response to the excitement we'd rediscovered by playing the Kid A material live. We wanted to capture that on record."

To some extent, it worked. Guitarist Ed O'Brien talked up the album's "swagger" on its release, Yorke recalled how he wept when he first heard the playback to There There, and the band proved that they could do it without squirrelling themselves away for years and hiring a stately home for inspiration - as they'd done for both OK Computer and Kid A. But despite its intermittent brilliance (and There There does sound like a spellbinding peak of sorts) and initial commercial success, Hail To The Thief was a short-term compromise solution that quickly proved to be no solution at all.

"We should have pruned it down to 10 songs, then it would have been a really good record," says O'Brien. "Working on In Rainbows, I was aware that we were making something that was really engaging, that moved people again. and I don't think Hail To The Thief consistently did that. I think we lost people on a couple of tracks and it broke the spell of the record."

Colin Greenwood knew as much from the start. "I didn't want three or four songs on there, because I thought some of the ideas we were trying out weren't completely finished." Such as? "The Gloaming. We played it live and it was cool. My brother [Jonny] sampled each of the instruments on stage, cut them up then sent them back into the mix. It was so exciting, like a live DJ show, and Thom performed off of all of that. But it wasn't the same in the studio. For me, Hail To The Thief was more of a holding process, really."

SITTING IN THE QUIET OF "PROBABLY OXFORD'S first and last London-style private members' club" above the QI bookshop, guitarist Jonny Greenwood, the most restless Radiohead member - "he has the patience of an insect!" says Yorke - also concedes that Hail To The Thief was a few songs too long. "We were trying to do what people said we were good at," he admits. "But it was good for our heads. It was good for us to be doing a record that came out of playing live."

If the suspicion that the record wasn't quite up to their usual standard didn't break them, then a year on the road touring Hail To The Thief very nearly did. After a short tour of Japan and Australia in April 2004, the band retreated back to their various young families. "It was definitely time to take a break," says Phil Selway. "There was still a desire amongst us to make music, but also a realisation that other aspects of our lives were being neglected. And we'd come to the end of our contract [with EMI], which gives you a natural point to look back over at what you've achieved as a band."

Any suggestion that this 'natural' break was a cover for a more ruinous rift within the group is rebuffed by O'Brien. The most relaxed band member in person, he is also the one least bound by what might be termed Radiohead-speak. "No, I didn't think the band would collapse. I wasn't scared. You know, if it all collapses, it's only a fucking band." But a livelihood, too. "Yeah, it's a living, it's a very nice living. But we've all got nice houses. We're not gonna starve. There are always other things we can do. But I wasn't ever worried about it. The good thing that came out of it was confronting things.

Confrontation they can do, but they don't really do compliments. Mention Nick Kent's claim in this magazine in 2001 that they were "the most important band in the world", and they'll pretend they haven't heard what you've said. It is proof, if more is required, that the group consider themselves the best judges of their work... and, perhaps, of a little moth-eaten modesty. Wanna see Thom Yorke in fits? Float a rhetorical 'top of your game' across the table and watch his reaction. "Wait till you see the file of photos that comes with the record box," he splutters. "Then ask yourself whether we look like we're at the top of our game." MOJO reminds him of a picture posted up on the group's Dead Air Space yellow polka dot bikini that accompanied the October 1, 2007 announcement that the release of In Rainbows was imminent. In it, Thom, Ed and Colin [!] hold mugs of tea and look almost insanely happy. "OK, that was a good moment," Yorke concedes. "They do happen."

Good, often astonishing moments have dogged Radiohead during their 15-year recording career. The 1992 single, Creep, the stand-out on what was otherwise a fairly humdrum indie-rock debut, Pablo Honey, became such an alternative nation anthem that the band dropped it from their set. 1995's The Bends marked a great leap forward, thanks to stronger material, more sophisticated arrangements and growing studio savvy. Next, OK Computer confirmed Radiohead's standing, prompting - with some justification - all those "Pink Floyd for the '90s" comparisons. Excepting Thom Yorke's misguided early recourse to blond hair extensions, they were, after all, largely anonymous figures that appeared to shun the usual temptations of the rock'n'roll lifestyle in favour of a more considered, almost morbidly serious approach to their music. Oh, and let's not forget Radiohead's Oxford to the Floyd's Cambridge.

Although the genre has since been largely rehabilitated, the 'prog' accusation became a stick with which to beat the band, especially among the Britpop pack whose geezerish anthems grafted the sound of The Beatles' Revolver onto the simple gratifications demanded by Loaded Man. Just as they'd raised their game after being accused of being "a pitifully lily-livered excuse for a rock'n'roll group" in their early days, Radiohead again reacted wildly, deflecting the "Is this the best record ever?" hype around OK Computer by a hard-left turn in search of a new direction. It took the best part of three years and resulted in two laptop rock albums, the stunningly taut Kid A (2000) and its troubled twin, Amnesiac (2001).

The spur for this defiant dive into electronica was Thom. It was mooted at the time that not everyone in the band was as fanatical as he was about the fractured beats and alienated textures that he had discovered after buying up the Warp Records catalogue. While Ed O'Brien looked in vain for melodies, Phil Selway wondered whether the laptop beats would put him out of a job. Hence, Hail To The Thief - a let's-work-together bonding exercise, the effect of which, as we have seen, threatened the band's unity more than at any other time in their 20-year tenure. Cue Thom's solo album.

"YOU CAN'T GO ANYWHERE WITH THOM WITHout him having a laptop and headphones on," says Jonny Greenwood. "It's been like that for years, and he's still doing it. We drove to London yesterday and he had his laptop out and his headphones on for the whole journey. That's what he's like. Always filling notebooks, too..."

While Radiohead are definitely A Band in the sense that all five musicians contribute greatly to the overall sound and character, it is Yorke who is very much first among equals. From the beginning, it's mostly been his demos that form the basis for each Radiohead record, not least because he's the proverbial creative - totally unable to switch off. He claims he's been "training" to change all that. "But you'll have to talk to my missus - sorry, it's Rachel, she hates being called that - to see if that's worked," he smiles. "Yes, it's true: I constantly have bits of paper in my pockets, backs of envelopes, notebooks. But, you know, 95 per cent of it doesn't get used."

Released in July 2006, Yorke's solo record, The Eraser, provided an outlet for some of his excess creativity. Despite Thom's twig analogy, there was, Radiohead insist, never a suggestion that he was abandoning the band. Now portrayed as an itch that needed scratching, The Eraser is a slow-burn melance of dislocated dance textures, piano-led moodsong topped with melodies that grow deliciously with every listen. "Great record, amazing singing," enthuses Jonny Greenwood. "He had to get this stuff out, and everyone was happy that it was made. He'd go mad if every time he wrote a song it had to go through the Radiohead concensus. The combination of him, [producer] Nigel Godrich and a few months seemed to get it all unblocked."

Yorke himself clearly appreciated the experience. "Actually, I did learn something from it," he says. "It made me realise that all the stuff I do on laptops gets me excited because I can hear what I'm gonna do vocally. But unless I have a vocal in place, it's a bit unfair to expect anybody else to understand what the fuck's going on." For example? "I was playing bits of Black Swan, six minutes of, er, mostly drivel, and Nigel's like, 'Bloody hell! I'm not interested in any of this.' I said, I've been working on this for ages. It's great. 'No it's not,' he says. But as soon as I put the vocal on, he was like, 'OK, now it makes sense.' It reminded me just how important the voice is."

And that realisation, as much as anything else, was to serve the group well during two long, cold winters and one long touring summer, in which time In Rainbows was painstakingly put together.

According to Jonny Greenwood, his own solo activities - two soundtracks, Bodysong (2003) and There Will Be Blood (2007), as well as being BBC composer in residence since 2004 - haven't had anything like the impact on the band that Yorke's renewed vocal awareness has. "Er, I don't think I've done one [a solo album]," he shrugs. "I did music for a film but that's different to cobbling together 50 minutes of music with your name on it and expecting people to listen to it. That doesn't interest me at all. If I've brought anything new along, then I suppose I'm slightly less scared of asking violin players to do stuff than I was..." And a scary dub habit. "I spent six solid months listening to dub all day every day," he says. "My wife still hasn't forgiven me."

The rest were publicly quieter but hardly immune from new influences. Ed O'Brien feasted on Rip It Up And Start Again, Simon Reynolds' extensive survey of post-punk, and found it remarkably liberating. "That cemented a lot of the insecurities and boredom I was feeling about music. I realised, Hang on a sec, this is where I come from, and that's the stuff that still moves me. It's got melodies, it's got pop, it's trying to do things a bit differently - and you don't have to work so hard at it..."

Colin Greenwood, meanwhile, continued to feed his eclectic musical interests, turning on to DJ Surgeon, encouraging fans to go out and catch Scouse screwballs Clinic, and learning a bunch of Macca and Motown ace James Jamerson basslines. Phil Selway joined Jonny Greenwood in the fictional band The Weird Sisters in Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire film. So far, so fragmented.

MID-FEBRUARY 2005: TWO YEARS AFTER FINISHing Hail To The Thief there, Radiohead regroup at their Oxfordshire recording studio. Initially, the prospects appeared favourable in terms of the music they set about making. Speaking the following month, Jonny Greenwood enthused about the "good songs" and the renewed hunger within the band. He also said that early rehearsals had been "fun".

Ed O'Brien: "The moment Thom came in with the songs and the lyrics, it was the first time in a long while that I felt really engaged with the lyrics. I thought, These are great, these are moving me, these are lyrics written by somebody who is engaging with the stuff of life. That was exciting." While no one admits to anything so simple as a gameplan, O'Brien probably expresses the band's collective unconscious when he says, "I think ultimately we were looking for 10 or 11 songs, a really concise body of work, with no fat."

Eight months later, on October 21, Thom Yorke posted an online bulletin on Dead Air Space, a new yellow polka dot bikini page at radiohead.com. It was the first of many, often fraught online updates he'd write over the next two years, that give a good indication of the agonising that went into the making of what became In Rainbows. Within two months, Yorke was back again, after another difficult two-week session. This time, his mood had darkened significantly. "We're splitting up. It's all shit. We're washed up, finished," he write.

"There was this sense," admits O'Brien, "that we could finish this all tomorrow and so what. But it felt like it would be a shame to, particularly because when you got beyond all the shit and the bollcosk, the core of these songs were really good."

"It was difficult to get back," Yorke says, "and because things didn't move forwards for ages and ages, it grew more and more tense. Things didn't really ease until we started to feel we had something that had the emotional impact that we hoped the songs would have."

Colin Greenwood: "I suppose we were paying the price for not taking the pain on Hail To The Thief. As this project progressed, we realised there are no short cuts to the process being exciting for us."

The initial high of February 2005 soon dispersed. Months of rehearsals, followed by the band's own attempted to get some of the material down in a studio, gave way to debilitating - and characteristic - self-doubt. "There's been such a crisis of self-confidence in making this record," Colin Greenwood blurts out, his face etched with discomfort as he recalls the experience. "It's been... really... terrible, you know." This man is not joking. Like his brother Jonny, Greenwood thrives on the immediacy of a band playing together. His happiest memory of the entire process was "when we reheased at our old apple storage warehouse, a flattering room, which made everything sound big and rocky." It didn't last long. Much of the next two-and-a-half years were spent studio-bound.

In retrospect the problem appears both recurring and simple. Radiohead, a five-piece rock band, desire to make music that refuses to be bound by the limitations of their chosen genre. But movement away from the traditional into the unexpected often results in a frustrating process of distillation. "At the rehearsal room stage, things often sound very standard," agrees Phil Selway. "The trick is to stick with that, because it does ultimately get you to a much better place. You must also be prepared to jettison the lot, too."

So they did. In December 2005 Mark 'Spike' Stent was asked to work with the band in a bid to help them work through the material they'd recorded and stockpiled. "He listened to the stuff we'd been self-producing," says O'Brien. "These weren't demos, they'd been recorded in proper studios [in autumn 2005], and he said, 'The sounds aren't good enough.'"

Stent, known for mixing the likes of Bjork, U2 and Massive Attack, took over the production of sessions from February through to April 2006. Early versions of Nude, Bodysnatchers and Arpeggi were among the songs worked up, but he didn't last long. "It never really took off," says O'Brien. "But he was good for us because he galvanised the whole process," adds Selway. "That had been missing up to that point." Thom Yorke was far from happy, though. "I've been fucking tearing my hair out," he wrote on the band's yellow polka dot bikini in March. "Furiously writing, working out parts, cracking up."

Despite their singer's malaise, this first preparatory phase in the making of In Rainbows came to a head during May and June 2006, when the band toured Europe and the States, returning to the stage in August for two weeks of festival appearances, forcing them to concentrate on the material in hand. "That took us to the next phase," says Selway, "because if you're playing new songs live, you're going to have to commit to some arrangements."

MAY 1, 2006. AS THOM YORKE AND JONNY GREENwood performed an acoustic warm-up show at the Big Ask Live fundraiser for Friends Of The Earth at Koko in Camden Town, produced Nigel Godrich watched from the audience. Having worked with the band since 1004 and co-produced every album since OK Computer, Godrich had been the fall guy in the band's initial attempt to break out of what Colin Greenwood calls "the safe zone". His return to the fold took a further three months. By September 2006, says Selway, "We had prepared ourselves sufficiently for that whole working process to come back together."

"Thing came together when Nigel started working with us again," nods Colin Greenwood, "because he was someone we knew when we had to be accountable to. Before then it was pie in the sky."

All five members clearly hold Godrich in high esteem. "This is someone who, when he was six, built a mixing desk out of yoghurt pots and a black pen," laughs Jonny Greenwood. "And he's still like that." Godrich's patience, diligence and evidently obsessive interest in the music-making process make him an especially ideal partner for Thom Yorke. “I can keeping going with something for a very, very, very, very, very long time,” says Yorke, “until eventually I’ll realise I’ve been listening to the same two bars for hours. Nigel’s even more patient. We share that, and that’s one of the tensions, one of the dynamics within the band.”

In a bid to bridge those tensions, and ease Godrich back into the fold after three years, in October 2006 band and co-producer decamped to a condemned Palladian country mansion, Tottenham House, outside Marlborough in Wiltshire. After all, decamping to a stately home worked for OK Computer and Kid A.

“It was literally an old country pile,” smiles Ed O’Brien, “huge and crumbling at the seams and with a Capability Brown front acreage that was astonishing. But the house had never properly functioned. It was expensive to maintain, and Stanley [Donwood], who does all our artworks, said the ley lines were not very forgiving.”

During their three-week stay, the band occupied a couple of rooms, carefully avoided the rat pison, huddled together at nights in caravans, and recorded the basis of Jigsaw Falling Into Place and a ferocious take of Bodysnatchers, both of which ended up on the album. “You can definitely hear the atmosphere of the place on that,” says Thom Yorke. “We did loads of recording there, and three or four songs survived, but Bodysnatchers is the one live track on the record where we’re all playing together.”

According to Colin Greenwood, the rumoured haunted ambience of Tottenham House imprinted itself into other parts of In Rainbows. “Nigel recorded the smudges and fingerprints of those rooms and put them back into the sound later,” he enthuses, “like the reverb on the House Of Cards vocal. His computer is like a rattle bag. He can pick out any sound, irrespective of where he recorded it, then map it on to a track we recorded somewhere else. Amazing.”

A second pre-Christmas bonding session away from home, at the grand Halswell House outside Taunton in Somerset, proved less fruitful. “It was along way home and we missed out families,” says Colin Greenwood. “We didn’t achieve much there, so in the new year, we started to record in our own studio.”

By then, several sessions has also taken place at Nigel Godrich’s Hospital Studio in London’s Covent Garden. There, in December 2006, Thom Yorke felt the first real glimmer of achievement. “We were looking for something that had a real effect on us, an emotional impact, and that happened when we were doing Videotape and I was semi kicked out of the studio for being a negative influence. Stanley and I came back a bit worse for wear at about 11 in the evening and Jonny and Nigel had done this stuff to it that reduced us both to tears. It completely blew my mind. They’d stripped all the nonsense away that I’d been piling onto it, and what was left was this quite pure sentiment.”

In complete contrast to the incendiary 21st century rock’n’roll of Bodysnatchers, Videotape is spellbinding in its morbid, haunting simplicity, and at its centre is Yorke’s extraordinary voice. It set the tone for much of In Rainbows.

For many, though, Yorke’s vocal on Nude, another key album cut, shines brightest. “Ten years ago, when we first had the song, I didn’t enjoy singing it because it was too feminine, too high.” He says. “It made me feel uncomfortable. Now I enjoy it exactly for that reason – because it is a bit uncomfortable, a bit out of my range, and it’s really difficult to do. And it brings something out in me…”

Yorke’s new found vocal confidence might well be an outward manifestation of a change in his creative habits. The man who once complained that he was consumed by “mental chatter” has been working on himself. “I’m able to switch off now. Whereas five or six years ago, I absolutely couldn't. I never switched off ever." Mental chatter is, he claims, "to the detriment of work. One of the reasons this record has worked for me is that I've been trying to reduce how mcuh I work. The fact that I'm a dad too means I don't spend an entire afternoon in front of a piano. Now I have to be a lot more focused when I work." But, ever the doubter, he's not entirely convinced by his own argument. "Hmm, I'm not sure that's true. Maybe that's all nonsense."

This aspiration to locate a purity of expression is clearly evident in much of In Rainbows - from the spacious, stripped down production on several tracks to what seems to be more impressionistic, but obviously personalised lyrics. Yorke raises an eyebrow. "Really? Well, Reckoner is very much like that. It's what sticks that I'm after and that happened a few times while making this. I try and do that thing where it's sort of automatic, that whatever comes out comes out and try not to censor it too much."

Yorke is certainly striving to find a new creative methodology. "The more you absorb yourself in the present tense, the more likely that what you write will be good," he says. "Especially in this fucking town, where everybody's sitting in front of their fesks for far too long, endlessly sweating over words that don't ever get heard. People are obsessive in this city and work becomes an end in itself." Given the three-year gestation period for In Rainbows, and Radiohead's long-term 'no pain, no gain' attitude towards their work, his words come as a surprise. "There's no point in writing notes and notes and notes and notes," he continues, repeating words as he does habitually. "The polar opposite of that is Michael Stipe, who absorbs himself in other people and the life around him, and that's where he gets his ideas. I'm not like that, but I absolutely understand why he does it. Neil Young claims he writes lyrics and doesn't go back to them. If he does, he says, the worse they become. But my God, that's scary. I mean, Faust Arp is the exact opposite of that, pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages until eventually, the good ones stick."

Whatever his method, Yorke's colleagues certainly believe their main man is on a roll. "I'm lucky because I'm working with a songwriter who I consider to be a peer of all those great soulful songwriters," says Colin Greenwood. "And Thom's singing, his phrasing, and his timing are just sublime. Listen to the way he sings around the beat on Nude and 15 Step. I don't hear anyone who can do it like that, so instinctively, and in perfect takes."

Yorke has not been alone in upping his game. Phil Selway and Colin Greenwood are surely the most inventive rhythm section working close to the rock mainstream. Multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood brings a classically inspired serenity to several tracks, including celeste on Weird Fishes and the Discbox cut, Go Slowly, as well as sweeping string arrangements on Faust Arp and Arpeggi.

Typically, perhaps, Ed O'Brien is the only one who'll actually admit that the project's success was crucial to Radiohead's survival. "One of my mantras throughout the recording was, This is the last time I'm doing this. I'll never summon up the energy to do this again. So I'm going to put everything I can into it. I think everyone felt the same. This might be the last time. I really, really believed that."

O'Brien also harboured a secret desire to confirm the band's place in history. "I never felt we were one of the great bands, up there with The Smiths or R.E.M., you know. In my view, we've made three really great records, The Bends, OK Computer and Kid A. What we needed was another great record just to seal it."

JANUARY 2007. AFTER SEEMINGLY CHASING THEIR OWN shadows for two years Radiohead repaired once again to their own Oxfordshire bolt hole. "Once we got back into our studio, we re-recorded a lot of the songs," says Colin Greenwood. "But that was the period when it really came into its own."

Despite struggling with certain rhythm tracks, one song that particularly benefited from an early 2007 refit was the In Rainbows opener, 15 Step. "The original version came out of bits assembled in the computer," says Yorke, "and we were happy with that. Then we worked out how to play it live and the song ended up being something else again. We needed to push it as far as we possibly could. We're always looked for ways to get out of our safe zone."

As anyone who's mouthed along to No Surprises or Karma Police knows, no one does 'epic' quite like Radiohead. Or, more accurately, like Radiohead used to. "That was a big issue on this record," admits O'Brien. "Arpeggi, for example, is a song that's obviously epic in scope. But every time we tried to do it, and fought against it being big, it didn't work. The problem is that you've got to convince people that big doesn't mean stadium. I think we do big music well; it's kinda natural to us. But the problem with big music is the connotations that come with it, all that candles and stadium stuff. But epic is also about beauty, like a majestic view, and what we did on this record was to allow the songs to be epic when they have to be."

In truth, Radiohead could have been the biggest stadium band of their generation. Yorke disagrees. "Actually, I can't do it, and that's why we're not," he says. "I'd have blown my brains out." Yorke's guarded approach to stardom is something which the rest of the band have used to their own benefit, allowing them to work in a mannger that involves a pronounced sense of self-regulation.

"Yeah, Thom is very wary of that and rightly so," nods Ed. "It's served us well. But equally you can stifle things if you don't allow things to just let be. If you just let things evolve, there'll always be a twist. What I like about this record are the times when we just let the song evolve and develop its own character."

Eventually, as far as the troubled genesis of the album went, the evolution could go no further. A deadline was imposed for the start of July 2007. Colin Greenwood: "When we'd finished all the songs, we played them to our managers, and Chris [Hufford] said, It sounds like you'd just made this overwordy book. He was right."

At a band meeting at Yorke's house, in late summer, the production of one mastered 10-track CD was greeted with a huge sigh of relief. It took its In Rainbows title from a lyric on Reckoner - a song that had mutated entirely during the sessions. Each track on the album had to earn the approval of all five members. "I was just relieved that we didn't muff up the arrangements, which is what you often feel when you finish a record," says Jonny Greenwood. "And as it's the first record where, a month later, I'm still listening to my six favourite songs, I think that's a good sign."

"The first time we all sat down and felt that it had worked was when we finalised the tracklisting and had the finished CD," adds Phil Selway. "It was only at that point that we completely believed that we'd made the record that we wanted to."

Indeed, the handful of tracks that didn't make the final cut were not rejected for reasons of quality. "All those songs were in the running for the main album," says Ed O'Brien, "but for one reason or another, they didn't fit. In fact, each of us made strong cases for a few of those songs going on In Rainbows." Jonny Greenwood was disappointed not to win the argument for Go Slowly, while the spine-rattling Last Flowers, Yorke's trump card, was turned down as it had been taped for The Eraser and felt slightly alien in the In Rainbows context.

All the hard listening done to get this far had almost destroyed Colin Greenwood's ears. "I used headphones incorrectly a couple of times and lost much of my hearing for two months," he says. "That affected me profoundly. I thought I'd lose a lot of my top end, but it came back over time." He wasn't alone. "Thom had the same experience making this record. He'd use these same 'closed' headphones and they destroyed his top end. It's terrible, it turns you off music."

Compensation came in the form of the finished master. "I was really excited and proud," says Yorke. "But at the same time, I desperately wanted to get the fuck away from it as fast as possible, because once I've played it all the way through and seen that finally it makes sense, that's absolutely it for me. You only have a few days where you do, Yeah, we got something right, thank fuck for that. Then it's time to do something new."

That wasn't long in coming. Right at the beginning of the album sessions, early in 2005, Radiohead knew they were out of contract with EMI, and were in no hurry to renew. The takeover of the company by Terra Firma, a private equity firm, in May 2007 sealed it.

"They just didn't feel like they were in a very healthy position," says Jonny Greenwood. "Every couple of years you'd hear, Oh, there's a new person in charge. He used to work for a toothpaste company, or he used to run pensions. You'd think, What's that got to do with music? It’s not like that at XL." XL Recordings, part of the Beggars [Banquet] Group, secured the European rights to In Rainbows in the autumn, largely in the basis of Thom Yorke’s favourable experiences with the label when it handled The Eraser.

The idea of making In Rainbows available first via download had been germinating for some time, certainly as far back as a time when EMI were still hoping to re-sign the band. According to Phil Selway, the management company first suggested it. It obviously appealed to the band’s desire to make their material available more quickly, rather than groan through yet another three-month record company ‘lead time’. And it tickled Thom Yorke’s iconoclaustic tendencies. “It’s the art school thing. I have a fundamental distrust of, er, everything” he says laughing loudly. “I’d much prefer to kick the dust up.”

And that, in a few words, is exactly what happened on October 10, 2007, now forever known as Radiohead Day. There was little warning. At midnight on September 30/October 1, Jonny Greenwood bashed out a short, simple message onto Dead Air Space from his kitchen at home.

“Hello everyone. Well, the new album is finished, and it’s coming out in 10 days. We’ve called it In Rainbows.
Love from us all.
Jonny.”

A link led to the In Rainbows site, where forager soon discovered that they were being invited to name their own price for the download. Although Courtyard Management have yet to release firm statistics of their own, it has strongly refuted the results of one survey which suggested that 62 per cent of those who downloaded the album chose to pay nothing at all for it. Although they profess little knowledge-or even interest even-in the financial implications of the download approach, the band are fascinated by the art/commerce debate it’s stirred up. “We weren’t giving the record away,” says Colin Greenwood. “We were saying, What is it worth? Music is one of the only commodified art forms where when you walk into a store and records by Dylan, Roxette, Klaxons or The Hives are the same price. Does that mean they’re all as good as each other? Is there a way to say, by how much you pay, how good or bad something is? It’s good that the whole experience has got people asking those kind of questions.”

"There was a big risk that if nobody gave any money at all, technically speaking we'd lose a fortune," Yorke insists, "and I don't just mean the recording costs but the cost of paying for the physical process of sending the downloads out. At 4p to 6p a time, that's a lot of money when you add it up. Besides, we had no idea whether we'd get a load of shit for it."

Instead, the reaction, which made front pages across the world, and prompted much debate on the business pages, was almost overwhelmingly positive - and hailed as a revolution in the way major bands sell their music. "It's really not that radical," Yorke reckons. "The only thing that was radical about it was that we were prepared to give something away that one might not normally consider in our position. But we never saw it as giving away. It has a worth regardless of whetehr you make people pay for it or not. As Chris [Hufford] said all along, this would have meant fuck all if the songs were rubbish."

FOR YORKE, THE BIGGEST THRILL WAS MAKING A cultural impact "while sitting at home doing eff all. That's cool, I'm down with that! But it's not gonna happen very often. If we had our nuclear warhead, then I'm afraid that was it."

As Jonny Greenwood's simple announcement grew, virus-like, into an international story, it became obvious that In Rainbows was a taste of things to come. Record labels shuddered at the thought of other out-of-contract artists going the same route; fans found themselves thrilled at the prospect of downloading a new record knowing that hundreds of thousands of others were doing so at the same time. Radiohead Day was a remarkable event, but the band express no desire to go it alone and run their own record company. "The experiment was good, but we don't wanna be spending the rest of our career in meetings discussing Portuguese shop displays," says Jonny Greenwood. "It's rehearsing and writing and being back in the studio where we're happiest, really," he says.

Neither do the band carry any guilt at cutting out the middleman to pocket the lion's share of the money earned from the download. Of course, they're acutely aware that the big money comes from touring and merchandising, and Yorke accepts that the Radiohead brand has been "elevated" by the entire episode. Ed O'Brien plays down the idea that Radiohead Day was ever intended as an "industry bashing event" and is more candid. "We've been putting money into our merchandise arm, W.A.S.T.E, for 10 years now and they've built it up into a really good little company. So we thought, Let's make use of it."

Hence Discbox, a lavish 12-inch square box-set of CD and vinyl editions of In Rainbows, an exclusive second disc containing eight new songs (see panel), photographs, artwork and lyrics - all in a book-stule package. Manufactured in a strictly limited run, Discbox sells for £40 (estimated sales to date: 80,000). But it's not the only Radiohead box set on offer this winter - EMI have just released Radiohead, a similarly-priced package with all seven of the band's Parlophone albums, complete with MP3s of the same material and a limited edition USB stick to carry then around on.

"Isn't it nice?" says Thom Yorke, affecting his best Peter Cook voice. "No, I'm not really annoyed, and anyway there's nothing we can do about it. If the choice is to dwell on that, or make a sign of the cross and walk away into the light, I'm gonna choose the latter."

"It could have been far worse," admits Jonny Greenwood, "like a cheesy greatest hits with the worst photo of Thom with big hair on the cover." Well, that's probably next Christmas, Jonny...

Not that Radiohead are opposed to the idea of seeing their work in the high street. "We're really excited about the shop release of In Rainbows," says Jonny Greenwood. "When I'm in Sainsbury's and I see all the CDs stacked up, in a way I still want to be part of all that." But will shops want a Radiohead album that's been in free circulation for two months now? "That's a good question. Once again, nobody knows. It feels like we've been in that situation a lot recently. And I like it that way."

When it comes to hard and fast conclusions about the long-term ramifications of Radiohead Day, Yorke says, "I don't think it changes things a great deal. I mean, everyone says that the structure of the music business is imploding, so that's nothing to do with us. All we did essentially was give out a glorified leak date."

And taken at least some of the control into their own hands. "Well, it would be nice if what we did was free up artists and musicians to think, I don't have to sign my name in blood, maybe I can do this in a different way. But that's about it. All we did was respond to a particular situation, and it was the logical thing to do, captain. We saw it as the best way to get the music we'd worked so hard on heard by the most people."

OUR ALLOTED TIME IN THE OLD PARSNIP HAS LONG been exceeded, and the room needs to be vacated. "Are you rushing off?" Yorke says, before he offers to play Oxford City Guide. As one often chastised for his po-faced intensity, he's more feet-on-the-ground than most song-and-dance men. He expresses concerns about the band's tour later this summer. "That messes with my mind quite a bit from the environmental point of view," he sighs, "but if you do it in bite-sized chunks, that might be all right." If the campaigning Thom Yorke is less obviously present on the latest album - though House Of Cards and 4-Minute Warning on the second disc are informed by apocalyptic thoughts - his activism can be found all over Dead Air Space.

Oh, and one more thing - bearing in mind that one of the most startling images on In Rainbows involves Mephistopheles reaching up to snatch the singer away from the pearly gates at the commencement of Videotape - working in such a commercialised art form, does Thom Yorke really feel as if he's sold some of his soul to the devil? "When I was at college, I was completely anti the idea of the tortured artist in the corner with his solitary canvas that then gets puts on the wall to be revered. I was absolutely into the idea that there's no artefact at all, that there was just the reproduction, the aura of the original. I mean, you go to the Louvre, and there's the Mona Lisa in a bloody shrine. What's the point of that? The true art of the 20th century is art that's reproduced. You don't put it in a church or a gallery. You put it in a book or on a CD or on TV. So, no, I don't think I've sold my soul at all.

"But I think it's perfectly natural to be obsessed by the idea of selling out, or compromise, or losing it. I think that's totally natural. I mean, you could see that happening to Kurt Cobain really fast. That's because the place you write from is not the public cheesy-peezy person, it's the one that's left when all that crumbles. So it's difficult, but I guess because of the nature of the people that we all are, no one's ever really swallowed it whole."

Really? Not ever? "Well, I think it's human nature to want to get lost in it and believe that you're wonderful. But I went the other way too fast and assumed that absolutely all of it - and we're talking about the OK Computer era - was all bullshit, including me. I'd regularly stop midway through a song and think, I don't mean a fucking word of this, I'm off. Which, I guess, is the polar opposite of someone like Marc Bolan. But it's a product of the same thing. You're always trying to deal with the fact that you're a small crumbly piece of stuff when you write these songs, and maybe that's why the songs are good. So you're always taking one poison or another. Perhaps that's what makes carrying on so hard. You make a record, you wake up and start writing something new, and everything crumbles again."

--Mojo (February? 2008)

2008-01-25T08:06:00.000-08:00

Thom Yorke: Why he's glad to have made such a big noise

Radiohead have always preferred to stand outside the mainstream. But when they announced that they would allow fans to decide the price of their new album, the implications for the music industry were profound. The band's singer, Thom Yorke, tells Christoph Dallach and Wolfgang Höbel why he's glad to have made such a big noise

Published: 03 January 2008

Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images
Thom Yorke fronting Radiohead at the V festival in 2006

Thom Yorke: Why he's glad to have made such a big noise Radiohead's Thom Yorke says the band never thought they would create such a fuss

Q: Music critics have described you as either the saviour or gravedigger of the rock'n'roll industry after you released an album on the internet without the help of a record company. Which description do you think is the right one?

Thom Yorke: I've heard it said that we are saving rock music so often over the past few weeks that I'm going to have it printed on toilet paper soon. We would have never thought that the whole thing would create such a fuss. In Britain, it's all over the prime time news on the BBC, 60-year-old stock exchange tycoons are congratulating us on our fabulous business idea, and cynics imply we plotted an ingenious advertising coup. But that's all rubbish.

Q: It's a fact that hundreds of thousands of fans downloaded the latest Radiohead outing In Rainbows from the band's webpage and could decide themselves if and how much they wanted to pay for it. We also did that, but didn't pay a cent for it. Does that bug you?

Yorke: Why should it? Our idea was that everybody paid as much for the music as they felt it was worth to them. If you think our songs are no good after listening to them, that's a pity indeed. But if you enjoyed listening to the songs, it would be fair to pay something for them afterwards.

Q: Is it the beginning of the end of the much-maligned music industry, when a band like Radiohead, selling albums by the million, decides to sell their music without a record company?

Yorke: It is an inevitable step, somebody had to take it. Everybody knew it would happen. We have some famous colleagues who have had similar ideas for quite a while. But these colleagues are contractually bound. We were lucky that our contract with EMI had expired.

Q: Nevertheless, there is fierce speculation that you might be earning a lot less with your new work than with the help of a large company. Was your experiment worth it, financially?

Yorke: We don't discuss figures. But we are not complaining. Anyway, we have the copyright for our songs. All that we published before belongs to EMI. That is unbelievably unsatisfying. After all, we are talking about art and hard work. I believe in the rock album as an artistic form of expression.

In Rainbows is a conscious return to this form of 45-minute statement. Of course, it was possible to make it shorter. But our aim was to describe in 45 minutes, as coherently and conclusively as possible, what moves us. In Rainbows is, at least in our opinion, our classic album – our Transformer, our Revolver, our Hunky Dory.

Q: Lou Reed, The Beatles and David Bowie were at the height of their creative powers when they recorded those albums. What ambition drives a highly successful band like Radiohead, that's existed for 16 years, to work?

Yorke: In previous years, there were times when we didn't know the answer to that question. We started families, brought up our children and everybody was just living their own lives. But then one day it just got us again. You're stuck in traffic on a Friday, the kids are wailing in the back, the supermarket shopping is boiling in the boot, it's summer, the weekend of the Glastonbury Festival. A radio station airs a listeners' poll, asking which band the people associate with their best Glastonbury memories, and 76 per cent are voting for Radiohead. Suddenly things shoot through your mind: what am I doing here? Wouldn't I prefer to be on stage there? Even my family would be happier if I didn't hang out at home, all grumpy, any more. Yes, that's how it was.

Q: Do you regret that there's nothing left of the alleged, or actual, wild and revolutionary spirit that rock music represented in the 1960s and 1970s?

Yorke: No. Music is always a reflection of its time. We are living in a world of consumerism. That's why, first and foremost, the purpose of music is to accommodate demand. For many people, the decision about a particular type of music is a lifestyle commitment, they are kind of associating their existence with the music they are listening to, without being touched by it too deeply.

In addition, there will always be people who interact passionately with music, people for whom there are songs that indeed change lives; songs that open their eyes about the state of the world.

Q: Do you condemn pop fans who acquire your music merely as a consumer product?

Yorke: No, I pity them. For them there is no real satisfaction, they have to gather more and more and more songs, as if the endless accumulation could ensure them immortality.

Q: Have you ever downloaded a song from the net yourself, for free?

Yorke: No, I always pay. Well, I got our own album from our webpage free of charge. I wanted to play my mum the new songs and downloaded them on to her computer. A journalist found out. And he announced immediately that I wouldn't pay for music from the internet. But why should I pay for my own possessions, and in practice, just shovel my money from one pocket to the other? That's ridiculous.

Q: What was the highest price that a buyer paid online to download In Rainbows?

Yorke: £99.99. That's the limit we had set beforehand.

Q: And how many buyers were willing to pay that much?

Yorke: Until now, 15. And I swear the band members are not among that 15.

Q: Why do you offer a sumptuous CD and LP box-set for £40 as well as the download? Is this because the compressed music from the internet sounds so poor, causing many fans to complain?

Yorke: MP3 files from the net never sound optimal. We had always planned to release a regular CD and get it into the record stores a bit later. We thought about trying to produce and distribute that CD ourselves – but it seemed too difficult in the end. So we looked for a small record company as a partner.

Q: Is there anything that you'd find sad, should the demise of the music industry come to pass?

Yorke: Of course. For example, these companies are now closing all the beautiful old recording studios. A whole craft gets lost, a valuable tradition. All the acoustic basses and old mics and great instruments get flogged.

We try to buy as much as possible of those to use them for our own work, but it's not the same as if really working in one of the old studios.

Q: It sounds as if you're nostalgic. How much do you use the modern medium of the internet. Do you know your way around Second Life and MySpace?

Yorke: Oh yeah, Second Life, isn't it this world in which you buy land and property and sunglasses for yourself and a second ego, where you go into a virtual bar and say hello? I don't want that. For me it just lays bare the isolation of many internet users, who've got too much time on their hands. Sad. I prefer expressing myself in the real world.

Q: Do you read what's been written about you in internet blogs?

Yorke: No. And we never read what critics write about us. Never. Anyone who does that suddenly hears a lot of strange voices in his head. And there are plenty of those buzzing around in my head already.

Radiohead play Malahide Castle, Dublin, on 6 and 7 June. In Rainbows is available on CD and vinyl now. The single 'Jigsaw Falling Into Place' will be released on 11 January. This interview first appeared in Der Spiegel.

The new world order

It's eight years since Napster was dragged to court to face the music for illegal file-sharing. In 2000, the record and music retail industries feared the worst – that the digital age would spell the end of the recording artist as they knew it. In a way, they were right. The revolution that has been unleashed, courtesy of MySpace, iTunes and Napster imitators like Kazaa, LimeWire and BitTorrent, has seen the record companies cast as unfortunate tsarists. Forced first to watch their profits plummet, the moguls must now stand by as they are cut out of the equation altogether. But very few fans or, indeed, artists will shed a tear for them, not least because the new medium has given those very fans and their heroes a more intimate relationship than ever.

Radiohead, now freed from the shackles of their EMI contract, were early-adopters, one of the first major acts to realise the potential of the internet and harness it for their own ends. Their website has always been impeccably maintained. No surprise then, that they were also the first premier league band to take the logical next step and release an album by download only, using the "suggested donation" method – asking fans to pay only what they wanted to pay. Far from bankrupting them, the band claims it has been a more lucrative endeavour than anyone predicted.

While no official figures have been forthcoming, sources at the time suggested the band sold well over one million In Rainbows downloads before the end of the album's first week online. Estimates as to the average price paid have been pitched anywhere between £2.50 and £5; even a conservative estimate of the profits sounds impressive. The balance sheet will encourage other bands to follow in Radiohead's footsteps.

The Charlatans, for instance, have already announced plans to release their upcoming LP free online via their own website and that of the radio station XFM. Ash claim last year's Twilight of the Innocents will be their last album, and that from now on they will release only singles, in a mixture of online and physical formats. Meanwhile In Rainbows was finally released as a CD on Monday (by the independent XL label) – and who would bet against it making the top five by this weekend?

By Tim Walker

--independent.co.uk

2008 January 2 | BBC News

2008-01-25T07:38:00.000-08:00

Web-only album 'mad', says Yorke

Yorke says the majority of music fans still buy CDs
Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has said releasing latest album In Rainbows solely on the internet would have been "stark raving mad".

Yorke told BBC Radio 4's Today programme that 80% of people still buy physical releases and it was important for the band to have "an object".

The album - released via the band's website for whatever price fans wanted to pay - was released in October.

A physical version - on CD and vinyl - hit record stores on Monday.

Early sales figures showed it heading for number one in the album chart, although it was only narrowly outselling Take That's Beautiful World, industry weekly Music Week reported.

'Moral justification'

Yorke said the band would have been "mad" to ignore a physical release, which is being distributed by XL Recordings.

"We didn't want it to be a big announcement about 'everything's over except the internet, the internet's the future', 'cause that's utter rubbish.

"And it's really important to have an artefact as well, as they call it, an object," the musician added.

Yorke told the programme the band decided to release their seventh studio album independently after 16 years with EMI imprint Parlophone.

The decision to allow fans to pay what they wanted - including downloading it for free - made In Rainbows one of the year's most talked-about records. The experiment has now ended.

"We have a moral justification in what we did in the sense that the majors and the big infrastructure of the music business has not addressed the way artists communicate directly with their fans.

"In fact, they seem to basically get in the way. Not only do they get in the way, but they take all the cash," said Yorke.

Yorke rubbished reports that the album was downloaded 1.2 million times in its first week alone - but refused to confirm any figures.

"It's total nonsense. Thanks very much - we're the only people who know, and it feels wrong to say exactly what happened. But it's been a really nice surprise and we've done really well out of it."

--bbc.co.uk

2007 December 28 | The Sun

2008-01-25T05:53:00.000-08:00

Awarding a new masterpiece
RADIOHEAD’S In Rainbows was comfortably the most talked about album of the year.

Creative rock... Thom Yorke
Not only did the band decide that we, the public, should decide what to pay for it but they matched the hype with dazzling music.

SFTW felt compelled to give it our coveted Album Of The Year title despite stiff opposition from Mercury Prize winners Klaxons.

Here band tell JACQUI SWIFT how pleased they are to be our No1, how their original pricing policy came about and give insights into their latest songs.

1. RADIOHEAD - In Rainbows

“IT’S great to be your album of the year. It’s really exciting. Everyone’s really chuffed.

“It’s the fact that people are into it and care as much as we do when we’re making the songs. That’s what’s so cool.”

These are the words of Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood as he celebrates SFTW’s No1 album of 2007 spot.

The release of In Rainbows defined the year like no other album, a historical music milestone which caused seismic shockwaves and caught the industry off guard.

The surprise came in the speed in which it was delivered, the fact it could be downloaded at ANY price you wished to pay — and just how brilliant it was.

This was the Oxford band’s best album since 1997’s OK Computer.

It was a bold move on October 1 when guitarist Jonny Greenwood announced on the band’s website that the new album was finished and coming out in just ten days.

A special In Rainbows website allowed the public to download this seventh album at any price — £100, £20, £10, £1 or nothing at all, the choice was ours.

The move gained as many column inches in the business and news sections as in the music ones, but their actions divided the industry.

Millionaires such as Radiohead can afford to give their music away but some new bands saw the move as insulting. For the music industry, it questioned whether bands needed record labels at all.

Sitting in a café at the newly opened St Pancras station (he later leaves for Brussels for more promotion with brother Jonny), Colin nods: “I understand both sides of the argument but the thing for us is we own our record now.

“We put it out there so people had the option to pay nothing if they wanted to. But we own it and we had the right to do that.

“A young band might get excited about their first record deal but they will only get 12 per cent of every record they sell. And the record company will own the record, not only for the band’s life but for the lives of the people in the band.

“If a band is really good they’ll do really well whatever. Giving away music may make it harder for new bands but talent always attracts attention. Genius draws a crowd.

“There has never been a more exciting time to be a band. There’s a passion and thirst for new music.”

The idea of “giving away” their album came from long-term manager Chris Hufford.

Colin says: “Chris said that, if we put it out as a CD with the record company, the earliest it would come out would be February 2008. We all just wanted to get it out because we’d been working on it for so long.

“As Thom recently said, it was only through the energy — the elation for want of a better word — of actually finishing it and being proud of it, that this whole thing of ‘Yeah, let’s get it out, let’s do the download’ made sense.

“Everyone knew it was finished, that it was good to go and we just wanted to share it.

“Usually you’d go through all that nonsense, all that bollocks of marketing and whatever. It’s like some kind of weird extended foreplay. It’s wrong. It’s just deeply wrong.

“But even though Chris had suggested not putting it out as a CD at all, we know there are fans who still love CDs.”

So next week the deluxe box set edition of Radiohead’s seventh album is released on XL Recordings, which includes eight additional new tracks plus a lyrics booklet, digital photos and artwork.

Survive

The decision to leave EMI after 15 years had been a hard one to make, admits Colin.

“It wasn’t the people, it was for other reasons — business sh*t. I could never survive without needing people and the people we work with are brilliant.

“Everything in the industry was changing. Now it’s about giving people what they want.

“Everyone still cares about music and is passionate about it. But what people don’t want is walls put up saying, ‘No you can’t have it like this, you can’t have it at that quality. You can’t copy or burn it’. It’s like trying to stop running water.”

With four years passing since 2003’s Hail To The Thief, it was the longest time between Radiohead albums.

With Thom Yorke making his solo album The Eraser and Jonny hired by the BBC as composer in residence, there were side projects to distract them, plus new babies born (“We had six kids between us — the record is dedicated to all the children.”) But, says Colin, the main reason for the wait was that In Rainbows was intensely difficult to make.

He explains: “We didn’t have any confidence in what we were doing. We had been on tour in America and England, and had been performing a number of new songs live. Then when we went to record them in this crumbling old country house in Wiltshire, it was beautiful but the tracks sounded all wrong.

“And you always worry that you’re going to make something of no relevance. No relevance to us as people, as a band, and to anyone who listens to it.

“I think because the songs are so emotional it couldn’t cut from live to record. It was like the Charge Of The Light Brigade turning up and galloping across all the music, in all their outfits.

“Because we love all the songs we played over them all, which was fine when they’re played live because then the colours can be more black and white.

“But for our record, we had to retreat and withdraw a bit and think about other things like groove and colour.

“We recorded some tracks loads of times but they didn’t sound right and you can kill something by loving it too much. You can smother stuff. You can get obsessed. And we’ve done that a lot in the past.

“The turning point was when we were in our little studio in Oxford and (producer/engineer) Nigel Godrich returned. I think actually it was because we had a break from it all. It was like someone had given us Zen Buddhism pills. We went into our live room to re-record songs. We did them in two hours.”

Radiohead had worked with Godrich on every one of their albums apart from their first.

But the partnership was only reunited following aborted sessions with Mark “Spike” Stent, whose work has included Madonna, Keane and Oasis.

Loose

Colin says: “We did about three versions with him but it wasn’t happening. That’s no disrespect to him because he’s a lovely, lovely man and hugely talented.

“We had to be honest. With Nigel, there’s this mutual dependency. Ever since he was cut loose to make OK Computer we’ve had this emotional relationship.

“A year and a half ago he came to the studio but we weren’t ready and we weren’t right. He was ready but we weren’t.

“He’s like an Anglepoise lamp which shone at us and made us look at ourselves in the mirror and realise where we were at. We are a gang, a posse.”

In Rainbows carries some of Radiohead’s most beautiful tracks. Soulful and melodic, it’s a u-turn from the harsher electronic sound of earlier albums Kid A and Amnesiac.

The eerily delicate "House Of Cards" and the stunning "Reckoner" are among the highlights.

Colin says: “I also love "Reckoner", because it’s like happy/sad music. It reminds me of "Lucky" on OK Computer or "Yellow" by Coldplay.

“You listen to it because you want to but it still tugs at you.

“When Thom’s singing the main melody, it repeats again and again. We recorded our own breaks and we are all playing little percussion instruments and recorded it on this one piece of tape.

“But my favourite is "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi", which is amazingly beautiful. The song gives you hope and then it goes down again.

“It’s up and down, with self-belief and self-doubt and emotional rushes and surges.”

Old track "Nude" made it on to In Rainbows, even though it had been played live as far back as 1998.

Colin says: “Thom felt it was right now, as he is in a place in his life where the words make sense to him.

“When we wrote it in the early Nineties, it didn’t feel right to him. Thom would say this album was also right for it because I finally came up with a bassline. It’s a soul thing.

“It was like a picture that wasn’t right for years and now it works for him.

“And in the context of the record it’s kind of about love so it works in that setting.”

So how did Radiohead decide which tracks featured on the original download album and as the extra tracks on the box set?

“It wasn’t a case that they weren’t good enough. They just didn’t fit. I like the fast ones on the record and I love the slow ones on the other one.

“The song "4 Minute Warning", I love. It starts with this white noise. Thom was writing it around that period of the July 7 terrorist attacks and that air of panic and fear. It’s really downbeat and downtempo and deals with really heavy stuff.

“Then the song, "Last Flowers" is about dealing with crap on a daily basis. How you deal with a bad day.

Thom said that In Rainbows “was much more about the f**king panic of realising you’re going to die! And that any time soon I could possibly have a heart attack when I next go for a run. You know what I’m saying?”

Do Colin and the rest ever quiz Thom about his lyrics?

“No. Thom doesn’t have to explain his lyrics to us as they are really clear.

“These songs are so beautiful and so personal, about who you could be with and the choices you’ve made in your life.

“They’re love songs or songs with the promise of love. They’re emotional songs that relate to people’s lives directly. Everyone falls in and out of love.

“Thom is such an emotionally honest person. He’s either on or he’s not,

“There’s no pretending to put the light on, which is why he’s such an amazing performer. He doesn’t take a back seat and fake the emotions.”

And so in 2007 Radiohead found gold at the end of their rainbow with an album that not only turned the music world on its head, but boasted some of the most gorgeous songs they’d made.

And the good news is there won’t be as long a wait for their next album.

“We’re never going to do it like this again or take as long,” Colin says.

“From now on we know what we’re doing and we have Nigel back. Things look good again.”

In Rainbows — there really wasn’t another album that came close all year.

--thesun.co.uk

Mojo

2008-01-25T05:44:00.000-08:00

Radiohead have made the album of the year. No one is more surprised than them. Guitarist Jonny Greenwood talks to Mark Paytress.

The response to In Rainbows and how it was made available, has been amazing. Surprised?

We are! I felt some would be curious, and that there'd be people in record shops who'd be annoyed. But it was mad. I sat in my kitchen at midnight, wrote a few words saying that the album was coming out in 10 days' time, and it generated all that. The immediacy of it all was very exciting, very different to the old ways of putting records out.

Were you aware it was a remarkable record?

Well... we spent more time on it than we should have done and you go a bit mental after a while. You listen to something like Reckoner and think, Maybe this is just a bad breakbeat. Now I can hear what's good about it. People around us were telling us it was really good, but what do they know? What do we know?

Did you approach it with a different mindset?

No. We just started recording, and after we had three or four songs in the bag, an album was underway. We're not very good at the big picture until an album's finished.

It was your first album in four years and you had no record label. Scared?

I don't think so. It didn't really feel like a non-EMI record. EMI were always very good about leaving us alone until we'd finished, at least ever since Pablo Honey. We just recorded in a different house with worse plumbing and lived in tents for a while. Some of it was recorded at the Radiohead studios. Then we hired a big crumbling house down Somerset way with no running water and rat poison everywhere. It was a bit grim. It had been a school, then a rehab centre, then abandoned for 20 years. Weird place.

Did that impact on the album?

You can definitely hear the atmosphere of the place on "Bodysnatchers". That's the one live track on the record, and that's how it sounded. Some of the record was done Kid A-style, working very slowly, building songs up piecemeal. It was when we recorded Reckoner that we felt we'd first got something special on tape.

Has the songwriting process changed significantly since Kid A/Amnesiac?

No. It's still mostly Thom's songs and us helping out on a few bits and pieces. All the albums seem to have that same balance.

How does Hail To The Thief sound to you now?

That was us doing what people said we were good at - writing songs, playing them in a room, recording an album in two weeks. It was good for our heads, good to make a record that way.

Did you intend to shake up the industry by releasing In Rainbows as a download?

No. I mean, we've got a small office in Reading. It's not gonna happen. It wasn't, This'll show 'em, but more a case of, This'll be mad, let's see what happens. That's as far as the thinking went. It's weird how a simple idea's been interpreted.

How successful was the pricing experiment?

Dunno yet. But that's what was cool about it, people's fingers hovering over that input field' for a few seconds thinking, What is this actually worth? A paperback book? A chocolate bar?

So Radiohead is now a cottage industry...

Well, it's great to have that control, but we don't wanna be spending the rest of our career in meetings discussing Portuguese shop displays. But it's been good. Ever since the release, we seem to have spent all our time in the studio, which is where we're happiest.

What's in the box set?

All the tracks we intended to use when some of us wanted it to be a long record but were wary of releasing something akin to a double album. It's certainly not just a bunch of songs that weren't good enough! It'll also include artwork, lyrics, photos from the big house by me and Colin. The shop version will be a disc and 10 songs.

Is there now a different kind of pressure?

I don't think it's that different, really. Was it successful? Yeah, because everybody heard the music quickly and in large numbers. It's made us feel gratified that the interest is out there. It was by no means certain that there'd be any interest, so that feels really weird and really great.--

Thanks to Withnail for the transcription.

2008-01-25T05:37:00.000-08:00

Meet Radiohead’s Secret Genius

He's the man behind Radiohead's artwork and this issue's free art prints: the mysterious Stanley Donwood

Free with this week's NME you’ll find three posters of classic Radiohead album artwork: the collage of scratched-out humans and dislocated motorways that makes up OK Computer's cover; Hail To The Thief's painted LA roadmap `Hollywood, with seething words and political phrases instead of buildings; and
the disturbed cartoon 'Everything in Its Right Place, from the Kid A booklet.

The creator of this startling, mysterious, downright odd artwork is the enigmatic Stanley Donwood. Not much is known of him; legend has is it that Stanley Donwood isn't his real name, that he met Radiohead at university and has collaborated with Yorke - working under the name 'Tchocky' or 'Dr Tchock - on all the artwork from The Bends onwards.

Donwood's stated in the past that the music and art have a 'symbiotic' and parasitic' relationship, but since his work complements their music so perfectly you could easily see him as integral to Radiohead as a whole.

Granted a rare interview with Donwood, NME tried to find out more about his relationship with the band but, befitting the smoke and mirrors that surround him and his work, his answers came more in the form of cryptic clues. From here on in, make sure you leave a trail of crumbs behind you and always remember that '2+2=5'.

NME: How did you first start working with Radiohead?

Stanley: "I saw an advert in the window of a newsagent's in Oxford; 'Wanted - artist for new band, own material, major label interest. Apply 01865 XXXXXXX:"

The first thing you designed for the band was the My Iron Lung EP. How did that come about?

"Well, after phoning the number on the ad in the newsagent's I went round to this horrible squat the band had round the back of a cinema. A really tall bloke, Ed [O'Brien, lead guitar], I suppose, explained that they were in a spot of bother. They had a single out in a week - did I reckon I could sort them out? Of course I said that I could. No point telling them I'd failed my art course."

What is your work inspired by?

"The usual things; rage, bewilderment, cynicism, boredom, paranoia, confusion, security guards, pylons, ring-roads, out-of-town supermarkets, petrol stations, fury, suburban lawns, pig farms, government installations, anger, decommissioned atomic sites, primetime TV advertising, volcanoes; you know."

How closely do you work with the band when you're designing artwork?

"Typically, I camp in the nearest woodland and try to forget who I am. Occasionally I stumble through the muddy fields to whichever derelict mansion they're recording in and make a few sketches and notes. Sometimes Colin [Greenwood, bass] notices me, skulking in the rain, peering in through the broken windows, but mostly I wander like a ghost."

Are you given a brief or can you do what you like?

"I don't know what a brief is, although I suspect I would start screaming if I ever got one."

What's the Radiohead angry bear (above) all about?

"It isn't angry; it's hungry. It's all the toys you used to play with when you were little. I first drew it for my daughter when she was about one. It was part of a story about how forgotten toys wake up in dusty boxes and go and eat the adults who abandoned them."

What do you think of the way Radiohead decided to release In Rainbows?

"Everyone's got an opinion, hey? I reckon it was the only thing to do. What else? Major label? Free CD with the fucking Daily fucking Mail? Covermount on Q? Give me a break."

Has the band ever said, 'No, that's crap, can you do something else?'

"They did once, when I wanted to make giant topiary porn. Just as well, really. Though I don't think they said it was 'crap'. I would have remembered and held a grudge for decades."

Are there overall themes to your work which perhaps dovetail with some of Radiohead's obsessions?

"It's not beyond the realms of possibility. Though I imagine those 'themes' and 'obsessions' are common to a fuck of a lot of people. But do you know what? NME exclusive: I'm even more of a miserable nihilist fucker than they are:'

What do you think is your own best piece of work and why?

"I don't know, but I got sent this quote this morning, which somehow seems quite apposite: 'You do not have to believe in yourself or your work. It is not your business to determine how good it is, how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. But it is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly to the urges that motivate you - Martha Graham [US pioneer of modern dance]."

How important do you think artwork is when it comes to forging the identity of a band?

"Well, if the band is no good it doesn't matter how good the artwork is, but if the band is great then the artwork can be shit and no-one’ll care. I'm quite repelled by the notions of marketing, brand identity and so on, but I grew up in the '80s so was continually exposed to the sort of corporate fuckwittery that gave us the insulting consumer-orientated client-state we inhabit today. This relatively sudden embrace of the power of 'graphic design' - formerly know as 'commercial art- undoubtedly had an effect on the music 'industry', paradoxically allowing me to rant about consumerism on record sleeves. And in music magazines:'

Could you explain the images on the posters we're giving away?

"Explain them? Not really; that's why they're pictures rather than monologues I bore people with at the pub. I'm a bit worried that if I 'explained' them they'd just kind of die, like tropical fish in the aquarium at the dentists'."--
Thanks to Withnail for the transcript.

2007 December 8 | NME

2008-01-25T05:19:00.000-08:00

Rainbow Warriors

December 8, 2007
By Julian Marshall

With the release of In Rainbows, Radiohead have changed the music industry. Now its makers tell us how it was made, what it means for them and whether they'll ever make another record

Endless yards of dusty books line the walls, a roaring open fire warms each room and everywhere not-too-tasteful stuffed fish are pinned into glass cabinets. Rumour has it The Old Parsonage Hotel in Oxford is where Oscar Wilde used to stay when he was visiting the town. It's pretty easy to believe - the place is a shameless feast of antique chintz. So fervently traditional and backward-looking, it's perhaps an odd venue for the first interview Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood have given since October 10 of this year. That was the day they sent shockwaves through ; the music world by announcing that their seventh studio album, 'In Rainbows', was finished and would be available for fans to download in 10 days' time. Oh, and that each person could decide how much they wanted to pay for it.

Thom is the first to arrive, by foot. He orders a coffee and small-talk immediately shifts to his record collection. He's excited about the new albums from !!!, Modeselektor and Robert Wyatt but, surprisingly, hasn't heard the new PJ Harvey record yet. He's just been listening to a bunch of remixes of tracks from his solo debut The Eraser that he hopes to put online before the end of the year. Greenwood arrives 20 minutes late, looking flustered. Compared to Thom he's shy, but get him on the right subject - the BBC archive, the lost genius of Clive James or computer programming - and he practically glows. Together, they are the heart and brains of a guitar band who, more than any other, has moved at the cutting edge of music in the last decade.

The duo are quick to reveal that the original idea to give In Rainbows away as a free download actually dates back to 2004 and Hail To The Thief. That album leaked online extremely early, as did Yorke's 2006 solo album. The embryonic plan this time was to have an official "leak" date so the group themselves could control how it was put on to the net. When In Rainbows was completed this summer the band were without a record contract, their six album-deal with Parlophone having expired with Hail To The Thief. They knew it would take at least until the new year to negotiate a new deal and get the album released if they went down the traditional route. Egged on by their management, they decided to take complete control and release it themselves.

It was the best-kept secret of the year: In Rainbows would be available to download only a few weeks after it was finished. You could pay what you liked, and if you were dead-set on having a version you could hold in your hands, there was a special collectors' edition discbox with eight extra tracks that, if you ordered it, will be dropping through your letterbox later this week. At first it sounded like bankruptcy-inducing madness, but on closer inspection it made sound financial sense. Under a normal record company deal, the band would make just over a pound per album sold, whereas with an honesty-box style approach to their music, the few people paying a tenner or more would balance out those downloading it for nothing. Radiohead's revolutionary step was widely regarded as an industry-shaking stroke of genius, remoulding the distribution of music as defiantly as they had reimagined music itself. Daring? Inventive? Revolutionary? From these modest maestros we expected no less. But did it feel as though they were messing with the music industry's DNA?

"We didn't really invite that many people into the circle of trust," says Jonny. "I bought NME and there was something on the cover about a new Oasis single out in a few weeks' time. I remember thinking, 'We've got a new album coming in 10 days and nobody knows!'

I stayed up until midnight to announce it and just watched people on messageboards claiming that the website had been hacked. I think they thought it was a joke. That seemed to be the first reaction. It was going to be two weeks originally because we thought it might take two weeks for people to actually find out about it. Our manager had said, 'There's a chance that people are less interested than we're assuming."'

Radiohead weren't done with the shock announcements. On October 31, just under three weeks after the In Rainbows had been released digitally, the band declared they had signed a conventional deal with independent XL, and that a normal CD version of the album would be available in shops on December 31, 2007. It's time for NME to get to the bottom of this unconventional revolution...

After the bold way In Rainbows came out, isn't putting out a normal CD a bit regressive?

Thom: "I don t think people should assume that everyone is internet savvy. The internet is not the fucking universe. Lots of people seem to have a problem with the fact that we are putting out a real CD at all. That assumes that all we do is worry about the internet and we don't. I'm not into MySpace, it's not my thing. And Facebook... I don't know, it's just not my thing. I'm too old."

Could you not have done the physical release yourselves? Why sign to XL?

Thom: "It's not a record deal in the sense of a traditional record deal, That's very important - it's just the distribution. There's none of the normal dynamics of a record deal where they have artist development and that sort of thing. I had a good relationship with XL doing The Eraser and it felt like the right thing to do."

Jonny: "The alternative was to sign a five-album deal with Universal or Warner and do a traditional, '90s-style record deal. Having done what we did in October it would have felt a bit weird."

Thom: "XL had actually called up our manager the week before the download happened and said, 'We've got this great idea. How about you just release it for free as a download?' (Laughing) We were like, 'That sounds like a good idea. .:"

What will you do if no-one buys the CD because they've already downloaded it for free?

Thom: "I think we’re doing alright already."

If the release of In Rainbows was a rushed affair, the recording certainly wasn’t; sessions first began in the autumn of 2005 with producer Mark 'Spike' Stent, but after a year in the studio, still feeling like nothing productive had come from them, Radiohead abandoned them to tour the UK and North America. It was on these tours that they were able to roadtest around 20 new songs, experimenting with their structure and sound in front of a real-life audience. Reinvigorated, the band called in long-term 'Head producer Nigel Godrich to Tottenham House in Wiltshire: a Grade-I listed building which dates back to the 1720s, and, in that sense, is a similar environment to the country-house studios some of their favourite moments from OK Computer and Kid A had been made in.

Tottenham House sounds pretty swanky - was it a palace?

Jonny: [Laughing] "They were waiting to go and demolish most of it. It was just a plumbing-free place full of buckets of rat poison. It was a bit grim."

Thom: "There wasn't even a functioning toilet. It was quite alarming - if the wind picked up you couldn't really stand beneath the windows because the top windows kept blowing out. They were all broken."

Jonny: "It had been a prep school up until the early'80s and then it was a rehab place for recovering heroin addicts. The bathrooms were designed for small boys."

How did the surroundings effect the recording sessions?

Thom: "Whenever you go somewhere you observe whatever the atmosphere is. The reason we went there at all is because it had this bizarre round chamber [a large space where the group could set up their equipment to get the best possible sound]. We used it on everything. We were there for about three weeks and I got very sick. I couldn’t swallow and it was all very horrible. I stayed in a caravan for two days thinking that I was going to get better and then it just got worse and worse and worse."

Jonny: "We were staying in caravans. I thought it would be quite glamorous, like winnebagos!"

Thom: "But it wasn’t t like that, and the cold set in and it was damp. It was kind of the wrong time of year, It was October and the weather was kicking in."

What was the mood like during the recording?

Thom: "We could do what we wanted and it was great. You just get into this crazy headspace really fast. In a couple of days you lose track of time and where you are, as you're just in music 24 hours a day."

Jonny: "The house was so dilapidated. But we developed an idea about all the songs. There was a room with just a guitar and drumkit and amp. We were just playing bad blues rock at three in the morning for the sake of it."

All this filth, rats and falling masonry might explain why "Bodysnatchers" is perhaps the most aggressive-sounding Radiohead track to date...

Thom: "I have this thing - just before I get really sick I'll have this 12-hour hyperactive mania, and that song was recorded during one of those. I felt genuinely out of it when we did that. The vocal is one take and we didn't do anything to it afterwards. We tidied up my guitar because I was so out of it, my guitar-playing was rubbish. My best vocals are always the ones that happen there and then."

After three weeks at Tottenham House the band returned to Oxford, craving home comforts. Pretty much all of the songs on In Rainbows (both the download and discbox versions) had been worked on - though none actually finished as the band were ironically hobbled by an overload of ideas: they could think of a million different ways to record each song, some of which had been in their live sets and in demo form, in different guises, for upwards of 10 years. String sections were experimented with, a choir of schoolchildren was recruited for "15 Step", and Jonny Greenwood would disappear for days at a time to write a computer program, which would finish up only making a couple of seconds of the record. The complexity of finishing these songs brought them dangerously close to an unproductive halt, as with Kid A years before.

Thom: "We deliberately did this thing to get a sense of disembodiment when we were assembling tracks. So the vocal may be from one version or the drums may be from another. If there was something that you were particularly fond of you kept it from that take and forced it on to the other version. It was a really interesting experiment. For example, "All I Need" was the outcome of four different versions of it. It was all the best bits put together."

Jonny: "Thom will come and play a song like "Nude" [which was originally written by Yorke in the mid'90s] to you and obviously it's good. You want to record it. But it's been hanging around for 10 years and you find yourself thinking, 'Why haven't we recorded a good enough version of that song?' The relief now is that it's done and we didn't mess it up - it's worth it all."

Thom: "We would have these days where there were big breakthroughs and then suddenly... no. "Videotape", to me, was a big breakthrough, we tried everything with it. One day I came in and decided it was going to be like a fast pulse - like a four to the floor thing and everything was going to be built from that. We threw all this stuff at it. But then a couple of months later I went out and I came back and Jonny and Nigel Godrich had stripped it back. He had this bare bones thing, which was amazing."

After such a painstaking recording process, are you happy with the album now? Are you ever?

Thom: "When it's finished I am, otherwise it doesn't get out. This one was hard because we had to jettison tunes that were as good as what's on there but for some reason didn't bounce off the other tunes right. They were to the detriment of them. That was a real headfuck for me. "Down Is The New Up" for example, is one of the things I am most proud of us ever doing. It's got the best drumming that Phil [Selway] has ever done on it. If you get it right, and we have done in the past, songs bounce off each other and they create something different."

The clock ticking, Jonny Greenwood has made plans for a long weekend so makes his excuses and leaves. But Thom is in the mood to talk some more. Earlier, NME had pressed him on what some of the more obscure lyrics were about. He seemed evasive. Now, one-on-one and a glass of white wine later, he seems more willing to discuss them.

With many of the lyrics on In Rainbows written in the first person, are we to take it this is a more personal record?

Thom: "With Hail To The Thief I was using the language of the impersonal, but the fact I'm using a different language on this doesn't necessarily mean I am personally reflecting it on me."

What about the night out that you described in "Jigsaw Falling Into Place"? Did you experience that first-hand?

"I would never say it was personal because it's always a set of observations. "Jigsaw Falling Into Place" says much about the fact I used to live in the centre of Oxford and used to go out occasionally and witness the fucking chaos of a weekend around here. But it's also about a lot of different experiences. Personally, I was really surprised that it's going to be the single. The lyrics are quite caustic - the idea of
'before you’re comatose' or whatever, drinking yourself into oblivion and getting fucked-up to forget. When you're part of a group of people who are all trying to forget en masse it is partly this elation. But there s a much darker side."

There's also a lyric in "Jigsaw..." about exchanging phone numbers, while "House Of Cards" has a line: 'I don't want to be your friend, I just want to be your lover'. Is this Radiohead's, um, sexy album?

"Oh yeah, most songs on the record are seduction songs. My version of it anyway. I guess it's something that is not very often apparent, but it became apparent as time went on."

Songs like "All I Need" are about obsession, aren't they?

"That's why it's called In Rainbows: That obsession thing, thinking beyond where you are at the time. It's a phrase I had for a while, it kept coming up in my notebooks. And I don't know why, because it's kind of naff. But it seemed to work - it's one of those weird things. It stuck and I don’t know why."

Our drinks drained, it's clear that the always self-conscious and reticent Thom feels he has talked enough about himself and his band for one day. But as he makes his move to leave, there is still one question - the same question that precedes every new Radiohead release - left to ask. Like night follows day and headache follows Gallows gig, a Radiohead album always comes trailing internet chatter that it will be their last, and In Rainbows has been no exception.

So, Thom, will there be another one?

"(Long pause) Yeah, but I'm not sure we would go on tour beforehand and do all that bullshit. But we are actually really happy. I think with the download thing... somehow we've been released from things. Not just from EMI, but also creatively. The idea that you can just press return and people can hear it. It's expanding everybody's minds. You can sort of see it happening. Colin [Greenwood, bass] for example is really excited about all the possibilities. So I'm sure there will be, but it will be a manifestation of the freedom of things. There’s no need to now answer to the old history of the band."

Finally, what advice would you give to a "Creep"-era Thom Yorke?

"Don't go on tour for quite as long as you did during the OK Computer period [Thom famously suffered from depression during the tour, as seen on the Meeting People Is Easy DVD]. And don’t assume that in any way this is yours. It's everybody's. Don’t be so fucking selfish."

There he goes then, shuffling smartly out of the Old Parsonages dusty history into whatever bright future he envisions for us all: rock's most downloadable Santa Claus and the least selfish man in showbusiness. Hail to the anti-thief.

Thanks to Withnail for the transcription.

2007 December 22 | The Scotsman

2008-01-25T05:08:00.000-08:00

A head for figures?

By JON PARELES

SHORTLY AFTER RADIOHEAD released their album In Rainbows online in October, the band misplaced their password for Max/MSP, a geeky music software package that guitarist Jonny Greenwood uses constantly. It wasn't the first time it had happened, Greenwood tells me over a cup of tea at the Randolph Hotel in New York. As usual Radiohead contacted Max/MSP's developers, Cycling '74, for another password. "They wrote back," Greenwood says, " 'Why don't you pay us what y
Well, Radiohead were asking for it. Those are the exact terms on which the band has been selling the downloadable version of In Rainbows: Buyers can pay zero or whatever they please up to £99.99 pounds for the album in MP3 form. Sixteen years and seven albums into the career that has made Radiohead the most widely pondered band in rock, they are taking chances with commerce as well as art. For the beleaguered recording business they have put in motion the most audacious experiment in years.

Radiohead are not the first act to try what one of their managers, Chris Hufford, calls "virtual busking". But they're the first one that can easily fill arenas. "It feels good," says Thom Yorke, the band's leader, over a pint of cider at his local Oxford pub, the Rose and Crown. "It was a way of letting everybody judge for themselves."

Radiohead's pay-what-you-choose gambit didn't just set off economic debates. It should also establish 2007 as two kinds of tipping point for recorded music. One is as the year of the free agent superstar. After fulfilling their contract in 2003 with their last album for EMI, Hail to the Thief, Radiohead turned down multimillion-dollar offers for a new major-label deal, preferring to stay independent.

"It was tough to do anything else," Yorke says, during one of Radiohead's first interviews since the release of the album. "The worst-case scenario would have been: Sign another deal, take a load of money, and then have the machinery waiting semi-patiently for you to deliver your product, which they can add to the list of products that make up the myth, la-la-la-la."

Signing a new major-label contract "would have killed us straight off," he adds. "Money makes you numb, as M.I.A. wrote. I mean, it's tempting to have someone say to you, 'You will never have to worry about money ever again', but no matter how much money someone gives you – what, you're not going to spend it? You're not going to find stupid ways to get rid of it? Of course you are. It's like building roads and expecting there to be less traffic."

The Eagles and Madonna, both with sales that dwarf Radiohead's, also abandoned major labels in 2007, as did songwriters such as Joni Mitchell and Paul McCartney, who moved to Hear Music, the independent label partly owned by Starbucks. Meanwhile Prince has followed his own wayward path, from one-album distribution deals through major labels to giving away CDs at concerts or free with the Mail on Sunday.

The second tipping point is the decisive migration of music to the internet. Of course, that has been anything but sudden. Music has been bouncing around online, sold or shared, since the days of dial-up, and bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Public Enemy gave away full albums online years ago. But the momentum of online music has been accelerating. Apple's iTunes became the third-largest music retailer in the US this year. Amazon added MP3 downloads alongside physical album sales. Hip-hop mix tapes, singled out for copyright prosecution by record labels, disappeared from stores and street corners only to thrive online, where the likes of Lil Wayne, Cam'ron and Kanye West release their latest innovations.

Radiohead were able to draw worldwide attention to In Rainbows with no more than a 24-word announcement on their website on 1 October. To the band's glee, they could release their music almost immediately, without the months of lead time necessary to manufacture discs. Hufford says In Rainbows has been downloaded in places as far-flung – and largely unwired – as North Korea and Afghanistan.

On 9 November, as a kind of workaholic lark, Radiohead staged a free, thoroughly informal webcast called Thumbs Down, with real-time performances of new songs and covers of Björk and the Smiths, from their cluttered studio in Oxford. (Many clips are on YouTube.) Yet Radiohead's online choices, band members say, were among the easier decisions made during the protracted recording process of In Rainbows. The band and their producer, Nigel Godrich, focused on 16 songs and worked them over in the studio, on the road and in the studio again, for well over two years of torturous rearranging and rewriting. "We kept on ripping the guts out of it all the time and starting again," drummer Phil Selway says in Oxford.

The band chose ten concise, tuneful songs for the album. Yorke sings about displacement, disorientation, memories and moving on. Weird Fishes/Arpeggi wonders "Why should I stay here?," and imagines decomposing underwater and being eaten by worms, before concluding: "Hit the bottom and escape."

Throughout In Rainbows Yorke's lyrics can be mapped onto personal relationships, the state of the world or the state of the band. Behind much of the album "was a sudden realisation of the day-to-day, tenuous nature of life," Yorke says. "Most of the time I was really, really trying not to judge anything that was happening. I was trying to just, not exactly knock it out, but not trying to be clever. That's all."

The internet had already witnessed the gestation of In Rainbows, as Radiohead tested songs in public, knowing they would be bootlegged immediately. "The first time we ever did All I Need, boom! It was up on YouTube," Yorke says. "I think it's fantastic. The instant you finish something, you're really excited about it, you're really proud of it, you hope someone's heard it, and then, by God, they have. It's OK because it's on a phone or a video recorder. It's a bogus recording, but the spirit of the song is there, and that's good. At that stage that's all you need to worry about."

The band worried over other things. After releasing Hail to the Thief and touring the world, Radiohead took a year off. The members, all in their thirties, turned to raising families as they mulled over the future. Early in 2005 they began rehearsing together tentatively; Selway says the word "album" was taboo for a year.

By the end of the year they had a list of songs, but the band had still not regained its momentum. Yorke, a prolific songwriter, made his own album, The Eraser, working mostly alone with his computer and samples. Godrich was busy recording Beck, so the band tried some sessions with Spike Stent, who had worked with Björk, at the beginning of 2006. They were disappointed with the results. Then they decided that performing might put the songs into shape. They booked a summer tour in 2006, playing half a dozen new songs at every show. Soon, thanks to bootlegged recordings online, fans were clearly recognising each one. After the tour Radiohead returned to the studio, only to decide that the songs weren't ready yet.

"To be brutally honest," guitarist Ed O'Brien says over lunch at Shoreditch House in London, "the problem about playing these songs live is that we were bored with them. We played them 80 times live or so, and we'd rehearsed them to death. It just didn't happen when we got back into the studio initially."

Once again the band began tinkering. "We have a song and we've got lots of different ways we can try it, but we don't know what's going to work, and that's why it still sort of feels a bit weirdly amateur," Greenwood says. "You'd think by now we'd know what's going to work, and what's still frustrating, or kind of encouraging in a way, is that we don't know whether it's going to work on a laptop or whether it has to be a piano or..."

He half-smiles. "It's got so twisted. What we've learned is that you can't repeat a method that you've already used for a song when it did work."

The sound of In Rainbows often seems straightforward, almost like a live band; it is Radiohead's most gracefully melodic album in a decade. But they arrived at the music circuitously, and there's often more tucked into a track than is apparent at first. Videotape, with lyrics about recording a happy moment in a tape to be viewed posthumously, has a tolling piano and a beat so elusive that "we spent about a year in rehearsal on that song actually all trying to agree on where the one was," Selway says. "Each of us, over the course of a year, we'd all lose it."

The Reckoner that was part of the band's live sets sounds nothing like the Reckoner on the album. When the band returned from touring, they decided the song needed a second part, and then a third one; eventually they discarded the original. For All I Need, Greenwood says, he wanted to recapture the white noise made by a band playing loudly in a room, when "all this chaos kicks up". That sound never materialises in the more analytical confines of a studio. His solution was a string section, and his own overdubbed violas, sustaining every note of the scale, blanketing the frequencies.

Yorke worked on many of the songs in the Rose and Crown. "I sit there, on the way in, because it's a really nice little table," he says, pointing. "And then I get out my scraps of paper and I line them up. I need to put them into my book because they're just scraps of paper, and I'm going to lose them unless I do it. So am I writing here? Probably. I don't know yet. I'm just collating information. This is a nice, relaxing thing to do, and it also keeps your mind tuned in to the whole thing. And you see things you didn't know."

The band and their managers are not releasing the download's sales figures or average price. "It's our linen," Hufford says. "We don't want to wash it in public." A statement from the band rejected estimates by the online survey company ComScore that during October about three-fifths of downloaders took the album free, while the rest paid less than half of the usual cost of a CD.

Factoring in free downloads, ComScore said the average price per download was £1.10. But it did not specify a total number of downloads, saying only that a "significant percentage" of the 1.2 million people who visited the Radiohead website, inrainbows.com, in October downloaded the album. Under a typical recording contract, a band receives royalties of about 15 per cent of an album's wholesale price after expenses are recovered. Without middlemen, and with zero material costs for a download, $2.26 per album would work out to Radiohead's advantage – and then there was the worldwide publicity.

Both Hufford and the members of Radiohead say the strategy has been a success. "People made their choice to actually pay money," Hufford says. "It's people saying, 'We want to be part of this thing.' If it's good enough, people will put a penny in the pot. This was a solution to a series of issues. I doubt it would work the same way ever again."

Radiohead have not abandoned the physical disc. A mail-order deluxe version of In Rainbows – the album and a bonus CD, two vinyl albums, artwork and a fancy package for £40 – went on sale alongside the downloaded version on 10 October, directly from the band's own mail-order company, W.A.S.T.E.

Hufford says that he and Bryce Edge, Radiohead's other manager, came up with the pay-what-you-want plan during a stoned conversation about the value of music. They had initially proposed releasing only the download and the deluxe box, but the band overruled them. On Monday 31 December – a day when few albums are usually released – the single-disc In Rainbows is due as a retail CD and vinyl LP, in joint ventures with XL in most countries and the US independent label TBD (part of ATO Records) .
http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
Will Botwin, president and chief executive of ATO, optimistically described the download as "the world's largest listening party", drawing attention to the album among Radiohead's core fans. Thehttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
label plans to market to a broader audience with everything from television ads to in-store displays. Radio stations have already been sent the bruising rocker Bodysnatchers – a song, Yorke says, inspired by Victorian ghost stories, The Stepford Wives and his own feeling of "your physical consciousness trapped without being able to connect fully with anything else" – and the tense folk-rocker Jigsaw Falling Into Place.

The music business waits to see how downloads will affect sales. "The record company doesn't know," says a grinning Colin Greenwood, Radiohead's bassist. "They called and said, 'We've made this number of records, is it enough?' And our manager said, 'I don't know.' It's great, isn't it?" For Radiohead, uncertainty is home turf.

• In Rainbows is out on 31 December, and the single, Jigsaw Falling Into Place, on 14 January. Radiohead play Glasgow Green on 27 June.--news.scotsman.com

Oor

2008-01-25T04:57:00.000-08:00

The price of Radiohead

Only Radiohead’s decision to offer their 7th album In Rainbows from 10 October through the internet, by which the downloader is allowed to decide for himself how many he/she wants to pay for it, was enough to make 2007 a historical pop year. With that, the pentad from Oxford had excluded (temporarily?) the by the pop world so often revenged record industry.
[It was] a brilliant manoeuvre according to some, a clever marketing trick to others. Or is the truth still a little bit different? [I was] in conversation with singer Thom Yorke and bass player Colin Greenwood about the strategy’s behind In Rainbows… but above all about the music itself.

In the boiling hot and musty corridors of the expensive Landmark Hotel in London it is “business as usual”. Journalists from European countries, a number of them came by train on request from the environmental aware band, are quickly and nervously reading through their notes before the girl from the record company Beggars Banquet (who’s subdivision XL will release In Rainbows on the 31st of December on a normal CD) pushes them into a chamber. It is almost like the work in a factory, in which it is important for her to make the right combinations of journalists and musicians and separate them again after 25 minutes or so. Over there guitar player Jonny Greenwood just rushed into a hotel chamber. Its tree-tall colleague Ed O’Brien is there at the corridor now. The girl from XL says: ‘Ed meets Manuel … O sorry, Ed meets Anders.’ Oh well, what does it matter if the Spaniard has been regarded as a Dane, or the opposite. “Don’t get any big ideas”, to start with a citation from Radiohead’s “Nude”. Thom Yorke appears in the corridor now. He theatrically walks crippled and goes through his knees. He’s a remarkably small man, evidently weary from a whole day of interviews. The girl from the record company pushes my shoulder: ‘Thom meets Tom.’ ‘Without H’, I added. Inside the room the air-conditioning is on full power. Thank God it’s cool inside here. The singer (little beard, ala Vincent van Gogh with a bad eye) is casual but decently clothed, with a pullover above a shirt and he’s relaxed and friendly.

I wanted to let him see the results of the OOR-poll, as I on the morning of my departure to London have printed and translated it for him to read:

For the new Radiohead-pay what you’d like download, which did you choose?
(2562 votes total)
ZERO EURO: 25% (882 votes)
AT THE MOST FIVE EUROS: 26% (942 votes)
I SUPPORT THE BAND AND PAID A NORMAL CD-PRICE: 27% votes (967)
I DON’T NEED THAT RECORD: 22% votes (771)

Thom (laughing): "Over the last category I don’t have to worry about being nice."

Is that the same result that you tallied?

Thom: "But is it true? Maybe not."

Bassist Colin Greenwood comes in. He has been wrapped in black, frequently uses the stoplap, it's cool, he has a nice strange face, talks a little drawling (many 'oh really's), and makes a gentle and pleasant impression. Thom puts the OOR-poll under his nose: "Decode this!"

Thom (to me): Approximately half of people have paid. That turns out better than expected, because we were well under the impression that entirely nobody would pay. Panic!

There will be a lot to be counted at the headquarters. The number of downloads, the incoming amounts for paid downloads, the number of orders for the special box with a second CD. We know nevertheless that the pictures and artwork must be put in those boxes somehow.

Thom: "Yes we certainly have someone we need, to do that."

Colin: "Our parents ... They are now working at home. They have retired and have nothing to do with their hands. No, joking. But it is the best that it can be. I spoke last night with our manager and he said that the download CD is approximately equal to where we were as the CD through a store would have sold. 60% of the downloads came within in the first week, but there are still new network picking people that want the record. It is cool."

Thom: "We are well over one million downloads."

Worldwide?

Thom: "Yes, but a lot of countries do not participate because of the language barrier. This is a bit annoying. Japan in particular."

Colin: "Yes, what’s strange is that if we had put it on the net in twenty different languages, it would be an entirely different story. We know that now. eBay and Amazon offered their assistance to us."

So they jumped on top of it immediately?

Thom: "No, it was not a jump. They said, "we will help you.” They wanted to perfect it through us."

Colin: 'But we said no, keep it."

Thom: "Keep the shit."

Did you make the record with the thought of putting it online for free?

Thom: No, every time our manager came by and wanted to talk about it, we said: we’re not done with the music yet. It only became an interesting concept, something we wanted to participate in, when the record was completely finished and we were satisfied with it. Before that, it was: there’ll be no talking. We had no idea what to expect.

You can’t possibly overlook the consequences when you make a move like that. At a certain moment, you knew that you were going to put ten songs online, and eight others were kept behind on purpose.

Thom: No, the ten songs that are on the internet will form the actual record.

What about the eight bonus tracks?

Thom: They’re in the box.

Colin: Last weekend, I listened to the bonus tracks again.

Thom: CD 2...

Colin: Yes, and I think we’ve made a good selection for the main record and the bonus record. Not that I want to discard the bonus disc, because one of my two favourite songs is on that one.

What’s it called?

Colin: "4 Minute Warning".

Thom: And "Down Is The New Up" is my favourite.

Colin: But these songs would never have fit on the main disc.

The first thing I saw when arriving at St. Pancras Station in London –at your request, to spare the environment- was a rainbow.

Thom: Well, seems like He Up There (??) has kept to our deal then, haha.

Why did you name the record In Rainbows?

Colin: It was one of many suggestions, but it sounds cool, like it has an open ending. I immediately liked it, because it has lots of possible meanings. It has nothing of a slogan, nothing provoking...

Thom: Nothing polarising. It’s related to the artwork as well. That’s so weird. It happens a lot that the artwork gives you ideas... Stan was doing this wicked ink explosion thing.

Stan is your designer?

Thom: Stanley Donwood. It all started with him dropping a candle.

Colin: Seriously, when he was working at home one night.

Thom: That’s how the Big Fire(???) in London started. He scanned the wax, which looked amazing. It fit very well with the rainbow idea. I started focusing on the words In Rainbows. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to go with the idea of trying to reach something you can’t. It’s there, but you can’t reach it.

A number of songs seemed to be about nature, and the human being, as a part of it, who doesn’t realise what he’s doing.

Thom: Wow! I haven’t heard it put like that yet, but it sounds great.

For example, the song about fish, "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi". People are poisoning the sea, you’re singing, where do the poor fish have to go?

Thom: You know what it is? The entire time I was busy writing, I wanted to get away from these things. I was worried about those themes entering my work. But it was just there, whether I wanted it or not. To me, the most important line on this record is the word denial in "House of Cards", because that’s what it all comes from. Denial in every possible meaning. It was the only time I was aware of that.

What you’re talking about. At the end of the song, you sing 'your ears should be burning'. Burning with shame, no? The human race should be thoroughly ashamed.

Thom: Yeah, you could say that. But of all the lyrics I’ve ever written, I hope that the ones on this record will deliver the widest range of interpretations.

In almost every song you constantly change perspectives: actor(???), victim, hunter, prey, polluter and threatened (???) species.

Thom: Bonkers! Fascinating interpretation, I hope everyone sees it like that.

You could interpret In Rainbows as a portrait of the 21st century man, who – despite trying to do what’s right – can’t fight the system. ‘You can fight it like a dog and they brought me to my knees.’ The Bodysnatchers will get you in the end.

Thom: Well, the lyrics of "Bodysnatchers" came from cutting and pasting lines fom The Stepford Wives. So there you go. I got obsessed with The Stepford Wives. I wrote lots and lots of excerpts from the book next to each other and started cutting.

Colin: It’s a book from the seventies. There’s a movie now, too. It’s written by Ira Levin, who recently passed away. He also wrote The Boys From Brazil [and, more famous: the horror story Rosemary’s Baby (1967)].’

Thom: The idea that you can be captured by something external, a ghost, comes from The Stepford Wives. At the end of the movie you see a new conscience entering someone’s body.

The first song, "15 Step", starts with ‘How come I end up where I started? How come I end up where I went wrong?’. This seems to fit you guys. Every idealism dies in the cynicism of reality. For example, when I arrived here I started thinking: Oh God, these guys are no logo, but gosh, there’s a label on my T-shirt and one on my jacket as well. Then I started looking around and the only thing I saw was logos.

Thom (pointing at his own white trainers): Here, a logo as well! You can’t escape it. I wrote this album from a very harmonious thought. I didn’t want to fight anything, but at the same time I didn’t want to be apathetic. That kind of mood. The others caught up on it as well – that it was a personal record, or at least a human one. It felt good not to attack in any way for once. I didn’t want to judge everything, just sing like how I am, like what I’m feeling. (???)

Is it hard not to judge yourself as well?

Thom: I’m only human, so... it’s about me, but... [long sighing] I’ll let this question pass.

Alright, "Nude" is an old song. What changed that made you get it right?

Thom: That’s the classical case of a song that hasn’t made sense for years, don’t you think, Colin?

Colin: One of the frustrating things of being a member of a band is that some songs mean everything to one person, but not to all of us. So one of us keeps going on and on about it, while the others try and look away. But that’s cool, you know.

Thom: I also felt very insecure about the way I had to sing "Nude". I didn’t know in what pitch. And the lyrics were too intimate, but too sweet as well. It’s only when Colin started knocking about with the bassline, that I could figure out how to sing it and get away with it. Also, the lyrics have fallen into place, while at the time... Nothing has changed about them, but still. They didn’t seem to make sense, and now they do.

It makes me think of a story where one band member wants to leave with a groupie, and the other saying: don’t do that, don’t get any big ideas, don’t give in to the temptation.

Thom: I don’t remember for sure, but "Nude" was written in the OK Computer era. It was more something like: 'Don’t play up your imagination, boy. Watch out so you don’t become something you aren’t.'

You didn't answer my question about judging yourself in your songs, but is it mere coincidence that Faust ("Faust Arp") as well as Mephistopholes ("Videotape") get a mention? The devil and the man who sold his soul to the devil?

Thom: Such literary references on this record! No, seriously, before today's interview sessions it hadn't crossed my mind for one second. [Half laughing, half surprised:] So weird.

Colin: Don't pay attention to that.

"Reckoner's" on the record. One of the most beautiful songs. What is "Reckoner" about?

Colin: About nature and what we discussed about that earlier. A friend of ours is making a video for "Reckoner". He's filming a lane, from up on the hill all the way down. He asked biologists to write down the names of all the different animals and insects living around this lane. He's filming from last summer to the start of this winter. He expected a few hundred species, but apparently it's more like a few thousand.

What exactly is a "Reckoner"?

Thom (with a difficult expression on his face): Actually I don’t know what it is.

Colin: Jonny and Phil know what it is. It's an old word from the Bible for Peter at the Gates of Heaven.

Thom: Really?

Colin: Yes, the one that makes the Last Judgement, who weighs your good deeds against your bad ones.

Thom (citing himself): 'Reckoner, you can’t take it with you.' You see how bad I am as a writer, haha! I’ve spent a long time writing these words. I desperately tried to let the melody write the words, even if I had to play it to myself a thousand times before words came out. I’d rather do it like that than take a notebook and write pages and pages full of words to choose a few appropriate ones. It was such a nice, fresh song. Riffs kicking around. We had already made a demo and everyone wanted to finish it. The same happened with "Pyramid Song". It was like: ‘Bong bong bong, you’ve got to do it now! This is such a beautiful song, do you have the lyrics? Give me ten minutes!’ And we recorded it. That’s it. Sometimes I think about the way Neil Young writes his lyrics. He never rewrites them. He never changes anything. While I fill notebook after notebook, endlessly. I enjoy it, too, but I’ve learned that sometimes it’s bad for the end product. Sometimes you just have to say: alright, I’m just going to write whatever feels right, without thinking about the consequences. "Reckoner" was created in this automatic process. And it just got more beautiful that way. If I had sat down to write it step by step, it would never have happened.

A cynic could say: by giving away their music on the internet, Radiohead are actually stating that music isn’t worth anything anymore.

Colin: It’s not that music isn’t worth anything these days. The question is: why is music, an art product that has become very common, always worth the same? If you go to a record shop, the records are always priced more or less the same. But is all this music equally valuable? Is this music worth as much as a Neil Young or a Roxette record?

Thom: The downloading story needs not to be seen as a way to devaluate music, but as a part of the general debate on how much music is worth. I don’t see how anyone can complain about it. Artists do sometimes whine along a bit, but the people who complain the most are people working at record companies, because they are trying to protect their profit. Because they get the largest chunk of the income. I would like to say to artists who complain that they should go complain to their record company. You’re all a bunch of losers anyway, ‘cause they aren’t paying you shit anyway! If your manager hasn’t told you yet, fire him.

Your contract with EMI ended after six records, which gave you the opportunity to make this move. But what’s going on now, practically? For the discbox you’ve basically become your own record company and for the regular cd release of In Rainbows you’re going to a new record company, XL Records in Europe. There’s been some stirring, but eventually everything more or less stays the same.

Thom: That’s right. It all boils down to you trying to get your music out. The question is: what kind of platform do you use? That’s the essence.

Don’t you think that people who have every Radiohead album on their shelf would find it annoying to have In Rainbows only in mp3 format on their computer or iPod?

Thom: Yes, of course people will keep asking for the physical thing.

Did you have endless meetings deciding this? Were there people against? Were there ashtrays flying across the room?

Colin: No, it was a very harmonious thing, actually. We did have meetings, but the last two months have been extremely exciting. Finally we could decide ourselves how and when the music would be released. It was micromanagement, but not in a frustrating way. Compare that to the three hour marketing meetings we had with EMI, where we had to talk to every department, even the graphic designers. This way it’s much more direct.

Thom: We’re in the dark the entire time. The exciting part is that we’re trying to find out what’s going on ourselves.

Colin: Last week we did a webcast. We played a few covers and improvised some parts. There were a few shabby moments, but some parts were genious. Unexpected parts. Like the way we played the end of Reckoner, that was really cool. You strip the act of making music down to a creative process people can watch and listen to. Some things they’re going to like, others maybe less. They can decide themselves. That’s cool. Makes me think of my favourite artists from the seventies: Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and Neil Young, from the Geffen label. They did exactly what they wanted. One moment a mass of people would be interested, the other only a few. But that didn’t matter. Both options were good. The good thing about our time is that the internet gives you the possibility to see how a work is created. It’s like gigging. And it’s lots more fun than releasing a single four weeks before the record comes out and hoping that it’ll become a success. It’s all worrying about the wrong things. So again: it was very liberating.

Thom: Most of all, there’s sort of a momentum. It’s very important to keep it going, to keep people listening. But no longer through this monstrous mechanism of a record company. Now it’s ‘press return, let’s do something else’. Wicked.

Colin: It’s cool.

Thanks to Trui76, Regime Change, Piacoa and Unaided FlipFlop for the translations.

2007 December 18 | Wired

2008-01-25T04:42:00.000-08:00

David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music
12.18.07 | 6:00 PM

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke (left) and David Byrne.
Photo: James Day

It seemed like a crazy idea. When Radiohead said it would release its new album, In Rainbows, as a pay-what-you-will digital download, you'd have thought the band had gone communist. After all, Thom Yorke and company are one of the world's most successful groups — a critical darling as well as a fan favorite for nearly 15 years. They hadn't put out a new album in more than four years, and the market was hungry for their next disc. So why would Radiohead conduct such a radical experiment?

It turns out the gambit was a savvy business move. In the first month, according to comScore, more than a million fans downloaded In Rainbows. Roughly 40 percent of them paid for it, at an average of $6 each, netting the band nearly $3 million. Plus, since it owns the master recording (a first for the band), Radiohead was also able to license the album for a record label to distribute the old-fashioned way — on CD. In the US, it goes on sale January 1 through TBD Records/ATO Records Group.

While pay-what-you-will worked for Radiohead, though, it's hard to imagine the model paying off for Miley Cyrus — aka chart-topping teenybopper Hannah Montana. Cyrus' label, Walt Disney Records, will stick to selling CDs in Wal-Mart, thank you very much. But the truth is that Radiohead didn't intend In Rainbows to start a revolution. The experiment simply proves there is plenty of room for innovation in the music business — this is just one of many new paths. Wired asked David Byrne — a legendary innovator himself and the man who wrote the Talking Heads song "Radio Head" from which the group takes its name — to talk with Yorke about the In Rainbows distribution strategy and what others can learn from the experience.

Byrne: OK.

Yorke: [To assistant.] Shut the bloody door.

Byrne: Well, nice record, very nice record.

Yorke: Thank you. Wicked.

Byrne: [Laughs.]

Yorke: That's it, isn't it?

Byrne: That's it, we're done. [Laughs.] OK. I'll start by asking some of the business stuff. What you did with this record wasn't traditional, not even in the sense of sending advance copies out to the press and such.

Yorke: The way we termed it was "our leak date." Every record for the last four — including my solo record — has been leaked. So the idea was like, we'll leak it, then.

Byrne: Previously there'd be a release date, and advance copies would get sent to reviewers months ahead of that.

Yorke: Yeah, and then you'd ring up and say, "Did you like it? What did you think?" And it's three months in advance. And then it'd be, "Would you go do this for this magazine," and maybe this journalist has heard it. All these silly games.

Byrne: That's mainly about the charts, right? About gearing marketing and prerelease to the moment a record comes out so that — boom! — it goes into the charts.

Yorke: That's what major labels do, yeah. But it does us no good, because we don't cross over [to other fan bases]. The main thing was, there's all this bollocks [with the media]. We were trying to avoid that whole game of who gets in first with the reviews. These days there's so much paper to fill, or digital paper to fill, that whoever writes the first few things gets cut and pasted. Whoever gets their opinion in first has all that power. Especially for a band like ours, it's totally the luck of the draw whether that person is into us or not. It just seems wildly unfair, I think.

Byrne (left) and Yorke in Radiohead's Oxford offices.
Photo: James Day

Byrne: So this bypasses all those reviewers and goes straight to the fans.

Yorke: In a way, yeah. And it was a thrill. We mastered it, and two days later it was on the site being, you know, preordered. That was just a really exciting few weeks to have that direct connection.

Byrne: And letting people choose their own price?

Radiohead performs "Jigsaw."

Yorke: That was [manager Chris Hufford's] idea. We all thought he was barmy. As we were putting up the site, we were still saying, "Are you sure about this?" But it was really good. It released us from something. It wasn't nihilistic, implying that the music's not worth anything at all. It was the total opposite. And people took it as it was meant. Maybe that's just people having a little faith in what we're doing.

Byrne: And that works for you guys. You have an audience ready. Like me — if I hear there's something new of yours out there, I'll just go and buy it without poking around about what the reviews say.

Yorke: Well, yeah. The only reason we could even get away with this, the only reason anyone even gives a shit, is the fact that we've gone through the whole mill of the business in the first place. It's not supposed to be a model for anything else. It was simply a response to a situation. We're out of contract. We have our own studio. We have this new server. What the hell else would we do? This was the obvious thing. But it only works for us because of where we are.

Byrne: What about bands that are just getting started?
"Don't sign a huge contract that strips you of all your digital rights ..."

Yorke: Well, first and foremost, you don't sign a huge record contract that strips you of all your digital rights, so that when you do sell something on iTunes you get absolutely zero. That would be the first priority. If you're an emerging artist, it must be frightening at the moment. Then again, I don't see a downside at all to big record companies not having access to new artists, because they have no idea what to do with them now anyway.

Byrne: It should be a load off their minds.

Yorke: Exactly.

Byrne: I've been asking myself: Why put together these things — CDs, albums? The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it's artistically viable. It's not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it's not obvious or even conscious on the artists' part. Maybe it's just because everybody's thinking musically in the same way for those couple of months.

Yorke: Or years.

Byrne: However long it takes. And other times, there's an obvious...

Yorke: ... Purpose.

Byrne: Right. Probably the reason it's a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you're getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you're going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there's a kind of bundle.

Yorke: Yeah, but the other thing is what that bundle can make. The songs can amplify each other if you put them in the right order.
"Do you know where your income comes from?"

Byrne: Do you know, more or less, where your income comes from? For me, it's probably very little from actual music or record sales. I make a little bit on touring and probably the most from licensing stuff. Not for commercials — I license to films and television shows and that sort of thing.

Yorke: Right. We make some doing that.

Byrne: And for some people, the overhead for touring is really low, so they make a lot on that and don't worry about anything else.

Yorke: We always go into a tour saying, "This time, we're not going to spend the money. This time we're going to do it stripped down." And then it's, "Oh, but we do need this keyboard. And these lights." But at the moment we make money principally from touring. Which is hard for me to reconcile because I don't like all the energy consumption, the travel. It's an ecological disaster, traveling, touring.

Byrne: Well, there are the biodiesel buses and all that.

Yorke: Yeah, it depends where you get your biodiesel from. There are ways to minimize it. We did one of those carbon footprint things recently where they assessed the last period of touring we did and tried to work out where the biggest problems were. And it was obviously everybody traveling to the shows.

Byrne: Oh, you mean the audience.

Yorke: Yeah. Especially in the US. Everybody drives. So how the hell are we going to address that? The idea is that we play in municipal places with some transport system alternative to cars. And minimize flying equipment, shipping everything. We can't be shipped, though.

Byrne: [Laughs.]

Yorke: If you go on the Queen Mary or something, that's actually worse than flying. So flying is your only option.

Byrne: Are you making money on the download of In Rainbows?

Yorke: In terms of digital income, we've made more money out of this record than out of all the other Radiohead albums put together, forever — in terms of anything on the Net. And that's nuts. It's partly due to the fact that EMI wasn't giving us any money for digital sales. All the contracts signed in a certain era have none of that stuff.

Byrne: So when the album comes out as a physical CD in January, will you hire your own marketing firm?
"A, that's asking for trouble and B, it's snobbery ..."

Yorke: No. It starts to get a bit more traditional. When we first came up with the idea, we weren't going to do a normal physical CD at all. But after a while it was like, well, that's just snobbery. [Laughter.] A, that's asking for trouble, and B, it's snobbery. So now they're talking about putting it on the radio and that sort of thing. I guess that's normal.

Byrne: I've been thinking about how distribution and CDs and record shops and all that stuff are changing. But we're talking about music. What is music, what does music do for people? What do people get from it? What's it for? That's the thing that's being exchanged. Not all the other stuff. The other stuff is the shopping cart that holds some of it.

Yorke: It's a delivery service.

Byrne: But people will still pay to have that experience. You create a community with music, not just at concerts but by talking about it with your friends. By making a copy and handing it to your friends, you've established a relationship. The implication is that they're now obligated to give you something back.

Yorke: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was just thinking while you were saying that: How does a record company get their hands on that? It makes me think of the No Logo book where Naomi Klein describes how the Nike people would pay guys to get down with the kids on the street. I know for a fact that major record labels do the same thing. But no one has ever explained to me exactly how. I mean, do they lurk around in the discussion boards and post "Have you heard the..."? Maybe they do. And then I was thinking about that Johnny Cash film, when Cash walks in and says, "I want to do a live record in a prison," and his label thinks he's bonkers. Yet at the same time, it was able to somehow understand what kids wanted and give it to him. Whereas now, I think there's a lack of understanding. It's not about who's ripping off whom, and it's not about legal injunctions, and it's not about DRM and all that sort of stuff. It's about whether the music affects you or not. And why would you worry about an artist or a company going after people copying their music if the music itself is not valued?

Byrne: You're valuing the delivery system as opposed to the relationship and the emotional thing...

Yorke: You're valuing the company or the interest of the artists rather than the music itself. I don't know. We've always been quite naive. We don't have any alternative to doing this. It's the only obvious thing to do.

HUMO

2008-01-25T04:37:00.000-08:00

London, November 17th. It’s just stopped raining. I leave the beautifully restored station of St. Pancras, and the first thing I see is a rainbow. That can’t be a coincidence. ‘In Rainbows’, the new Radiohead album, will be released on cd on December 31st after all. What’s more: in June 2008, Oxford’s finest are touring again. Werchter has already been booked!

I’m meeting Jonny, Colin and Phil in London. Thom is ill and at home. Ed is “somewhere”. Since the last time we met, Thom, Phil and Jonny became fathers. The atmosphere within the band seems really relaxed. There’s not much that can go wrong: they’re all millionaires by now, and the new record has been widely hailed as their best since ‘OK Computer’. ‘In Rainbows’ reveals that Radiohead is still “fuckin’ special”, even though in the last fifteen years they’ve also been (as Thom said) “fuckin’ precious”: self-absorbed, overly sensitive and needlessly complicated. I’ve prepared a practical joke. I brought the twenty year old demo’s of two songs by On A Friday, Jonny and Thom’s first band. I ask Jonny if he wants to listen to “my band’s demo”. Phil and him immediately exchange a glance: journalists bothering stars with their own music is not done. My plan: chastising Jonny once he’s exclamated “Worthless!”. “Gotcha: it’s YOU!”. However, the plan fails.

Jonny Greenwood (playfully strict): “Sorry, but this band has no future. Past expiration date, mate! It’s a good attempt, but I happened to come across this old demo tape myself last week. I’m still using this trick with the spinning coin (as heard on ‘Philippa Chicken’ – editor) – we haven’t evolved a bit in the last twenty years (grins). It was strange to hear those songs again: it’s us, and yet it seems like a totally different band.”

What strikes me the most is that Thom was a rather average Bono-imitator in those days – he sang pretty forced. His singing is much more natural now...
Jonny: “Yes, he’s definitely more himself since “The Bends”. It was pure insecurity – Thom won’t deny that. When we started, we didn’t think that anybody would be interested in who we really were. We shaped our style with clichés and sounds and singing lines that we thought were hip. We only became successful when we grew the courage to be ourselves. I think that’s quite beautiful, actually: with most bands it works the other way around. By the way: where did you get those On A Friday demos? That’s highly illegal, you know.”

Ehm...I got it from someone who works at EMI, your former record company.
Jonny: “There you go: a multinational spreading bootlegs themselves!”

No, the guy is just a fan. Which brings me to this year’s main point: who are those horrible record industry people musicians keep complaining about? I’ve met EMI-people on three continents and they were all sincerely passionate about music.
Jonny: “I don’t doubt that. The real wolves are a few stories higher, of course.”

People who went to inrainbows.com to download your album saw “It’s up to you”. And then after another puzzled click: “No really, it’s up to you!”. The fans could decide for themselves how much to pay for In Rainbows. That’s just about the same as saying “You decide who you really are, dear fan: a reasonable person, an opportunist or a cheapskate.” Nice and original, but also a real mindfuck.
Colin Greenwood: “If you say so. We thought it was amusing to make people stop and think about how much music was worth to them. More than a good bottle of wine? Less than a restaurant dinner?”
Philip Selway: “Compare it to the honesty box in the bar of a quaint family hotel: you grab a drink and the owners trust you to put a reasonable amount in their savings jar.”
Jonny: “The genuine mindfuck only came about when our server crashed in early October and the fans had to wait for an eternity before they could order the new album. Awful. Frustrating people is the last thing we want.”

Offering your new music as a download first, at a price of the customer’s choice, and then releasing a traditional cd after all: what on earth is the idea behind that? Especially in an age where everyone has an iPod and an internet connection.
Jonny: “That’s too complicated to answer shortly. It was a test.”

I’m curious at how revolutionary or futile that test will seem in ten years’ time.
Jonny: “Same here. We’re not the scared type, and something had to happen. Actually not having a record company only has two disadvantages: not working with the employees of EMI, whom we’ve shared everything with over the last twelve years, anymore, and not having a deadline, which causes us to just keep working aimlessly. That’s why we can’t do it without a producer.”

There’s also the physical aspect: I think cd’s and vinyl and cover art is delicious, it’s an almost fetishistic pleasure.
Jonny: “Yeah, I also feel that way: you want something you can hold, not just sounds in a small box, thousands of songs piled onto each other invisibly. It trivialises the music, as if it doesn’t really exist.”
Colin: “Ah, the joys of a 12 inch single! The smell of a record sleeve! The...”
Phil (interrupts): “I believe I overheard a musac-version of ‘Creep’ in the hallway just now, is that possible?”

I recently heard “Pull/Pulk Revolving Doors” in a documentary about...clitorises!
Jonny: “Really? That makes me happy. More even: grateful! Usually, documentary makers only use our music to accompany depressing footage about heavy-handed subjects: fraud, feuds, suicide, war, conflicts,... That has been irritating us for a long time.”
Colin: “We’re already satisfied if a Radiohead snippet shows up in the report on a soccer game. Many people forget that our music also has a beautiful, spiritual, even sensual side.”

Now that you mention it: it can’t be coincidental that there’s a dj who calls himself Radioclit.
Jonny (laughs): “The guys in Slowdive recently said that their songs weren’t penis substitutes, but clitoris substitutes, I liked that one. Oh man, I’m really happy with any association with sex...can you make it stand out even a little more? Even our fans think that they’re depreciating or raping or music if they use it for so-called light-hearted means. We’re no gloomy doommongers at all: we’re consciously living young people who aren’t disgusted by having a social and political conscience.”

Let me dredge up an old story: Radiohead didn’t perform at Live 8. Isn’t doing something always better than doing nothing? When a politically engaged band like Radiohead boycots such an event, it’s easy for young people to think: “Then we don’t have to do anything either”.
Jonny: “I suppose so. At the time, the band was asleep after a long tour, and we were a little sick of everything. Not just each other but also the monster called Radiohead. We doubted whether or not we still had a future. Thom was also not fully supportive of Live 8. A gigantic festival like that simplifies things. It leads the attention away from the real problems, which are always complex, and enables politicians to work on their public relations without really making an effort to change anything. But maybe we missed an opportunity there, yeah.”
Colin: “We were enjoying parenthood for five minutes after ten years of hard work. We were totally not in that mindspace at the time.”

Radiohead rehearsals. Tell us all about them.
Phil: “Exhausting. Time-consuming. But after all those years still exciting, thank God. On a good day, that is.”
Colin: “Jonny does a lot of preparation work. He loves tinkering.”
Jonny: “Among other things, I made a machine which takes sounds on radio stations – music, but also conversations and even the silences between two words – and turns it into rhtythmic patterns. A sort of improvising drum machine.”
Phil: “A conspiracy to rob me of my job, that’s what it is!”
Colin: “We do a lot of jamming, but our jam sessions aren’t the same as your avarage rock band’s. We often jam by talking. And by being silent. (laughs)”

Which song on ‘In Rainbows’ was most fun to work on?
Colin: “15 Step. With perverse pleasure.”
Jonny: “Bodysnatchers, Weird Fishes/Arpeggi...although that was a tricky one.”
Phil: “Nude, anyone?”

Yeah, that jewel of a song has been around for ten years.
Colin: “That song demonstrates how terrified we are of finishing our ideas. What’s the matter with us that we’re so hesitant to make definitive versions? Maybe we should give that some thought.”
Jonny: “Or maybe not at all.”

During recording sessions for ‘The Joshua Tree’, Brian Eno tried to erase the master tape of ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’. He wanted to force U2 to start from scratch. A sound technician was just in time to stop him. Would you hire Eno?
Jonny: “I doubt it. It would probably be a bit much. We’re all a bit Brian Eno ourselves.”

Bono once said that U2 was so desperately trying to avoid surrounding themselves by yes men that after a while, they got stuck with counterproductive naysayers.
Jonny: “We ourselves are those naysayers. I sometimes wonder whether we’ve made good records because we’re such insecure, self-critical worriers. Maybe our music would be even better if we were a happy-go-lucky bunch.”
Phil: “Sometimes all the worrying is really just too much for us.”

When Thom is once again prey to doubt and misantrophy?
Colin: “Unfortunately, that happens to us all. Most of the time doubt is a motor for creativity, but sometimes it’s incredibly bollocks. In any event we don’t have the extreme amount of self-confidence people associate with rockstars.”

Maybe you can borrow some arrogance from Oasis and lend them some of your sense of adventure.
Colin: “That’s the best idea I’ve heard in years! The best unrealistic idea (laughs)”.

Many songs on ‘In Rainbows’ differ drastically from the versions you’ve been playing live. ‘Nude’ exists in four guises: a rock version, an orchestral version, a piano version and the version on the record. Picking the definitive arrangement out of a thousand options: it would drive me insane.
Jonny: “That can work paralysingly, yes. Especially when you’re in a band. Just when, after months of doubting, you’re completely certain about what you want, someone else says “Hmm, I’m not sure, maybe it’s better if we...”.”
Colin: “Often we’d be discussing certain songs during a concert. “How long can this break last? Shall we stretch the outro a bit more?”. It keeps being a delicate issue: one version works better on the record, another is better fit for on stage. ‘Videotape’, for instance, is really sparse on the album: Thom on the piano, that’s about it. In its live form the song had a majestic arrangement because it’s much easier to work towards a climax that way.”
Phil: “We’ve become less nitpicky. Before, we didn’t want to stray from the original live: if there weren’t any guitar or drums in it, we’d play it without guitar or drums. Now we keep working on our songs, and if after two years the live version has become better than the studio version, that’s just how it is. We have only one rule anymore: anything goes as long as it benefits the song.”

Four years ago I was at a David Sylvian concert – in the nineties he used to perform with a band of six up to ten brilliant musicians. That night, I saw three intellectuals typing away on a laptop. I thought to myself “God no, is this the way of the future?”
Jonny (nodding fiercely): “Yes, I know exactly what you mean. At the time of ‘Kid A’ and ‘Amnesiac’, we spent way too much time surfing the internet. We did too much messing around with downloads, technical gizmo’s and obscure, ehm, computer input. On ‘Hail to the Thief’ we were painstakingly looking for some counterbalance to all this experimentation, but only on ‘In Rainbows’ have we really succeeded in doing that.”

During a rehearsal you once played ‘Crazy Little Thing Called Love’ by Queen. Done any other silly covers lately?
Jonny: “Yeah, in a corny mood Colin and me played a ‘Creep’ cover as The Greenwood Brothers.”

I once saw a showcase where Moby covered that song.
Jonny, Colin and Phil: (total silence)

Are you too tactful to comment on that?
Phil: “Err...yeah.”

One of the beautiful things about Radiohead is that you create mind-expanding music without any drugs ever coming into play. Or am I wrong?
Colin (after a long silence): “I won’t say that we never took anything, but definitely a lot less than other rock bands.”
Jonny: “What fascinates me about drugs is that you can never be sure how they will influence your creativity. Take Fleetwood Mac, for instance: they were high as a kite while recording ‘Rumours’. They snorted tons of cocaine, a drug that turns even an insecure footwipe into a megalomaniac dictator. And yet the album is full of wonderful, subtle, sensitive ballads with very open-hearted lyrics. Remarkable.”

When I last spoke to Thom in Oxford, I jokingly gave him a list of my favorite Radiohead-songs, to use as a setlist for the next tour. “Why is ‘Everything In Its Right Place’ not on here?”, he commented. It wasn’t until I heard your brilliant live version of that song at Shepherd’s Bush Empire in London that I understood why.
Colin: “I remember that show: we never came closer to a classic jam session. At the end of the song I totally cut loose while Phil was sustaining a glorified disco beat. Strange, a few years before that we wouldn’t have dared, because of it being...”
Phil: “Too predictable.”
Colin: “Too festive.”
Phil: “Too danceable.”

I can imagine ‘EIIRP’ being the most intense moment in the set for you, a kind of natural climax. Is it tricky to keep being focused on the music then?
Jonny: “For me all songs are equally risky, because I’m constantly fidgeting about with effect pedals, samples, livestreaming, guitars and keyboards...a lot can go wrong. Actually it’s a miracle that we don’t mess up more often.”

Is there room for humour during concerts?
Jonny: “As in Thom riding up the stage on a tricycle with a clown mask on and a party whistle stuck in his mouth? After which the wheels fall off one by one? We have lots of laughs behind the scenes, but on stage? No.”

And yet I saw Phil playing a lemon during ‘EIIRP’. Funny if you consider the opening line of the song: “Yesterday I woke up sucking on a lemon”...
Phil: “That wasn’t a joke, I couldn’t have been more serious! During another concert, I used a pear-shaped shaker – THAT was a joke.”

Finally, could you listen to this cd? The Flemish girl choir Scala covers ‘EIIRP’...
Phil: “Lovely. Sounds good.”
Colin: “Yeah, really nice.”

‘Nice’? Are you being polite? Because Steven Kolacny is a real Radiohead-freak.
Jonny: “Oh no, I already have a cd by Scala at home. But I wasn’t familiar with this cover yet. It’s tastefully done, original and atmospheric. Moving, even. Congratulate the singers.”

You just did.

translated by kid.android

2007 December 9 | The Observer

2008-01-25T04:17:00.000-08:00

Caught in the flash

Radiohead released a landmark album, and gave it away for free. Craig McLean asks the questions of the band changing everything - with a little help from you, the people

Sunday December 9, 2007
The Observer

Toshio Suzuki, 25, from Nagoya in Japan, has a question he wants OMM to ask Radiohead. 'Dear Representative: with the assurance that this question is coming from an ardent fan, may I simply ask why In Rainbows took so long?'

'We were all in family mode,' replies Colin Greenwood, a bookish and slightly spacey chap who spent yesterday playing Risk with son Jesse, not yet aged four and one of 11 Radiohead children. 'Because Thom was doing his record. And [producer] Nigel [Godrich] wasn't around to record the album and... it became quite clear that we couldn't move forward without him.'

Alex Green, 15, from Cornwall, has another: 'Was In Rainbows the most painful album to make?'

'It was difficult,' says Colin. 'But I don't think it was more difficult than The Bends and OK Computer.'

'And Kid A and Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief!' chips in his brother, Jonny. 'They've all been difficult! But you forget that quite quickly, how painful they are, so it's fine.'

Now here is Louise Kent, 45, from Vancouver: 'Why is it called In Rainbows?'

'Um,' says Thom Yorke in the manner in which he begins most answers to most questions. Often he'll scratch his head, too, making him look totally Stan Laurel. 'Because it was the desire to get somewhere that you're not. I thought of that last night.'

So it's nothing to do with the theory posited by Cony Abbatemarco, director of food and nutritional services at Gaylord Hospital in Connecticut, who writes (and I quote): 'According to Genesis 9:1 (9+1 = 10!), God created the very first rainbow for Noah (Thom Yorke's son's name) as a symbol of gratitude and a promise of peace. This is known as the Noahic Covenant and in it God blesses Noah, his sons and all modern humankind ('Reckoner' lyrics??). God promised Noah that never again would there be complete destruction to all living things. Is the In Rainbows title related to this?'

'Ha ha ha!' laughs Ed O'Brien. 'Excellent. I love this shit! Fair play to somebody who works this stuff out!'

'Uh-oh,' says Thom Yorke. 'No. That's pure coincidence. Having not read that particular section of the Bible ...' he adds with a wryness so thick you could eat it with a fork.

'Some people,' notes Phil Selway, 'have far too much knowledge for their own good, you know.'

And now here's Maja Dorn, 33, from Germany: 'Can you say something about the sales figures of In Rainbows, the average price paid only for the download and the number of ordered discboxes? In which countries the most discboxes?'

Ed: 'I think there's about 80,000 discboxes.'

Jonny: '60,000.'

Ed: 'It was 65,000 a week ago.'

Colin: 'It's 72,000.'

Answering that question, it appears, might take some time...

Welcome to Radiohead vs The People, an OMM-curated global interrogation of the world's first post-tomorrow band.

As you may have heard if you've switched on the TV, or opened a newspaper, or talked to anyone, or walked down a desert track in Mongolia, on 10 October this year Thom Yorke (39, vocals, guitar, keyboards), Ed O'Brien (39, guitar), Jonny Greenwood (36, guitar, weird obscure muso kit), Colin Greenwood (38, bass) and Phil Selway (40, drums) released their seventh album and first in four years, In Rainbows. They had only announced its existence on 1 October, when a posting appeared on Dead Air Space, the diary section of Radiohead.com: 'Hello everyone. Well, the new album is finished, and it's coming out in 10 days. We've called it In Rainbows. Love from us all. Jonny.'

Initially the album was solely available via download. Boldly, simply, Radiohead were allowing anyone interested to set their own price: £00.00 if they wanted. A discbox, offering the download but also double vinyl and CD versions of In Rainbows, plus 'enhanced CD with [eight] additional new songs, artwork and photographs of the band', would be available in December at the fixed price of £40.

But, yes, it's worth repeating: You could get the new album from one of the biggest rock bands in the world for free

This was the proverbial butterfly flap that caused a far-off hurricane. Debate raged. Really raged. Radiohead - who had previously sold 23 million albums via traditional channels - were single-handedly tearing down the music industry. No, cheeky kids were tearing down Radiohead, taking the band at their word and paying precisely nothing for the 10 tracks. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and the entire global technological and media top brass were committing hara kiri. Guy Hands - boss of Terra Firma, the private equity firm who earlier this year bought Radiohead's old label EMI for £2.4bn - knocked over his latte. Bono was in the corner in a huff, muttering 'damn, why didn't we think of that?' The record shop was dead, the DIY age was here and long live the virtual store! Could this business model be applied to, say, cars and comestibles too? Nothing would ever be the same again ...

Liam Gallagher, asked if Oasis - also currently without a record deal - would release their next, seventh album via a similar 'honesty box' mechanism, replied with much cursing and a pithy 'over my dead body'. Jay-Z, though, was mad for it: 'What Radiohead did with their album was a genius idea. I'm going to pay $50 for it.'

'The kamikaze pilot in me wants to do the same damn thing,' Courtney Love wrote on her yellow polka dot bikini. 'I'm grateful for Radiohead for making the first move. I'd do it differently. That's why B-sides are no longer B-sides, but have to be A-sides, to an extent.' Right on, Courtney.

Gene Simmons of Kiss, waggling his big tongue, was less impressed: 'Are they on fucking crack?' he spluttered. 'Do they really believe that's a business model that works?' Lily Allen exhaled a ring of fag smoke and huffed: 'It's arrogant for them to give their music away for free - they've got millions of pounds. It sends a weird message to younger bands who haven't done as well. You don't choose how to pay for eggs. Why should it be different for music?'

'How do the band respond to comments by Lily Allen and others accusing them of being arrogant and inconsiderate for putting their music out for whatever price the fans wished to pay?' - Jacob Day, 25, Orem, Utah

Thom: 'That's from Lily Allen?'

No, that's from Jacob in Utah, but Lily Allen said that last week.

Thom [clapping hands and emitting high-pitched laughter]: 'Oh, I'm upset about that.'

So that's no comment?

Thom: 'Well, that was my comment. It makes me laugh.'

And in the middle of all this, some people were even asking about said music. Like, was In Rainbows really the warmest, most approachable yet still daring Radiohead album yet? Might this be, in Radiohead terms, the perfect storm: the record that married the big rock welly of The Bends, the heart and soul of OK Computer, and the sonic adventurism of Kid A and Amnesiac.

So many questions, so little response from Radiohead. So, when they finally agreed to talk, OMM decided to follow the spirit of the In Rainbows 'initiative' and have fans and album-purchasers help with the questions.

In the middle of last month I asked through two Radiohead fansites, Ateaseweb.com and Greenplastic.com, for questions for the band. I also asked respondents to include, if they didn't mind, the amount they'd paid for In Rainbows. Thirty-six hours later, some 700 emails from all over the world were testing the capacity of the OMM inbox.

I then hooked up with Radiohead in London on a wet Monday morning in late November. The venue was handy both for the M40 to Oxford and Marylebone Station (four-fifths of Radiohead still live in Oxfordshire, where they formed the band in 1986 while attending the private, boys-only Abingdon School; Ed O'Brien lives in north London). Ed, Colin and Jonny are interviewed together, and then Thom and Phil.

Few groups enjoy the bond with their fans that Radiohead do. By any measure, they qualify as one of the world's biggest bands, but politically attuned and socially-aware, they are wary of the baggage that implies, and operate almost under the radar - now more so than ever. Given the invitation, the type of question submitted was a long way from 'why are you so fit, Ed?' Although someone did ask that, too. What follows is a selection of the best with some further context and interpretation.

'The In Rainbows cover art departs from the impersonal and apocalyptic imagery of recent albums. The music does the same. It's warm and inviting. The whole aesthetic points to a shinier, happier Radiohead. Do the band agree a shift has occurred? If so, why do they think it happened?' - Wes Jarrell, 25, USA

Thom: 'Uhnnnn, yeah, kind of. More sort of explosive and ... Explosive is perhaps not the right word but in-your-face, spontaneous. That's what we were aiming at.'

Ed: 'I think the big thing was Thom's lyrics really. That always heralds something. The music always seems really strong, but the lyrics were ...'

Where has that come from within Thom?

Ed: 'I think not being scared to be personal. And not being scared to ... I think it was really liberating for him to do [his solo album] The Eraser. His voice is really upfront. That's the most noticeable thing. He's not hiding. And after OK Computer he sort of withdrew a bit. I think it's also being bold enough and brave enough to be personal. And you know what... there's stuff to write about in your late thirties. You've lived. You've started families up.'

Jonny: 'You're a different person.'

Ed: 'Yeah, you've stopped dealing with, "Me, I'm the centre of everything." Because you've got kids you can't do that. So, it changes. It was like, "Wow, there's a warmth to these songs, it's very human."'

'Lyrically, In Rainbows seems to revolve around infidelity and relationships. This is a big jump from the more world-focused, environmentally-charged lyrics in the previous two-three albums. Was Thom more focused on family life and dealing with personal matters during the songwriting process for this album?' - Bianca Carlson, 30, Denver, Colorado

Thom: 'More focused on not getting into large generalities, definitely. Other than that, I couldn't really say, to be honest.'

'To what extent is In Rainbows about middle-age malaise and the sort of drifting moods you find in the corners of 15-year-old marriages?' - Anthony Strain, 28, Modesto, California

Thom: 'It was much more about the fucking panic of realising you're going to die! And that any time soon [I could] possibly [have] a heart attack when I next go for a run. You know what I'm saying.'

Before the release of his solo album in July last year, Yorke told me that being in Radiohead 'was getting boring and it just got a bit weird and self-perpetuating ...

'It felt like everyone was under obligation to do it rather than because we wanted to do it. And one of the things I had wanted to do for ages was get stuck into a bunch of things that I had been mucking around with that didn't fit into the Radiohead zone.'

The band had started recording a new album sometime in 2005 in the wake of the brain-scrambling world tour (another one) in support of 2003's Hail to the Thief. They began working on album seven with Mark 'Spike' Stent. Then, throughout May, June and August last year, around the July release of The Eraser, Radiohead toured the UK, Europe and America. They were 'road testing' new songs - 11 in total by the tour's end. They had done this before, when they meandered through Spain and Portugal in summertime prior to the recording of Hail to the Thief, and it had worked fine. So it seemed last year: 'Nude', a 'lost' Radiohead song that they had been trying to record for a decade, was finally sounding great. 'Reckoner' was a 'cock-rocking guitar stomp' (© Jordan Cox, 21, Auckland, New Zealand). 'House of Cards' was a beautiful, ethereal ballad. Radiohead were, as Yorke said, 'getting to a good space'.

But away from the stage ... The sessions with Stent seemed to have come to naught. Maybe they would produce themselves. Whatever, no one was breathing down their necks - their contract with EMI had been fulfilled, so Radiohead were unsigned. No deadlines, no focus ... When the tour ended in Amsterdam on 28 August 2006, the band were still, it would transpire, all over the shop.

That said, back in the spring, Yorke had been restless. He knew Radiohead had become bogged down in the studio in the past (see: the agonising sessions that would eventually produce Kid A and Amnesiac). And he had an eye on the future.

'It seems crazy to have this all [new material] sitting around,' he said. The new album was, 'to varying degrees, finished, [and] to just have to wait for another six months, eight months, seems nuts.' Oooh ... somewhere in the recesses of the collective Radiohead psyche a little idea may have just begun - as Yorke put it last month - 'floating around'.

Fast forward to April this year. Having reunited last autumn with Nigel Godrich for sessions in a leaky country mansion in Wiltshire, their own Oxfordshire studio and in Godrich's place in London's Covent Garden, Radiohead are, at last, at the mixing stages of the making of their seventh album.

'Did you make a conscious decision to get away from the electronic sounds... or was a transition purely organic?' - Paul, 26, Ontario, Canada

Jonny: 'Eh...'

Colin: 'I think [not working with Godrich initially], we realised we wouldn't be able to make the record without him - and we discussed making everything sound sort of organic.'

Ed: 'There was a conscious thing that Nigel talked about, and we talked about, stripping stuff out. Not putting everything into.... You know, making arrangements and music slightly more minimal.'

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'When, and how, did the transition from suburban paranoia to sensuality take place?' - Jon Papas, 22, Rochester, New York

Ed: 'Yeah, yeah! Exactly!'

Colin: 'Tick!'

Thom: 'Ed always banged on about how this record was very sensual. The mind boggles slightly, but I think there was a lot of that. It was as much about the way it flowed and whatever, not specific things. But it is kind of... it's not supposed to be in any way cerebral.'

In April the band also had a meeting with their managers, Chris Hufford and Bryce Edge, who had a suggestion: as the band were without a record deal, why not release the album themselves, via the internet? Cue much discussion, endless meetings. Then, another idea: how about letting people decide how much they paid for it? If anyone could 'get away with' such a seemingly reckless plan...

Phil: 'Not everything had been working towards this initiative. The one thing that we had was, we wanted to make a record. Quite simply, that was it, that's what was driving us along. I think because [the album] was taking quite long, our management were twiddling thumbs at points and they were just coming up with ideas. And this was one that really stuck.'

Thom: 'Whenever the discussion was started up, it just seemed like so nuts to be talking it, 'cause we didn't know whether we were going to get our shit together. And it was only through the energy, the elation for want of a better word, of actually finishing it and being proud of it, that getting into this whole thing of, "Yeah, let's get it out, let's do the download" that it made sense.

'It felt so much it was Chris and Bryce's bag. It was nothing to do with us, we'd done our fucking job. And it was exciting because we knew we'd done something that we were really proud of.'

In the 10 days between Jonny's posting and the album going on sale, the internet and media were afire with discussion. Radiohead kept schtum. What was that period like for the band?

Thom: 'It was really fun. All this shit kicked off and we were all just sitting at home going [high- pitched], "What?". It was brilliant. Hard hats on!'

Phil: 'But also we felt quite detached from it... We'd be spotting the most bizarre place [in the media that the download 'business' idea] came up. One of the dads at school came up to me - he's a car sales manager - and said, "You're on the front page of Automotive Industry today!"'

So, back to Maja from Germany's question...

Any idea of the average price paid?

Colin: 'No.'

Phil: 'Well, we're still putting that stuff together at the moment.'

Thom: 'Very politically put.'

Phil: 'But it's been good. It has been good.'

'Was that last question from a "G Hands"?' adds the drummer, in his soft-spoken, schoolteacher-ly fashion.

Early last month a web-monitoring company called comScore claimed that 62 per cent of downloaders had paid nothing. The other 38 per cent had paid an average of £1.29. 'Those figures are all fucking shite,' says a somewhat vexed Yorke. (He isn't very good at hiding his emotions: in terms of spending time with him, this makes for someone who's either thoroughly engaging, or who makes you feel you're sitting smack in the middle of a cloud.) 'My parents were talking about some article [he affects smugly sneery tone], "Ooh it's all gone wrong. Oh dear, it's all backfired." That's utter fucking crap. It's all worked very nicely thank you, [mirthless laughter] ha ha ha.'

So you've made more money than you would have from the conventional sales route?

Colin: 'If we'd set out to do this to make lots of money, we'd have signed to Universal Records two months ago. So it was not something that we did... No sane person would have released a record like this for financial gain.'

'Did the band purposefully wait until after their record deal expired with EMI to release their most commercially appealing album since OK Computer, just as a kind of final "screw you"?' - Shay, north Wales

Colin: 'No, the whole EMI thing, we were still working with them up until the release of this record.'

Ed: 'We thought a deal could be done. We really did. So...'

Why wasn't a deal done?

Ed: 'Because EMI is in a state of flux. It's been taken over by somebody who's never owned a record company before, Guy Hands and Terra Firma, and they don't realise what they're dealing with. It was really sad to leave all the people [we'd worked with]. But he wouldn't give us what we wanted. He didn't know what to offer us. Terra Firma don't understand the music industry.'

But in the words of Elizabeth Ortega, 16, from Whittier, California: 'do the band think they basically said "fuck you" to half there [sic] fans because not everyone has access to the internet?'

Thom: 'That was a condition of doing this whole project, that we put out a normal CD. Because I totally agree.'

On 8 November, Radiohead did indeed announce the release of a straight 'physical' - i.e. CD - version of In Rainbows via XL Recordings on 31 December. 'What type of contract have you signed?' - John Galantini, 22, Southampton

Thom: 'lt's licensing for one record. Same with [American label] ATO.'

Phil: 'Is that "G Hands, disconsolate of London" again?'

But if Guy Hands is smarting, his company at least has the comfort of releasing a Radiohead box set which brings together the band's first six albums, also this month.

'EMI appear to have reacted to your giving In Rainbows to XL in a particularly petulant manner, releasing a box set in direct competition...'

Thom [more mirthless laughter]: 'Ha ha ha!'

'...what did you think when you found out? More importantly, how will you retaliate? Novelty Xmas single? Limited edition Pop Is Dead remix boxset' - Andy Shade, 28, Coventry

Phil: 'And that was from "T Yorke of Oxford."'

Jonny: 'We knew something was going to happen, whether it was going to be a cheesy greatest hits or this.'

Ed: 'It came from up high anyway, it was from the Terra Firma lot. We knew that when the negotiations went on for this record, we knew that that was going to be an issue, and we had to accept that it was going to come out.'

Jonny: 'It's not done in the best possible taste.'

Thom: 'How did we feel? Um, isn't it lovely? What did the others say? Well, um, hmm, yes, isn't it nice? We're not allowed to slag it off.'

'What has been the hardest part of releasing In Rainbows by yourself?' - Dan Rockwell, 26, Corvallis, Oregon

Ed: 'The one for me was missing some of the people in our record company. We were lucky to work with some of them. That's the only downside I think. The people.'

Thom: 'It wasn't really a challenge as much as a "dive in, who gives a shit?" sort-of-thing really. Because it seemed to be the necessary thing to do. We were aware that we had no idea of the consequences, but that made it really exciting.'

'Some people think you do the bad thing for young bands - because who would like to pay for their records if we can all get album of Radiohead, world famous band?' - Aleksandra, 17, Poland ('sorry for my English')

Jonny: 'Yeah, we went through the pluses and minuses of doing this. That was the biggest question mark really.'

Ed: 'But the thing is, so much good music is now free anyway.'

Jonny: 'Yeah, the download culture is there anyway. It's King Canute - you can't pretend the flood isn't happening. This friend of mine bought the Muse album. And his 12-year-old son was just looking at it - "Wow, the real thing!" His son had the album already, he knew the songs, but he'd never held a CD. He just found it a curious object. That's kind of how it is now.'

Colin: 'It's not prescriptive for us or for anyone else. The problem with that line of questioning is you end up sounding like one of the old record companies. You're forgetting what music is all about: excitement and talent and artists doing cool new things that people are into. That's what record companies had forgotten about. They were worrying about all these ancillary questions and forgetting about the primal urge of people to share and enjoy music. And there's always going to be a way of finding money or livings to be made out of it.'

Ed: 'It's just [about] responding to the environment, the situation, that's all we're doing. And trying to do our best. But we haven't got all the answers.'

Out there in the blogosphere, some people think super-brainy Radiohead do have all the answers. Many respondents to OMM's posting were seriously exercised by the conspiracy theories (they felt were) embedded within In Rainbows

Jonny Greenwood sits up at mention of this. 'You know all these, don't you?' says Ed O'Brien - the heartiest, most gregarious Radioheader - to his fellow guitarist. Greenwood, the youngest and possibly shyest member of the band, replies by looking sheepish.

These theories include the 'tenspiracy', so named because In Rainbows came out on 10/10, the title has 10 letters, as does OK Computer, and it's out 10 years after said album. There is supposedly some binary coding at work here. This is what Cony Abbatemarco was on about when he wrote 'According to Genesis 9:1 (9+1 = 10!)'.

So for the record: with regards to 'the Kid 17 and tenspiracy theories' (Neil Dooley, 19, Dundalk, Ireland); the idea that The Golden Section of In Rainbows occurs at exactly the moment in 'Reckoner' when the backing vocals sing the words "in rainbows" (Tom Ballatore, 37, in Kyoto, Japan); that the bonus disc's tracks correspond to the Star of Ishtar in Taoist philosophy (Curtis Perry, 19, Ontario, Canada); that In Rainbows is a 'Pynchonian citation' (Carlo Avolio, 22, Naples, Italy); that it relates to Conrad's Heart of Darkness (Alex Drossart, 18, Wisconsin); that it is conceptually linked with Goethe's Faust, notably in 'Videotape' ('When I'm at the pearly gates/this will be on my videotape/Mephistopheles is just beneath/and he's reaching up to grab me') - in definitive response to all those: Radiohead don't know anything about any of that stuff.

Thom: 'All good records have a heart of darkness.'

Phil: 'You've been asked that one before, obviously.'

Thom: 'I have, yep! I vaguely know the story of Faust. But that would involve me having remembered it in some detail or picked it off the shelf. Which I didn't. But yes, hmm, Goethe's Faust. I'm going to have to look that one up, actually, 'cause that sounds suitably pretentious. We live in Oxford, after all.'

'When I listen to Kid A and Amnesiac I can't help but notice a narrative sewn seamlessly into the music. Does Kid A end with a suicide?' - Aaron McClaskey, 20, Fort Wayne, Indiana

Thom: 'No, 'Motion Picture Soundtrack' ends with little tweety angel noises, I seem to remember. [sings quietly] "I will see you in the next life..." No, that could just be saying goodbye to someone dying. They don't have to be doing it themselves. You can read suicide into most things, can't you?'

The Eraser, now, that does feature a suicide. Released in July 2006, Yorke's solo album was an electronic cri de coeur, an itchy collection of moans about the state of the planet and, more specifically, in the song 'Harrowdown Hill', about the venal state of a body politic that could allow a man - government weapons inspector Dr David Kelly - to be hounded to his death. The Eraser would go on to be nominated for the Mercury Prize, losing out to the Arctic Monkeys' debut.

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In response to the question 'has The Eraser made an impact on the music-making of the band?' (Hasan Dindjer, 15, London), Yorke acknowledges that making his solo album enabled him to get out certain thoughts and feelings that might have sat oddly within 'the Radiohead zone'. This thereby freed him up to be more 'in-your-face' with In Rainbows. Godrich, too, who produced The Eraser, was instrumental in prodding Yorke, convincing him that a techno-treated mumble was no use for the new Radiohead album - on these bright and direct new songs, the singer had to sing.

Dan Lewis, 32, a teacher in Philadelphia, asks: 'Margaret Florence [aka Stevie Smith] one wrote, "why does my Muse only speak when she is unhappy? She does not, I only listen when I am unhappy." Can you relate to this?'

Thom: 'That's good. That's true. But unhappy would be the wrong way of putting it. You're in a certain state of mind. Unhappy is not... the entire manifestation of that state of mind. It's also hyperactive, out-of-control, off-your-face. All these things. But not necessarily just unhappy or melancholic, which I read the other day, which is a much better word.'

'Why did Thom turn down Paul McCartney's request to collaborate [on his recent Memory Almost Full album]?' - Ron Sauzo, 25, San Fernando, California

Thom: 'Uhh, 'cause I can't play piano. Not like that. I had to explain to him that, I listened to the tune - "Mr Bellamy" - and I really liked the song, but the piano playing involved two hands doing things separately. I don't have that skill available. I said to him, "I strum piano, that's it."'

While the new record is a more personal work, the fans still look to Yorke as political oracle; the people still require answers from someone.

'Does Thom feel that his efforts in the environmental battle are helping any? Are the politicians at last hearing him out in [Friends of the Earth's] Big Ask campaign?' - Kristin Idlebird, 18, Houston, Texas.

Thom: 'The Big Ask thing has been actually quietly really effective... Actually, Gordon Brown is now sort of suddenly coming on board. Or at least he says he is... The other thing which was going on in the background this year was that the Tories had a big environmental report. That was going to be quite a positive, exciting thing, but then it got quietly shifted to the side. That was a downer. But maybe, you know, Gordon Brown's now on the case and maybe things are looking up.

'Unless you have laws in place, nothing's going to happen. Nothing of this is going to be voluntary. It's a bizarre form of rationing that we're all going to have to accept, just like people did in the Second World War.'

So fundamentally, Brown must grasp the thistle of eco-taxes?

Thom: 'Yeah. Which for someone like the ex-Chancellor of the Exchequer who's got [former director-general of the Confederation of British Industry] Digby Jones in his fucking government is going to be quite a tricky one. [Brightly] Anyway. Very technical and boring. I love going on about it.'

Another direct question that I'd like to put: in these post-Blair times are you more or less optimistic about the situation in Iraq?

Thom: 'What I find totally horrifying is the stories of the soldiers coming back. I think the thing that stays stuck in my throat is Blair saying, "I'm answerable to God over this." Well, actually you're not. In a democratic country you're answerable to us, pal. And I don't understand why the government really has never accepted full responsibility for its mistake, and sought to, with humility, address it properly in a democratic fashion, when it was the most unpopular thing any government has done for quite some time.'

Radiohead have also been - say it loud - having a laugh, as anyone who tuned into the Thumbs Down webcast that the band quietly hosted on their own site last month will know. 'What was the idea behind Thumbs Down?' asks Tobias Radoor, 15, from Denmark? Well, it was a 'chaotic news show' (Yorke), the name arising from 'a desperate attempt to find a name in five minutes flat' (Yorke). In the three-hour show the band DJ'd, performed cover versions (the Smiths' 'The Headmaster Ritual', Joy Division's 'Ceremony', Björk's 'Unravel'), reimagined the end of David Fincher's Se7en (with Yorke's head in the box instead of Gwyneth Paltrow's), and generally goofed around with comedy pals Adam Buxton (of Adam & Joe fame) and Garth Jennings (half of pop promo directors Hammer & Tongs).

You might view Thumbs Down as a further evidence of Radiohead's embrace of a DIY aesthetic and declaration of independence: we don't need record companies, and we don't need the media either. Or you might view it as five blokes having a laugh in the studio, hogging the record decks and going, 'No, my turn, my turn, listen to this!'

'We never play each other what we're into normally,' says Yorke. 'And the fact that people are watching is a bonus. But, also, it was a really nice thing to do because we set up this infrastructure and this way of thinking, and it's a nice way to get into this idea of doing TV stuff.

'Got to do it again in a couple of weeks,' he sniffs. 'But we have discovered a way where we can actually do it, not at the sort of bandwidth and quality that that one was, but we can do it off-the-cuff, stream it live from our studio whenever, which is fucking mental. It would be pretty lo-fi. So we might do a bit of that as well...'

The snarky view of Radiohead as 'gloomy, depressing, remote, difficult': this whole In Rainbows 'event', the soulful album and the heartfelt method of selling it, destroys that. Empowering the consumer has, in a way, humanised the band.

Thom: 'Well, part of the point for me personally was to get away from the story of [our] whole situation completely. If people want to know about it, go and find out. There's no perpetuating of myths that you don't agree with. [We're] just trying to avoid all that. I mean...

Thom Yorke sighs and rubs his ever-present (and rather gingery) stubble.

'"Depressing?" Oh yeah,' he snorts, 'whatever.'

Other things we have learnt:

1. Radiohead fans - notably Italo Rossi del Aguila, 21, in Lima, Peru - are seriously vexed by the fact that the band have never played South America: 'Yeah, so am I!' says Ed O'Brien. 'We are going to go! We're fucking going!'

2. Radiohead have at least one fan on Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. Hello to First Lieutenant Sean M Warner of the USAF.

3. Radiohead will start touring in America next May; sorry, Daniel Baker, 19, in Bournemouth, Neil Burns, 15, in Glasgow, and Thomas Hutchcroft, 16, in Somerset, they don't know yet if they will play Glastonbury. But I think they would like to. (Yorke's favourite ever 'Radiohead moment' was Glastonbury '97.)

4. To reduce their carbon footprint, they've thought about touring by ship. 'But if we go on the Queen Mary to the US,' says Yorke, 'it's more carbon emissions than it is if you go on the plane. The most eco-way of doing it is for us to get a crate on a merchant ship. That was pretty impractical!'

5. In response to the question from Bryn Gay, 26, in Colombo, Sri Lanka, as to whether Radiohead might apply the pay-what-you-like initiative to gigs, especially in 'less developed regions', Yorke replies: 'That could get really out of hand. Imagine the touts getting on that one!'

6. In response to the queries from Kathleen Plank, 19, from Indiana, and from Colm Byrne in Co Meath, who read Nick Cohen's What's Left? on Colin Greenwood's Dead Air Space recommendation, Colin is currently reading Piers Brendon's new The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, Jonny's re-reading Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ed's just finished Man's Search For Meaning by Victor Frankel ('Brilliant. He's an Auschwitz survivor'), Phil's reading Mark Haddon's A Spot of Bother, and Thom's reading Q by mysterious Italian anarchist group Luther Blisset. I tried to read that once, I tell him. 'Oh it's fucking ace! But my missus, that's her specialist field, so she's been explaining it to me all the way through. Medieval church carnage. It's mental. I want to get it made into a film. That's my next mission.'

Using the In Rainbows profits?

'Mmm-mm,' says Thom Yorke, shaking his head. 'I doubt it. That would cover basically the catering.'

Incidentally, among OMM's respondents - and bearing in mind these questions came via fansites, so the results should be weighed accordingly - half bought the box set. Ten per cent refused to say if or how much they paid. Of the remaining 40 per cent, just under a quarter paid nothing. Of the 75 per cent who did pay, the average price was £5.65. If we include those who didn't pay, the average price per download was £4.33.

Phil: 'What a lovely price.'

Is that pretty much pure profit?

Thom: 'Actually, unfortunately not in this case, because it's taken quite a lot to set all this shit up, servers and all that crap. There was a lot of risk. The biggest risk was that no bugger would pay anything, and we'd still have placed this infrastructure, and we would have lost out. But that hasn't happened, so that's fine.

'It was worth it just for getting a buzz out of the whole thing, which is what we have got. And it's worked actually way, way, way, way better than we thought it would.'

There's just time for one final question. Ana Paquim is Portuguese but lives in Sweden, and wants to know: 'Is it still fun?'

Thom: 'Hello Ana. Yeah. Sometimes. Definitely.'

Colin: 'It is at the moment.'

Ed: 'Yeah.'

Phil: 'Basing it on the five weeks that we've had so far, it's more fun.'

Jonny: 'I was listening to it on my iPod on the way up today, and some of the songs I still want to listen to. With all our records I'm normally keen to frisbee it out the window by the end of it. But I could still listen to 'Nude' and 'Reckoner' and think they're great.'

Thom: 'Well, definitely, definitely the whole download thing has given a real boost of energy to the camp. So yeah, so far. But after Christmas we'll all be bored again.'

Fear not, kids: Thom Yorke is, as he often is these days, joking.

· With thanks to the fan sites. Download 'In Rainbows' from inrainbows.com or buy it on CD from 31 December. The band will tour the UK in June 2008.

--observer.guardian.co.uk

2007 December 9 | New York Times

2008-01-25T03:41:00.000-08:00

Pay What You Want for This Article

Taking chances with commerce as well as art: From left, Ed O’Brien, Colin Greenwood, Thom Yorke, Phil Selway (reflected in the mirror) and Jonny Greenwood of
Steve Forrest/Insight-Visual for The New York Times
Radiohead.

By JON PARELES
Published: December 9, 2007

OXFORD, England

SHORTLY after Radiohead released its album “In Rainbows” online in October, the band misplaced its password for Max/MSP, a geek-oriented music software package that the guitarist Jonny Greenwood uses constantly. It wasn’t the first time it had happened, Mr. Greenwood said over a cup of tea at the venerable Randolph Hotel here. As usual Radiohead contacted Max/MSP’s developers, Cycling ’74, for another password. “They wrote back,” Mr. Greenwood said, “‘Why don’t you pay us what you think it’s worth?’”

Well, Radiohead was asking for it. Those are the exact terms on which the band is selling the downloadable version of “In Rainbows”: Buyers can pay zero or whatever they please up to £99.99 (about $212) for the album in MP3 form. Sixteen years and seven albums into the career that has made Radiohead the most widely pondered band in rock, it is taking chances with its commerce as well as its art. For the beleaguered recording business Radiohead has put in motion the most audacious experiment in years.

Radiohead is not the first act to try what one of its managers, Chris Hufford, calls “virtual busking.” But it’s the first one that can easily fill arenas whenever it tours. “It feels good,” said Thom Yorke, the band’s leader, over a pint of hard cider at his local Oxford pub, the Rose and Crown. “It was a way of letting everybody judge for themselves.”

Radiohead has abandoned major labels.

Radiohead’s pay-what-you-choose gambit didn’t just set off economic debates. It should also establish 2007 as two kinds of tipping point for recorded music. One is as the year of the superstar free agent. After fulfilling its contract in 2003 with its last album for EMI, “Hail to the Thief,” Radiohead turned down multimillion-dollar offers for a new major-label deal, preferring to stay independent.

“It was tough to do anything else,” Mr. Yorke said during Radiohead’s first extensive interviews since the release of the album. “The worst-case scenario would have been: Sign another deal, take a load of money, and then have the machinery waiting semi-patiently for you to deliver your product, which they can add to the list of products that make up the myth, la-la-la-la.”

Signing a new major-label contract “would have killed us straight off,” he added. “Money makes you numb, as M.I.A. wrote. I mean, it’s tempting to have someone say to you, ‘You will never have to worry about money ever again,’ but no matter how much money someone gives you — what, you’re not going to spend it? You’re not going to find stupid ways to get rid of it? Of course you are. It’s like building roads and expecting there to be less traffic.”

The Eagles and Madonna, both with sales that dwarf Radiohead’s, also abandoned major labels in 2007, as did songwriters as influential as Joni Mitchell and Paul McCartney, who moved to Hear Music, the independent label partly owned by Starbucks. Meanwhile Prince has followed his own wayward path, from one-album distribution deals through major labels to giving away CDs at concerts or, lately, bound into a British Sunday paper.

The second tipping point is the decisive migration of music to the Internet. Of course that has been anything but sudden. Music has been bouncing around online, sold or shared, since the days of dial-up, and bands like Smashing Pumpkins and Public Enemy gave away full albums online years ago. But the momentum of online music has been accelerating. Apple’s iTunes became the third-largest music retailer in the United States this year. Amazon added MP3 downloads alongside physical album sales. Hip-hop mixtapes, singled out for copyright prosecution by record labels, disappeared from stores and street corners only to thrive online, where the likes of Lil Wayne, Cam’ron and Kanye West release their latest innovations.

And Radiohead was able to draw worldwide attention to “In Rainbows” with no more promotion than a modest 24-word announcement on its Web site on Oct. 1. To the band’s glee, it could release its music almost immediately, without the months of lead time necessary to manufacture discs. Mr. Hufford said “In Rainbows” has been downloaded in places as far-flung — and largely unwired — as North Korea and Afghanistan.

On Nov. 9, as a kind of workaholic lark, Radiohead staged a free, thoroughly informal Webcast called “Thumbs Down,” with real-time performances of new songs and covers of Bjork and the Smiths, from its cluttered studio in Oxford. (Many clips are on YouTube.)

Yet Radiohead’s online choices, band members said, were among the easier decisions made during the protracted recording process of “In Rainbows.” The band and its producer, Nigel Godrich, focused on 16 songs and worked them over in the studio, on the road and in the studio again, for well over two years of torturous rearranging and rewriting.

“We kept on ripping the guts out of it all the time and starting again,” the drummer Phil Selway said in Oxford.

The band chose 10 concise, tuneful songs for the album. In them Mr. Yorke sings about displacement, disorientation, memories and moving on. “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” wonders “Why should I stay here?,” imagines decomposing underwater and being eaten by worms, then concludes, “Hit the bottom and escape.”

Throughout “In Rainbows” Mr. Yorke’s lyrics can be mapped onto personal relationships, the state of the world or the state of the band.

Behind much of the album “was a sudden realization of the day-t0-day, tenuous nature of life,” Mr. Yorke said. “Most of the time I was really, really trying not to judge anything that was happening. I was trying to just, not exactly knock it out, but not trying to be clever. That’s all.”

The Internet had already witnessed much of the gestation of “In Rainbows,” as Radiohead tested songs in public, knowing they would be bootlegged immediately. “The first time we ever did ‘All I Need,’ boom! It was up on YouTube,” Mr. Yorke said. “I think it’s fantastic. The instant you finish something, you’re really excited about it, you’re really proud of it, you hope someone’s heard it, and then, by God, they have. It’s O.K. because it’s on a phone or a video recorder. It’s a bogus recording, but the spirit of the song is there, and that’s good. At that stage that’s all you need to worry about.”

The band worried over other things. After releasing “Hail to the Thief” and touring the world, Radiohead took a year off. The members, all in their 30s, turned to raising families as they mulled over the future. Early in 2005 they began rehearsing together tentatively, although, Mr. Selway said, mentioning the word “album” was taboo for a year. They had a list of songs, most of which would appear two years later on “In Rainbows,” by September.

But as 2005 ended, Radiohead still had not regained its momentum. Mr. Yorke, a prolific songwriter, made his own album, “The Eraser,” working mostly alone with his computer and samples.

Mr. Godrich was busy recording Beck, so the band tried some sessions with Spike Stent, who had worked with Bjork, at the beginning of 2006. It was disappointed with the results. Then it decided that performing might put the songs into shape. It booked a summer tour in 2006, playing half a dozen new songs at every show. Soon, thanks to bootlegged recordings online, fans were clearly recognizing each one. After the tour Radiohead returned to the studio, only to decide that the songs weren’t ready yet.

“To be brutally honest,” the guitarist Ed O’Brien said over lunch at Shoreditch House in London, “the problem about playing these songs live is that we were bored with them. We played them 80 times live or so, and we’d rehearsed them to death. It just didn’t happen when we got back into the studio initially.”

Once again the band began tinkering. “We have a song and we’ve got lots of different ways we can try it, but we don’t know what’s going to work, and that’s why it still sort of feels a bit weirdly amateur,” Mr. Greenwood said. “You’d think by now we’d know what’s going to work, and what’s still frustrating, or kind of encouraging in a way, is that we don’t know whether it’s going to work on a laptop or whether it has to be a piano or. ...”

He half-smiled. “It’s got so twisted,” he added. “What we’ve learned is that you can’t repeat a method that you’ve already used for a song when it did work.”

The sound of “In Rainbows” often seems straightforward, almost like a live band; it is Radiohead’s most gracefully melodic album in a decade. But Radiohead arrived at the music circuitously, and there’s often more tucked into a track than is apparent at first. “Videotape,” with lyrics about recording a happy moment in a tape to be viewed posthumously, has a tolling piano and a beat so elusive that “we spent about a year in rehearsal on that song actually all trying to agree on where the one was,” Mr. Selway said. “Each of us, over the course of a year, we’d all lose it.”

The “Reckoner” that was part of the band’s live sets sounds nothing like the “Reckoner” on the album, which includes the lyrics “in rainbows.” When the band returned from touring, it decided the song needed a second part, and then a third one; eventually it discarded the original. For “All I Need,” Mr. Greenwood said, he wanted to recapture the white noise generated by a band playing loudly in a room, when “all this chaos kicks up.” That sound never materializes in the more analytical confines of a studio. His solution was to have a string section, and his own overdubbed violas, sustaining every note of the scale, blanketing the frequencies.

Mr. Yorke worked on many of the songs in the Rose and Crown. “I sit there, on the way in, because it’s a really nice little table,” he said, pointing. “And then I get out my scraps of paper and I line them up. I need to put them into my book because they’re just scraps of paper, and I’m going to lose them unless I do it. So am I writing here? Probably. I don’t know yet. I’m just collating information. This is a nice, relaxing thing to do, and it also keeps your mind tuned in to the whole thing. And you see things you didn’t know.”

The band and its managers are not releasing the download’s sales figures or average price, and may never do so. “It’s our linen,” Mr. Hufford said. “We don’t want to wash it in public.” A statement from the band rejected estimates by the online survey company ComScore that during October about three-fifths of worldwide downloaders took the album free, while the rest paid an average of $6.

Factoring in free downloads, ComScore said the average price per download was $2.26. But it did not specify a total number of downloads, saying only that a “significant percentage” of the 1.2 million people who visited the Radiohead Web site, inrainbows.com, in October downloaded the album. Under a typical recording contract, a band receives royalties of about 15 percent of an album’s wholesale price after expenses are recovered. Without middlemen, and with zero material costs for a download, $2.26 per album would work out to Radiohead’s advantage — not to mention the worldwide publicity.

Both Mr. Hufford and the members of Radiohead said the strategy had been a success. “People made their choice to actually pay money,” Mr. Hufford said. “It’s people saying, ‘We want to be part of this thing.’ If it’s good enough, people will put a penny in the pot.”

“This was a solution to a series of issues,” Mr. Hufford added. “I doubt it would work the same way ever again.”

Radiohead has not abandoned the physical disc. A mail-order deluxe version of “In Rainbows” — the album and a bonus CD, two vinyl albums, artwork and a fancy package for $80 — went on sale alongside the downloaded version on Oct. 10, directly from the band’s own mail-order merchandising company, W.A.S.T.E., and was shipped to the first buyers last week.

Mr. Hufford said that he and Bryce Edge, Radiohead’s other manager, had come up with the pay-what-you-want plan during a stoned philosophical conversation about the value of music. They had initially proposed releasing only the download and the deluxe box, but the band overruled them, noting that many of its fans are neither downloaders nor elite collectors. On Jan. 1 — a day when few albums are usually released — the single-disc “In Rainbows” is due as a retail CD and vinyl LP, in joint ventures with the independent labels TBD (part of ATO Records, partly owned by Dave Matthews) in the United States and XL in most other countries.

Will Botwin, the president and chief executive of ATO Records Group, optimistically described the download as “the world’s largest listening party,” drawing attention to the album among Radiohead’s core fans. The label plans to market to a broader audience with everything from television advertisements to in-store displays. Radio stations have already been sent the bruising rocker “Bodysnatchers” — a song, Mr. Yorke said, inspired by Victorian ghost stories, “The Stepford Wives” and his own feeling of “your physical consciousness trapped without being able to connect fully with anything else” — and the tense folk-rocker “Jigsaw Falling Into Place.”

The music business awaits results on how the worldwide downloads of “In Rainbows” will affect disc sales. “The record company doesn’t know,” said a grinning Colin Greenwood, Radiohead’s bassist, over tea in London. “They called our office and said, ‘We’ve made this amount of records, is it enough?’ And our manager’s office said, ‘I don’t know.’ It’s great, isn’t it?” For Radiohead, uncertainty is home turf.

--nytimes.com

Focus

2008-01-25T03:22:00.000-08:00

RADIOHEAD
'Duitsers zijn het gierigst'

Er blijven toe doen. Veertien jaar en zeven platen lang. Alleen Radiohead krijgt het in deze tijden van indigestie en eendagsvliegen voor elkaar. Broederpaar Jonny en Colin Greenwood (gitaar/bas) over 'In Rainbows', de plaat én de marketingstunt van het jaar. 'Er zit een Spice Girl in elk van ons.'

Hello everyone,
Well, the new album is finished, and it's coming out in 10 days.
We've called it 'In Rainbows'
Love from us all
Jonny

Zo kort en bondig was de boodschap die gitarist Jonny Greenwood op 1 oktober op de website van Radiohead postte. Maar de voorbije maanden werden die 27 woorden wel vaker geciteerd dan om het even welke andere yellow polka dot bikini. Omdat ze het stoutmoedigste marketingplan aankondigden in jaren.

Radiohead bracht In Rainbows aanvankelijk alleen via zijn eigen website uit, als digitale download en als luxebox, zonder de steun van een platenfirma. Als eerste millionseller , maar in geen geval als laatste. En wat vooral revolutionair was: fans mochten voor de digitale download betalen wat ze wilden. Ook niets - wat naar verluidt meer dan de helft van hen ook deed.

'We wilden alles zelf in handen houden deze keer', zei Thom Yorke, in één van de zeldzame interviews die hij de voorbije maanden toestond. 'En we wilden even snel werken als John Lennon voor Instant Karma . 'Geschreven voor het ontbijt, opgenomen voor de lunch en uitgebracht nog voor het avondeten.''

En niet alleen markete ers floten bewonderend tussen de tanden voor In Rainbows . Ook recensenten gaven de plaat een staande ovatie. 'Dit had nog per postduif mogen komen, dan nog was het een meesterwerk geweest', schreef het Britse Q Magazine . En Rolling Stone : ' In Rainbows is weer zo goed, dat je het gevoel krijgt dat veel andere rockgroepen zich voor hun platen zouden moeten beginnen excuseren.'

Een vraag die spontaan bij me opborrelt: zou een alom bejubelde groep als Radiohead nog altijd met dichtgeknepen billen op recensies zitten wachten?

Jonny: Natuurlijk wel. En dat moet ook, vind ik. Anders kan je er maar beter mee ophouden. Deze keer was speciaal omdat iedereen ook over ons zakenplan berichtte. In Times en The Economist stonden zelfs foto's van Thom - een redelijk absurd gezicht. Maar toch waren we opgelucht dat recensenten schreven dat het misschien wel onze beste plaat tot nog toe was. Je bent altijd maar zo goed als je laatste plaat, hé?

De variabele prijs van 'In Rainbows' werd onthaald als de marketingstunt van de eeuw. Maar Thom ontkende dat jullie er bijzonder diep over nadachten.

Colin: De beslissing om de plaat op deze manier uit te brengen werd in no time genomen, dat klopt. Daarna moesten we nog wel het één en ander finetunen . Praktische toestanden vooral. Maar heel veel marketing kwam daar niet aan te pas.

Jonny: Tot het laatste moment hadden we ook enorme twijfels. 'Is dit allemaal wel zo'n goed idee? Gaat het systeem wel werken? Kunnen we er wel geld voor vragen? Zouden we toch niet beter gewoon bij een platenfirma tekenen?'

Colin: Het voelde aan als een gigantisch risico. Als Mission: Impossible , bijna. Uit schrik dat onze muziek op voorhand zou lekken, vernielden we na elke opnamedag altijd alle cd's. En op de master schreven we altijd een naam waarmee we uitsloten dat iemand er in geval van verlies naar zou luisteren. 'Eagles: Greatest Hits.' 'Kula Shaker Demo's.' 'Phil Collins's Hip Hop Covers.'

Jonny: Ooit gehoord, die plaat? Je gelooft je oren niet!

Intussen raakte bekend dat 'maar' 38 procent van jullie fans voor de download van 'In Rainbows' betaalde. Waren...

Colin: (onderbreekt) Het zijn er veel meer, al heb ik geen idee van de recentste cijfers. Het laatste wat ik onze manager hoorde zeggen, was dat onze Duitse fans het gierigst waren, en onze Italiaanse het gulst.

Blijft mijn vraag: waren jullie hier tot nog toe zelf tevreden mee?

Colin: Absoluut. We hadden drie doelstellingen. Een: alles volledig zelf in handen houden. Twee: zorgen dat de plaat niet op voorhand lekte, in tegenstelling tot onze vorige drie. En drie: de eerste groep worden die op deze manier een plaat uitbracht. In die zin was het over de hele lijn: missie volbracht.

In welke zin niet?

Jonny: We hadden - zoals altijd - gehoopt dat de opnames eens géén uitputtingsslag zouden worden. En dat we aan het einde van de opnames eens niét allemaal op de rand van een zenuwinzinking zouden balanceren.

Colin: Maar wat dat betreft blijft het dus wachten op ons eerste succes. (lacht)

Klopt het beeld dat Thom zo vaak van zichzelf ophangt in interviews? Het beeld van de dictator die puur voor de lol 'een klimaat van angst' creëert?

Jonny : Nee, dat is gewoon het beeld dat de media graag van hem ophangen. Scary Thom .

Colin: (droog) Er schuilt een Spice Girl in elk van ons.

Jonny: Het enige waar hij echt ontzettend onredelijk in kan zijn, is in zijn haat voor banjo's. Ik probeer 'm nu al veertien jaar duidelijk te maken dat je daar heel donkere, warme klanken mee kan maken. Maar elke keer opnieuw is het: ' No. Fucking. Way. '

Colin: jij hebt als student naar verluidt nog een tijdje in een platenwinkel gewerkt.

Colin: Ik heb Our Price Records nog gestofzuigd , jawel. Met NWA op de achtergrond. Fantastische stofzuigermuziek!

Snap je dat platenboeren boos waren dat jullie 'In Rainbows' oorspronkelijk alleen online wilden uitbrengen? En dat jullie 'm nu toch als cd verkopen, nu al jullie fans hem al hebben?

Colin: Nee? Want we hebben de kleine platenboeren nooit de kaas van tussen het brood willen eten. Het was van meet af aan onze bedoeling om In Rainbows ook als cd beschikbaar te maken. En dat hebben we vanaf dag één ook zo gecommuniceerd. We wilden dat de muziek voor iedereen beschikbaar zou zijn. Ook voor onze ouders. En onze fans zonder internetverbinding of creditcard. Alleen duurde het veel langer dan verwacht voor we een platenfirma gevonden hadden.

Jonny: In al onze haast waren we ook vergeten om een Chinese en een Spaanse interface te maken voor onze website. Ook daardoor kregen honderdduizenden fans geen toegang tot onze muziek.

Colin: Straffer nog. We vergaten zelfs om in het keuzevakje voor de prijs meer dan twee digits te voorzien. Zodat mensen meer dan 99 pond konden betalen, als ze dat wilden. Wie weet hoeveel geld we daardoor misgelopen zijn! (lacht)

Klopt het dat jullie niet meer met EMI wilden samenwerken omdat ze overgenomen werden door de geldmachine Terra Firma.

Jonny: Absoluut. Guy Hands, de nieuwe CEO, kondigde bij de overname aan dat hij de winst wou verviervoudigen tegen 2012. Maar niét door op een zeer ethische manier met muziek om te gaan, hadden we de indruk. Dus gingen we elders aankloppen.

Gaven jullie je toestemming voor de Radioheadverzamelbox die bij EMI verscheen?

Jonny: Wat denk je? Natúúrlijk niet. Maar ze hadden onze toestemming niet nodig, helaas. Ze hebben op alles de rechten. Muziek én artwork.

Colin: 'Probeer het positief te zien', zei Thom toen we de box een paar weken geleden toegestuurd kregen. 'Ze hadden er ook naaktfoto's van mij op kunnen zetten. Met mijn peroxidekapsel uit de jaren 90. En mijn twee duimen omhoog. Zo van: 'Kopen, deze handel!'' (lacht)

Jonny: Wat ik wel griezelig vond: de eerste dagen na de release verschenen overal op internet woedende recensies van fans. 'Dit is een cynische EMI-release! Koop dit niet!' Maar een paar dagen later waren die al allemaal verdwenen.

Jonny: Ik snap trouwens niet waarom ze er geen vinylbox van maakten. Daarmee hadden ze pas big time langs de kassa kunnen passeren.

Heeft 'In Rainbows' de muziekindustrie veranderd, zoals we links en rechts lazen?

Jonny: Dat geloof ik niet, nee. Maar we hebben wel ontzettend veel positieve reacties gekregen. En ik denk wel dat een aantal muzikanten ons voorbeeld zullen volgen. Jay-Z, bijvoorbeeld, zei in een interview dat hij heel veel voor zijn download had betaald. Omdat hij het zo'n geweldig initiatief vond.

Colin: Maar voorlopig is het met al die nieuwe businessmodellen in de muziek een beetje zoals met Apple en Microsoft, vrees ik. Met de Macs aan de ene kant, waarvan iedereen zegt dat ze zo geweldig zijn. En de PC's aan de andere kant, die - helaas - nog altijd door 99 % van de wereldbevolking gebruikt worden.

Een obligaat vraagje over België. Vier jaar geleden speelden jullie hier een magistraal concert in Vorst, nochtans een galmhal. Hoe slaagden jullie daarin?

Colin: We hadden gehoord dat het a haunted hall was, een behekste zaal. En dus brachten we Big Jim mee, de geluidsman van onder meer Peter Gabriel en Nine Inch Nails. Dat concert is voor mij een van de beste die we ooit hebben gegeven. En dat zeg ik niet zomaar, dat méén ik echt. Over ons laatste concert op Pukkelpop bijvoorbeeld was ik helemaal niét te spreken. Daar stonden we zo laat geprogrammeerd dat we tegen de bissen allemaal half stonden te slapen.

Tot slot. Jullie staan sinds jaar en dag bekend als 'de nieuwe Pink Floyd'. Hoe blij zijn jullie daar mee?

Jonny: Ik ben een gigantische Pink Floydfan, dus: ontzettend blij.

Colin: Een jaar of drie geleden kregen we een postpakketje. Inside Out zat erin, dat boek van (Pink Floyd drummer) Nick Mason. 'To Radiohead, my favourite Pink Floyd tribute band of alle time' , had hij erin geschreven.

Jonny: Wat mij betreft: het mooiste compliment dat we ooit hebben gekregen.

Door Wouter Van Driessche

--knack.be

Translated by Piacoa from atease.

Would the famous and ever praised Radiohead still anxiously await reviews?

Jonny: Of course. It’s necessary, I think. Otherwise you’d better quit. This time was special because everyone also talked about our business plan. There were even pictures of Thom in The Times and The Economist – a rather ridiculous sight. Still, we were relieved that critics wrote that it might be our best record ever. You’re always as good as your last record.

The variable price of IR was claimed to be the marketing stunt of the century. But Thom denied that you had thought it over thoroughly.

Colin: The decision to release the record like this was taken in no time, that’s right. After that we just had to finetune some stuff. Practical stuff, mostly. But it didn’t involve lots of marketing.

Jonny: Until the last moment we’ve had serious doubts. “Is this really such a good idea? Is the system going to work? Can we ask money for it? Shouldn’t we just sign with a record company?”

Colin: It felt like a gigantic risk. Mission Impossible, almost. For fear of having our music leaked again, we destroyed every cd after a day of recording. We wrote false names on the masters so no one would listen to it when it got lost. ‘Eagles: Greatest Hits.’ ‘Kula Shaker Demos’. ‘Phil Collins’ Hip Hop Covers’.

Jonny: Ever heard that one? You wouldn’t believe your ears!

Meanwhile it seemed like ‘only’ 38% of your fans payed for the download of IR. Did...

Colin: (interrupts) There are lots more, though I have no idea about the latest numbers. Our manager did say that our German fans are the most miserly and the Italians are the most generous.

Were you satisfied with these facts yourselves?

Colin: Absolutely. We had three goals: 1: Keeping everything in own hands. 2: Making sure that it doesn’t leak beforehand, like our last three albums. Three: Becoming the first band releasing a record this way. In that sense it was Mission Accomplished.

In what sense not?

Jonny: As usual, we had hoped that the recording sessions would for once not end with us being exhausted and on the verge of nervous breakdown.

Colin: But concerning that we’re still waiting on our first success. (laughs)

Is the image that Thom often creates of himself in interviews, true? Is he really a dictator who creates a ‘climate of fear’ just for fun?

Jonny: No, that’s just the image that the media create of him. Scary Thom.

Colin: (with straight face) There’s a Spice Girl in every one of us.

Jonny: The only thing he can be extremely unreasonable about, is his hate for banjos. For fourteen years I’ve been trying to make him see that you can create very dark, warm sounds with it. But every single time it’s ‘No. Fucking. Way.’

Colin, apparently you had a student job in a record store?

Colin: I once vacuumed Our Price Records, yes. With NWA in the background. Great vacuuming music!

Do you understand that record shops were angry that you initially only wanted to distribute the record via the internet, and that, now that your fans already have it, you are selling it as a cd?

Colin: No, because we never wanted to rob the small record shops. From the beginning on we’ve wanted to release In Rainbows as a cd as well. We’ve communicated that from day one. We wanted our work to be available for everyone. Our parents included. En the fans that don’t have internet connection or a credit card. It’s just that it took much longer than expected to find a record company.

Jonny: In the rush we’d forgotten to create a Chinese and a Spanish interface for our website. Another reason why hundreds of thousands of fans didn’t have access to our music.

Colin: Better yet. We even forgot to create a possibility for more than two digits in the decide-your-own-price box, so people could pay more than 99 pounds if they wanted to. Who knows how much cash we missed out on because of that! (laughs)

Is it true that you guys didn’t want to work with EMI again because they had been taken over by the money machine that is Terra Firma?

Jonny: Absolutely. Guy Hands, the new CEO, announced that he wanted to quadruple the profit by 2012. But not by handling music in a very ethical way, we noticed. So we went elsewhere.

Did you give permission to EMI for selling the Radiohead collection box set?

Jonny: What do you think? Of course not. But they didn’t need our permission, unfortunately. They have the rights to everything. Music ànd artwork.

Colin: ‘Try to see the positive side of it,’ Thom said when we received the box a few weeks ago. ‘They could’ve added nude pictures of me. With my nineties peroxide haircut and two thumbs up, like “Buy this stuff!” (laughs)

Jonny: The thing I found kind of creepy, was that the first days after the release of the box set everywhere on the internet you found angry reactions of fans going ‘This is a cynical EMI-release! Do not buy this!’ but a few days later they were all gone.

Jonny: By the way, I don’t get why they didn’t make it a vinyl set. They could’ve made a fortune with that.

Has In Rainbows changed the music industry?

Jonny: I don’t think so, no. But we did receive lots of positive reactions, and I do think that some musicians will follow our example. Jay-Z, for example, said in an interview that he has paid a lot for his download, because he thought it was a brilliant initiative.

Colin: But for now the situation with the different business plans is comparable to that with Apple and Microsoft, I fear. The Macs on one side, of which everyone keeps saying that they’re great, and the PC’s on the other, which – unfortunately – are still used by 99% of the world population.

A small obligatory question about Belgium. Four years ago you guys played a marvellous gig in Forest National, a particularly tough venue with lots of reverb. How did you succeed?

Colin: We had heard that it was a haunted hall, so we brought Big Jim along, the sound guy of Peter Gabriel and Nine Inch Nails. That concert to me is one of the best we ever did. And I’m not just saying that, I mean it. Pukkelpop Festival last year, on the other hand, I was very unsatisfied with. We were scheduled so late that we were half asleep by the time we had to do encores.

To close with: for ages you guys are known as the ‘new Pink Floyd’. How happy are you with that?

Jonny: I’m a massive Pink Floyd fan, so extremely happy.

Colin: About three years ago we got a package in our mailbox. It contained Inside Out, that book Nick Mason(Pink Floyd drummer) wrote. ‘To Radiohead, my favourite Pink Floyd tribute band of all time,’ he had written inside.

Jonny: In my opinion the biggest compliment we’ve ever received.

2007 December 2 | depers

2008-01-24T21:02:00.000-08:00

Exclusief Interview met zanger Thom Yorke en drummer Phil Selway
Radiohead neemt de regie over

Door: Jaochim Hentschel / IFA
Gepubliceerd: zondag 2 december 2007 22:51
Update: zondag 2 december 2007 22:51

Radiohead is sinds debuutalbum Pablo Honey uit 1993 altijd zeer experimenteel geweest. Dit najaar doorbrak het Engelse vijftal ook nog eens alle marketingtaboes: de band zette haar nieuwe album volledig op internet, de downloader mocht de prijs betalen. Exclusief in De Pers: zanger Thom Yorke en drummer Phil Selway over de affaire.

Het was maar één klik met de muis en toch veroorzaakte het een virtuele aardbeving: op 10 oktober 2007 zette de band Radiohead alle tien nummers van het nieuwe album In Rainbows, op hun site zodat iedereen ze kon downloaden. De actie werd niet gefinancierd door een platenmaatschappij en de platenzaken ontvingen geen exemplaren van het album.

De grootste verrassing kwam voor de downloaders toen het op betalen aankwam: Radiohead liet het aan de klant over hoeveel ze wilden betalen voor de MP3-bestanden. De muziekwereld stond op zijn kop. Sommigen vonden dat de band gewoon bijdroeg aan de waardevermindering van digitale muziek, een groot aantal anderen kwamen tot de conclusie dat Radiohead de toekomst van popmuziekmarketing had ontdekt. In de weken hierna namen veel mensen om allerlei redenen hun oorspronkelijk lof voor het revolutionaire gebaar terug.

Eind november hadden we in Londen de kans om met Radiohead-zanger Thom Yorke en drummer Phil Selway te praten over de marketing en de muziek van In Rainbows.

Was een van de redenen om In Rainbows on line uit te brengen niet gewoon dat jullie geen zin hadden in het gedoe dat bij een nieuw album hoort?

Selway: ‘We hadden op dat moment geen contract en we hadden een album dat eindelijk klaar was en waar we blij mee waren. Dus was het voor iedereen een opwindend idee om het eens anders te doen.’

Yorke: ‘Het was een antwoord op een aantal dingen. Voor mij was het belangrijkste dat al tijden lang elk album op de een of andere manier van tevoren toch uitlekt op het net. Dus op deze manier namen wij de situatie weer in eigen hand. En daarnaast wilden we graag weer dat opgewonden gevoel hebben: je produceert de plaat, je uploadt hem. En klaar ben je. Net zoals John Lennon, die over Instant Karma zei: Voor het ontbijt heb ik het geschreven, voor de lunch heb ik het opgenomen en nog voor het avondeten brengen we het uit.’

Ik dacht dat jullie je niet druk maakten om dat lekken?

Selway: ‘Nou, wel dus.’

Yorke: ‘Het ging er vooral om dat iemand anders het deed hoewel je gevraagd had het niet te doen. Het is zo dat je klaar bent met een album en dan moet je van de platenmaatschappij nog drie maanden wachten terwijl zij alles voorbereiden…Het was prettig om daar allemaal niks mee te maken te hebben en te kunnen zeggen: als je het horen wil, als je geïnteresseerd bent, hier is-ie!’

Maar jullie waren je toch wel bewust van het feit dat als Radiohead zoiets doet er veel publiciteit zou komen?

Selway: ‘We hadden geen idee wat er zou gebeuren als we de plaat op de site zouden zetten! Het was eigenlijk ook best riskant. Voor het zelfde geld was het helemaal niet opgevallen.’

Yorke: ‘Vooraf hadden we een eindeloze reeks bijeenkomsten, waarin we al die zaken bespraken. In het kort: hoe gaat het werken? Gaat de service wel werken? Moeten de mensen ervoor betalen? Zelfs die vraag was nog tot op het laatst een discussiepunt. We liepen de kans heel veel geld kwijt te raken! Maar er zat ook een gevoel bij van 'wat kan het ons schelen'. De wens was de plaat zo snel en direct mogelijk te laten horen. We hebben natuurlijk niet gedacht aan al die negatieve kanten, bijvoorbeeld dat niet iedereen internet gebruikt.’

Velen voelden zich ook beetgenomen toen bleek dat er ook een ‘In Rainbows’-cd kwam. Heel wat fans hadden soms al 25 dollar besteed aan een gedownloade kopie van slechte kwaliteit.

Yorke: ‘Maar als we het daarbij gelaten hadden, dan hadden heel veel mensen de plaat nooit kunnen horen. Punt. Mensen als mijn moeder! Mensen in Brazilië, in Argentinië, in Japan die hebben hem niet gedownload omdat wij het niet voor elkaar kregen een meertalige site te maken!

Het is toch idioot aan te nemen dat de internetversie de enige zal zijn. Het gaat in de eerste plaats om de muziek en niet om de verspreiding ervan. Iedereen beet zich vast in dat downloadgedoe alsof we een gebaar tegen de muziekbusiness hadden gemaakt, maar het was voor ons gewoon een middel om ons doel te bereiken. We hadden absoluut niet de bedoeling de muziekbusiness aan te pakken!’

Gaat het bij volgende albums weer zo?

Selway: ‘Dat weten we nog niet. Het hangt ervan af of het past bij wat we in de toekomst gaan doen. Het hoeft voor mij niet vast te liggen. Je doet wat je denkt dat dan het beste past bij dingen die om je heen gebeuren en bij de plaat die je hebt gemaakt. We zijn contractueel tot niets verplicht.’

Yorke: ‘Absoluut niets! Je moet goed onthouden dat we dit slechts gedaan hebben omdat we klaar waren en trots waren op wat we hadden gemaakt. Omdat die energie aanwezig was, hebben we dit gedaan. Als we hierna muziek maken die het beste past bij een lp doen we dat misschien wel. Het hele idee van doorgaan met muziek maken is dat het voor ons wel wat moet blijven betekenen.’

--depers.nl

2008-01-24T20:44:00.000-08:00

Yorke: Mum Made Me Put Radiohead Album On CD
Dec 5 2007 By John Dingwall

THOM Yorke has admitted Radiohead are to release their latest album on CD ...because of his mum.

The enigmatic frontman revealed his allegiance as he announced a massive gig on Glasgow Green next June 27.

Radiohead originally released seventh album In Rainbows in October over the internet only.

More than 1.5 million fans were even allowed to choose how much they wanted to pay for the download, with some coughing up just one pence.

The move caused massive debate within the music industry and was welcomed by the public.

But now Yorke, 39, - who grew up in Fife - has denied cashing in on fans by not sticking to the internet and issuing the CD version on December 31.

Revealing his family tie, he said: "If we had left it at that, there would have been loads of people who would never have heard the record.

"People like my mum - she's still asking me to make a copy for her.

"Also people in Brazil, in Argentina, in Japan ... they haven't downloaded it because we couldn't get it together to do a multi-lingual website.

"It's utterly ridiculous for people to assume there will only be the download. It wasn't this purist thing.

"The record is the thing that comes first, not the means of distribution. Everyone jumped on the download thing as this sort of anti-music business gesture.

"Actually it was just a means to an end for us. Taking on the music business was not the point."

The first single from In Rainbows, "Jigsaw Falling Into Place", will be out in early 2008.

But it seems the music business is biting back for fans who cannot wait that long.

On Monday, their former label, Parlaphone, will reissue all their albums from 1993-2003 - Pablo Honey, The Bends, OK Computer, Kid A, Amnesiac, and Hail To The Thief plus a live album I Might Be Wrong - in a CD box set or 4Gb USB stick.

That will make Radiohead the first big act to issue a memory stick holding seven albums.

And fans can expect the best of their classic and new material at Glasgow Green - the band's first Scots show since their 2006 gig at Edinburgh's Meadowbank Stadium.

--dailyrecord.co.uk

2007 November 30 | Columbia Spectator

2008-01-24T20:32:00.000-08:00

No Alarms, But Still Surprising
By Logan Light
PUBLISHED NOVEMBER 30, 2007

On Oct. 1, 2007, Radiohead fans who paid a routine visit to the band’s homepage were in for a surprise, in the form of a short message from band member Jonny Greenwood.

Hello everyone.
Well, the new album is finished, and it’s coming out in 10 days;
We’ve called it In Rainbows.
Love from us all.
Jonny

Thus began the hype cycle for what was, for those 10 days, the most anticipated and blogged-about album of the century thus far. In Rainbows changed the way musicians do business—and not only because the album was released so soon after it was finished. The band made the album available exclusively as a digital release, and, in a now-legendary move, allowed listeners to pay whatever they thought the album was worth. Yes, “nothing” was an option, though Record of the Day later revealed the results of a thousands-strong poll: the average In Rainbows buyer spent £3.88, or about $8.01.

Thank goodness In Rainbows is a great album. It may be the most universally lauded release of the year, garnering praise like, “all of it rocks; none of it sounds like any other band on earth; it delivers an emotional punch that proves all other rock stars owe us an apology,” from Rolling Stone, and “the gentlest, prettiest Radiohead set yet,” from Entertainment Weekly. It currently has a score of 88 on the admittedly subjective Metacritic, putting it at third place on their Best of 2007 list.

The band has been fairly reticent since the album’s release—until now. Through e-mail, guitarists Jonny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien, bassist Colin Greenwood, and the band’s manager Bryce Edge, answered Spec’s questions about their philosophy of the value of music, family life, and that crazy Kid 17 thing. With the exception of an hour-long BBC 6 radio interview and a smattering of individual Q&As band members did individually, this article marks one of the first print interviews Radiohead has performed since In Rainbows came out nearly two months ago.

SPECTATOR: The way In Rainbows was released had never been done on such a large scale. If the technology didn’t allow each fan to buy the record directly from the band at the price of their choosing, what other options were you looking at for release?

RADIOHEAD (COLLECTIVELY): The main idea behind the release was to get music to the fans as soon as possible after finishing it. We also wanted everyone to get the music at the same time. A digital release is the only way that is possible. The pricing option is secondary to that and is a way of asking people what a bunch of binary codes is worth to them. Without the technology, we would be back to a traditional release.

SPEC: Going into this release process, you knew this was unique. Regardless of what the industry thought, what was your barometer for success?

RADIOHEAD (COLLECTIVELY): Good question. The most important thing was delivering the music to a large number of people, without the technology falling over. (We are not eBay!) Interestingly, the only problems we had were in processing credit cards from around the world. The security codes just clogged everything up when demand was at its highest. Delivering the music was easy.

SPEC: The industry is looking at this release under a microscope. A number of artists said that giving music away for free is easy when you have the touring base Radiohead has, but that it hurts new bands who don’t have that revenue source. How do you respond to that statement? Do you think Radiohead, because of their stature, has an obligation to the next generation of bands or only to their fans?

BRYCE EDGE: “Don’t try this at home” should be tagged to this way of doing things. It is not a solution for anyone else, just a way of releasing music that might work for Radiohead. We’ve always said it’s an experiment in progress. Any band worth their salt will work out what is right for them and give it a go.

SPEC: Radiohead has often cited bands like the Pixies and R.E.M. as their influences. How does Radiohead feel to have the same sort of influence on the current growing generation of musicians?

RADIOHEAD (COLLECTIVELY): It’s humbling.

SPEC: In Rainbows will no doubt be defined as the most important musical release [of 2007] in terms of its content and way in which it was released. 50 years from now, when the entire music industry is undoubtedly completely different, how do you think and want this unique release to be remembered?

COLIN GREENWOOD: I hope we put some excitement back into music; it’s all becoming horribly predictable. We got incredible feedback from a whole range of people who joined the biggest listening party ever on Oct. 10.

SPEC: With such a large young-adult fan base—who will be the future leaders of the world—do you think music will influence these future leaders? And how specifically would you like to see Radiohead’s music influence them?

COLIN GREENWOOD: I don’t think music influences people in a direct-action kind of way, but it does help to shape tastes and perhaps that has a part to play in growing up. If we make people think, then we’ve achieved something.

SPEC: Whenever I hear In Rainbows, it will remind me of the time I first heard it: sitting under the peaceful 2 a.m. sky with a light drizzle above in the center of the Columbia campus. Is there a song or record or live performance for the band that, when you play it or hear it, defines for you what Radiohead means?

ED O’BRIEN: “Bodysnatchers” will always remind us of Tottenham House, a decrepit mansion where we recorded some of the album. This track reflects the weird energy of the house. There isn’t anything that specific in relation to Radiohead as a whole, if that makes sense.

SPEC: Since Radiohead is making many attempts to promote environmental activism, and assuming they are going to make their tour eco-friendly, what exactly are their plans to do so?

EDGE: There is a very long answer to that question but the most important thing is to try and site concerts, which allow the audience to travel in a sensible way. That is the most impactful factor by far.

SPEC: It is quite clear In Rainbows has a much “lighter” sound than Hail to the Thief. [With most of the band] now married and having children, Radiohead must have a different mind-set than they did, say, 10 years ago during the OK Computer era. Family is undoubtedly the most important thing in nearly everyone’s life. So how has family life influenced and changed Radiohead’s music?

RADIOHEAD (COLLECTIVELY): Priorities definitely change. Time becomes precious, and the gang mentality is really hard to maintain. That’s really why it’s taken quite a long time to finish this record, but we are very proud of it. I am sure our children will think of us as old farts and be into whatever their generation throws up.

SPEC: When you get something for free, it has zero value; when you pay for something, you feel a sense of ownership. Do you think the fans who didn’t pay for the music value it the same way those that did do?

EDGE: It’s a complex question. How do we know that those people who paid zero would not buy a CD? I think the really good part of the whole experiment was the debate it engendered around the nature of value. It is a really fascinating part of human behavior and one which can throw up a lot of things that appear to be counter-intuitive.

SPEC: Radiohead fans have noted quite a bit of remarkable coincidences within the band’s work. Whether they be considered odd coincidences or marks of brilliant planning for an album, fans want to know if these were deliberate plans, coincidences, or is it up to these fans to decide for themselves? Here are a few examples:
-A majority of tracks on Kid A create an interesting array of effects when played 17 seconds apart, often known as Kid 17.
-OK Computer’s “Fitter Happier” nearly splits the album on the Golden Ratio
-At the golden ratio of In Rainbows, which occurs 2:49 into “Reckoner,” the background vocals can be heard singing “In Rainbows.”
-The number 10 being tied to In Rainbows, from it being released 10 days after its announcement to being released on the date 10/10.

JONNY GREENWOOD: A few years ago a weird connection between The Matrix and OK Computer was brought to light. If you run the movie with the album apparently there is a striking synergy. Strange how culture throws up coincidences ... or is it?

--columbiaspectator.com

2007 December | SMH

2008-01-24T20:19:00.001-08:00

Radiohead's new-found freedom

Stephanie Bunbury
December 1, 2007

'It just felt beautifully simple. I don't think we thought far beyond that, to be honest'

Thom Yorke

Thom Yorke
Photo: Damon Winter/Los Angeles Times
Advertisement

SOME people hit their computers at dawn on October 10. That was the day In Rainbows, the passionately awaited Radiohead album, was released online. Anyone could get it, for whatever they chose to pay - even nothing - with a simple click.

"I can't remember the last time I woke up voluntarily at 6am," wrote a reviewer on Pitchfork, a music site. "But there I was, sat at my computer, headphones on, groggy but awake and hitting Play."

For others, it was a news story. Radiohead, arguably the most significant, innovative and outright thrilling band of their generation, were writing a new rulebook. Their contract with EMI had expired and the band had set up their stall and were selling their own stuff with the website equivalent of an honesty box. For friend and foe alike, it was as if they had sounded the trumpet that would bring forth the apocalypse. This, surely, spelt the end of the music industry.

Two months later, however, the music industry is still tottering along, getting its Christmas best-ofs into the shops, while the five members of Radiohead are doing the usual rounds of interviews to promote the physical version of the album, which is due out on December 29. Capitalism, at least for the moment, is safe. "We don't normally get that," Yorke says of becoming a newsmaker. "I think it's the only time we'll get that."

Oxford's Radiohead bestride the narrow British indie scene like a colossus; for something like 14 years, they have pushed the idea of what a pop song can be further and further into unknown musical territory, embedding catchy melodies and thrilling rolls of orchestration in a mesh of experimental sounds. As with Pink Floyd before them, Radiohead are relentlessly ambitious while remaining popular, their legions of fans having stayed with them from the more-or-less straight guitar grunge of Pablo Honey (1993) through the wind-blown electronica of Kid A and Amnesiac until this year's surprise gift, In Rainbows.

A lot of people have paid for that gift, although there is now a running spat about how many and how much. Internet monitoring company comScore said 62 per cent of downloaders paid nothing and that the average drop in the box was a mere $US2.26 ($2.60). "Those figures are wrong. Those figures are made up," Yorke says contemptuously. "It was about 50 per cent last time we looked."

The idea of a free download emerged during recording, which was as painful, draining and protracted - "the same old same old," Yorke sighs - as every previous Radiohead album. In Rainbow's four predecessors and Yorke's solo album, The Eraser, had all been leaked by somebody. "Not necessarily in the proper form," he adds, "which is sort of mildly irritating-stroke-very irritating if it was someone in the record company or, indeed, someone breaking into the record studio while you're working, which is what happened on Hail To The Thief. All these things were a real pisser. So it was nice to keep it really inhouse."

The skulduggery level was high; all working CDs were destroyed once heard and no copies were handed out. "And it became this really exciting thing, because we had something that was starting to come together but we kept it among ourselves and sort of kept hold of the whole procedure. And then suddenly, boom, there it is. If you want it. It just felt beautifully simple and I don't think we thought far beyond that, to be honest. I was just excited about doing what I wanted to do, which was have our own leak date: why let some snotty little bugger do it for us?"

This is, according to reputation, Thom Yorke at his most relaxed. Radiohead's keening, lowing singer and melancholic sprite has had a frequently adversarial relationship with the press, despite the band being critical darlings.

By the late '90s he was mired in depression, which he countered by walking along the cliff-tops of southern England in all weathers, preferably extreme. "It kind of reflects what's going on inside."

Some might say this rawness is the price of genius, although other members of the band tend to put more emphasis on the price of hard work. Yorke's relationship to the wider world - especially sabre-rattling presidents and prime ministers - similarly prickles with anger and anxiety, while one need only listen to the songs to wonder at what torments might lie in any disaffected lad's relationship with himself.

At times, relations within the band have come close to snapping point. Yorke, Phil Selway, brothers Colin and Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien have been playing together for more than two decades, since they were all at high school. Selway is now 40 and the others are just a year or two behind. Since their first album as Radiohead, Pablo Honey, came out, however, their survival has seemed to hang permanently in the balance.

After Hail To The Thief (2003) they had a long hiatus before beginning rehearsals for the new album about two years ago; meanwhile, Yorke released the solo The Eraser. Time was when he described himself as running the band as his own personal fiefdom, creating "a climate of fear, the same way that Stalin did". The balance is more realistic now but that doesn't make it easier.

"If I'm honest, it was hard to get back to the dynamic of working with a band again," he says now. "If you're on your own, you make all the decisions. There's no participation; it may be good and it may not but it just happens."

The glory of being part of Radiohead, he continues, is that the combination of views and talents means things happen that he doesn't expect but he still finds it difficult to open up to surprise. "It's a limitation but it's the reverse as well. That's a lesson I should be … well, someone should be hitting me over the head with a wet fish, constantly." Every time he drives through the studio gates, he adds later, he wonders why on earth he's there.

But here's the thing: he can't imagine living without that uncertainty. "You've got to have a reason to carry on, other than just blindly carrying on because that's what you do," he says. "Trying to keep it genuine, not making music just for the sake of it, that's a difficult thing for anybody."

He shrugs and looks vaguely into a corner of the room. "No complaints, you know. Could be worse. But obviously you've still got to be proud of what you're doing, and that involves a degree of dismantling every time you work. You have to dismantle where you're at and how you view your expectations."

It is the same sort of process, he says, as the ruthless but essential critical examination they make of what they do while they're doing it. "You're not feeling that kick but you're fooling yourself it's there: it's easy to fall into the trap of fooling yourself it's good when it ain't. That's the big fight when you're making a record."

Radiohead is always zesty on stage but the same songs on record can sound strangely morbid. "It's different live, obviously: that's a one-off and you've got the energy of this tune and then the next one and you've got an audience. The sort of disconnection when you're in the studio is a difficult thing to tackle."

Some critics have suggested that the prevalence of straight guitar, singable songs and beauteous string washes on In Rainbows makes it a friendlier record after a decade of challenging listeners and themselves.

"If it's more user-friendly, well, one would never know why that was, exactly," Yorke says. "But I think we did want to do something that was really coherent. I think that's true."

They were also entirely concentrated on a small number of songs they had been playing live, in a couple of cases for years, he says. "There were so many discussions on this record about energy. It had to have a lot of energy and not - ah - sound old." He bursts into a slightly maniacal laugh.

They have no idea how the next record - if, of course, there is a next record - will work. What In Rainbows has brought home to them, Yorke says, is that they can post tracks on the web as soon as they finish them.

"If we're hanging round the studio before Christmas and finish something we like, we can put it straight up. That's nuts! No trying to schedule-it-in or promote-it-now."

They are only promoting-it-now at all because they wanted the album to be available to everybody. In future, Yorke muses, they could post songs on the web as they finish them. Anything could happen; they are their own masters of the digital universe.

"Now we have our own little tiny infrastructure," says Yorke. "It may be little and tiny, but we can do all this shit!"

In Rainbows is released on December 29.--smh.com.au

2007 October 10 | gothamist.com

2008-01-24T19:46:00.000-08:00

A Conversation with Jonny Greenwood

Jonny Greenwood was named the BBC’s composer-in-residence in 2004; during this time he debuted "Popcorn Superhet Receiver", a twenty-minute work for string orchestra inspired, in part, by the phenomenon of white noise and Penderecki’s "Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima". Tickets are on sale for a two-night performance of the composition at The Church of St. John the Apostle in January as part of The Wordless Music Series; works by John Adams and Gavin Bryars will also be performed.

We spoke with Greenwood this morning, which happened to be the same day his side-project – a little band called Radiohead – unveiled their seventh album, In Rainbows, via digital download. It’s being sold online only at the moment and – did you hear – buyers are welcome to pay whatever they want! Hm, good luck with that chaps. Might want to tell your business manager to ease up on the amazing mushrooms he’s been munching.

Parts of "Popcorn Superhet Receiver" sound cinematic to me; I know you've done the soundtrack for the new PT Anderson film There Will Be Blood. Did you have any visual images in mind when composing "Popcorn Superhet Receiver"? No, the opposite really. It’s more about radios and radiowaves and hearing music that isn’t there.

Hearing music that isn’t there? Yeah, like the noise from a radio in the background. Or when you hear a popular song that you think you know over the back of a car engine or spilling out of someone’s walkman. So it’s weird that you say that; there was nothing visual to it. That’s interesting.

Where did the title come from? I had a whole page full of radio-related words and a superhet is a kind of radio that seemed to fit with what I was writing.

What kind of radio is a superhet? It’s a short wave receiver. I don’t know how it works or why, I just had it scrawled in my notepad, along with other words like VHS and that kind of thing, you know. Superhet seemed the most suitable.

How have you revised the composition since it premiered in 2005? It was revised for the last performance; I just cut out some of the more obtuse parts of it. Partly because I find it hard to write music that isn’t just in three minutes sections. So now I’ve arranged it so hopefully over the whole twelve minutes it’s got some shape to it.

So now it’s twelve minutes as opposed to twenty minutes? Yeah, it’s just a bit shorter. I forget how long it used to be; it was about fifteen minutes I think. Like I said I tried to arrange it so that it’s set as one thing flowing into another instead of different sections stuck together, which is how it began really. The new arrangement is just a way to try and do something on a larger scale that goes on for longer but still has a structure that holds your interest and hopefully takes you somewhere.

Is it exciting or nerve-wracking for you to sit in the audience and hear your music performed as opposed to being on-stage? Yeah, you feel very self-conscious even though nobody’s watching you. It’s sort of a personal thing and it’s quite odd to involve all these people. It’s quite embarrassing for me. I don’t know. But it’s such a magical moment when orchestras start up; when you’ve got silence in the room, with instruments making a sound together. It’s magical for me. So I just get excited about that really and try to ignore everything else.

There is a lot of tension and drama in this piece yet you seem, in public at least, to be rather serene. Is making music therapeutic for you? I don’t know, maybe that’s true. Maybe people writing lighter music are very angry, violent people. I don’t know, that’s interesting. Maybe Burt Bacharach writes stuff and then fights. I don’t know. For me it just feels like the orchestra is making sounds I really want to hear. That’s all I’m thinking about really. It’s such an amazing thing; I’m still a bit in awe of what orchestras can do and how much of an event it is. And then when they’re playing in a room… You can forget and think that CDs are enough and you sort of don’t need to see an orchestra play. But then once you’re actually at the performance you realize it’s so much more magical than a recording.

I agree; the vibrations that come out of an orchestra are very palpable. Right, you think recordings are so good now but they don’t touch you in the same way as all those wooden boxes with the strings strung across them being played by musicians. It’s just incredible, really.

So today’s a big day? Yeah, big day today. It’s the launch. Like a ship.

Seems to be going flawlessly. At least for me, it downloaded very quickly. Yeah, I know, we’re all quietly surprised because it’s mostly done all on our own back with a small group of people.

I’ve been able to listen to the album twice this morning. All I can say at this point is WOW. Oh great! A good wow, I hope. We’re just really, really relieved that it’s out, and people are hearing what we’ve been listening to for so long.

What’s motivating the band to distribute the album this way? Just getting it out quickly. It was kind of an experiment as well; we were just doing it for ourselves and that was all. People are making a big thing about it being against the industry or trying to change things for people but it’s really not what motivated us to do it. It’s more about feeling like it was right for us and feeling bored of what we were doing before.

Why give people the option to pay whatever they want? It’s just interesting to make people pause for even a few seconds and think about what music is worth now. I thought it was an interesting thing to ask people to do and compare it to whatever else in their lives they value or don’t value.

Have you gotten any figures of how much people are choosing to pay? No we get the numbers tomorrow supposedly. Yeah, I don’t know. The more exciting thing for me is just hearing it on the radio today and knowing it’s landed on everybody’s desk at the same time. That’s what’s exciting. But yeah, I’m sure our manager will have some idea soon.

How did the process of making In Rainbows differ from Hail to the Thief? It was more like earlier Kid A stuff, more based in studio experiments and trying out ideas and spending quite a long time. That’s what we did with Kid A and Amnesiac.

What song on the album proved most difficult to finish? Even ones that we finished quickly we spent a long time deciding if they were good enough. None of them were easy, actually. "Reckoner" kind of came together quickly.

Back to the impending PT Anderson soundtrack, it features another composition called "Smear". Did you compose that at the same time as "Popcorn Superhet Receiver"? No, that was a couple years ago, that was the first thing I wrote for orchestra. I wrote it for the London Sinfonietta and ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument. It’s like a nine-minute piece. I’m really fond of it because I’m really fond of the instruments themselves.

You won the Listeners’ Award at the 2006 BBC British Composer Awards for "Popcorn Superhet Receiver" and part of that was a commission to write a new piece. Have you started working on that? No, it makes me sweat every time I think about it. I must start that soon. Yeah, it’s a little bit daunting. I don’t know. I’m not one to sit at an empty table waiting for inspiration or something. I had an idea for "Popcorn Superhet Receiver" about radio frequencies and I wanted to try an orchestra and I was wondering what you could do with strings. So I kind of jumped at the chance to do it. I don’t know if it’s what I want to do [with the next one]. So yes, thanks for reminding me, I must start something soon on that.

Did your experience as composer in residence serve as extra motivation to compose "Popcorn Superhet Receiver" or was work already underway on that? No, that was finished completely. I love the orchestra and their patience and they’re up for trying new things. They’re kind of waiting for the next piece so, yeah, there’s a few things I’ve got to get started.

Are you going to be in New York for the performances in January? I’d love to but I can’t really justify the flight just to come to that. I’d feel a bit weird about it. If I was in America already for touring or something I’d love to go but I can’t really justify it. It’s a shame.

Have you been trying to reduce your use of air travel because of carbon emissions? Yeah, that’s basically why. It’s difficult because we want to travel and tour and do musical things and we’re just looking at ways of doing it without going to the other extreme. It’d be crazy to not tour for that reason but it’d also be crazy to tour in too greedy a way. So we’re just working on the balance for it. And I can’t really justify going to New York just for my own sort of thing.

Are you working out plans to tour in America at this point? We’re talking about touring somewhere in the world next year. Now that the album’s out that’s what we’re talking about. I hope you’ll get to see some good shows.

Have you considered doing some sort of carbon-offset thing with touring? We’ve heard bad things about that. I’m not sure that that’s enough; to buy off our guilt with money. That might not be the best way to do it. We’re kind of looking at a few other ideas. It’s interesting; we’ve had a report done on touring and how much pollution gets created and what would be the most efficient way to do it: playing small venues or big venues, playing venues inside a city or outside a city, playing a big venue and having lots of people drive a long way to get to see you or whether it’s better for us to travel to different places. There are a lot of things to balance out. Whether it’s better to play a festival. So we’ve got to factor that in as well.

Is it better to play a festival? Depends which festival, depends on where it is. It gets kind of complicated. You have to compromise something or don’t play at all. I’m sure we’ll end up doing something wrong, that’s just how it is. It’s not going to be perfect by any means. And it’s still got to be a good show and be in a venue people can enjoy and get to; that’s probably half of it. It’s not just about us feeling smug that we’ve done exactly the right in how we’ve planned the tour.

Yeah, it sounds very complex! Yeah, really complex. Interesting but very complex.

Tickets are on sale for a two-night performance of the composition at The Church of St. John the Apostle in January as part of The Wordless Music Series. Photo of Jonny Greenwood by Jason Evans.

--gothamist.com

2008-01-24T11:01:00.000-08:00

Awarding a New Masterpiece
RADIOHEAD’S In Rainbows was comfortably the most talked about album of the year.

Not only did the band decide that we, the public, should decide what to pay for it but they matched the hype with dazzling music.

SFTW felt compelled to give it our coveted Album Of The Year title despite stiff opposition from Mercury Prize winners Klaxons.

Here band tell JACQUI SWIFT how pleased they are to be our No1, how their original pricing policy came about and give insights into their latest songs.

1. RADIOHEAD - In Rainbows
“IT’S great to be your album of the year. It’s really exciting. Everyone’s really chuffed.

“It’s the fact that people are into it and care as much as we do when we’re making the songs. That’s what’s so cool.”

These are the words of Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood as he celebrates SFTW’s No1 album of 2007 spot.

The release of In Rainbows defined the year like no other album, a historical music milestone which caused seismic shockwaves and caught the industry off guard.

The surprise came in the speed in which it was delivered, the fact it could be downloaded at ANY price you wished to pay — and just how brilliant it was.

This was the Oxford band’s best album since 1997’s OK Computer.

It was a bold move on October 1 when guitarist Jonny Greenwood announced on the band’s website that the new album was finished and coming out in just ten days.

A special In Rainbows website allowed the public to download this seventh album at any price — £100, £20, £10, £1 or nothing at all, the choice was ours.

The move gained as many column inches in the business and news sections as in the music ones, but their actions divided the industry.

Millionaires such as Radiohead can afford to give their music away but some new bands saw the move as insulting. For the music industry, it questioned whether bands needed record labels at all.

Sitting in a café at the newly opened St Pancras station (he later leaves for Brussels for more promotion with brother Jonny), Colin nods: “I understand both sides of the argument but the thing for us is we own our record now.

“We put it out there so people had the option to pay nothing if they wanted to. But we own it and we had the right to do that.

“A young band might get excited about their first record deal but they will only get 12 per cent of every record they sell. And the record company will own the record, not only for the band’s life but for the lives of the people in the band.

“If a band is really good they’ll do really well whatever. Giving away music may make it harder for new bands but talent always attracts attention. Genius draws a crowd.

“There has never been a more exciting time to be a band. There’s a passion and thirst for new music.”

The idea of “giving away” their album came from long-term manager Chris Hufford.

Colin says: “Chris said that, if we put it out as a CD with the record company, the earliest it would come out would be February 2008. We all just wanted to get it out because we’d been working on it for so long.

“As Thom recently said, it was only through the energy — the elation for want of a better word — of actually finishing it and being proud of it, that this whole thing of ‘Yeah, let’s get it out, let’s do the download’ made sense.

“Everyone knew it was finished, that it was good to go and we just wanted to share it.

“Usually you’d go through all that nonsense, all that bollocks of marketing and whatever. It’s like some kind of weird extended foreplay. It’s wrong. It’s just deeply wrong.

“But even though Chris had suggested not putting it out as a CD at all, we know there are fans who still love CDs.”

So next week the deluxe box set edition of Radiohead’s seventh album is released on XL Recordings, which includes eight additional new tracks plus a lyrics booklet, digital photos and artwork.

Survive

The decision to leave EMI after 15 years had been a hard one to make, admits Colin.

“It wasn’t the people, it was for other reasons — business sh*t. I could never survive without needing people and the people we work with are brilliant.

“Everything in the industry was changing. Now it’s about giving people what they want.

“Everyone still cares about music and is passionate about it. But what people don’t want is walls put up saying, ‘No you can’t have it like this, you can’t have it at that quality. You can’t copy or burn it’. It’s like trying to stop running water.”

With four years passing since 2003’s Hail To The Thief, it was the longest time between Radiohead albums.

With Thom Yorke making his solo album The Eraser and Jonny hired by the BBC as composer in residence, there were side projects to distract them, plus new babies born (“We had six kids between us — the record is dedicated to all the children.”) But, says Colin, the main reason for the wait was that In Rainbows was intensely difficult to make.

He explains: “We didn’t have any confidence in what we were doing. We had been on tour in America and England, and had been performing a number of new songs live. Then when we went to record them in this crumbling old country house in Wiltshire, it was beautiful but the tracks sounded all wrong.

“And you always worry that you’re going to make something of no relevance. No relevance to us as people, as a band, and to anyone who listens to it.

“I think because the songs are so emotional it couldn’t cut from live to record. It was like the Charge Of The Light Brigade turning up and galloping across all the music, in all their outfits.

“Because we love all the songs we played over them all, which was fine when they’re played live because then the colours can be more black and white.

“But for our record, we had to retreat and withdraw a bit and think about other things like groove and colour.

“We recorded some tracks loads of times but they didn’t sound right and you can kill something by loving it too much. You can smother stuff. You can get obsessed. And we’ve done that a lot in the past.

“The turning point was when we were in our little studio in Oxford and (producer/engineer) Nigel Godrich returned. I think actually it was because we had a break from it all. It was like someone had given us Zen Buddhism pills. We went into our live room to re-record songs. We did them in two hours.”

Radiohead had worked with Godrich on every one of their albums apart from their first.

But the partnership was only reunited following aborted sessions with Mark “Spike” Stent, whose work has included Madonna, Keane and Oasis.

Loose

Colin says: “We did about three versions with him but it wasn’t happening. That’s no disrespect to him because he’s a lovely, lovely man and hugely talented.

“We had to be honest. With Nigel, there’s this mutual dependency. Ever since he was cut loose to make OK Computer we’ve had this emotional relationship.

“A year and a half ago he came to the studio but we weren’t ready and we weren’t right. He was ready but we weren’t.

“He’s like an Anglepoise lamp which shone at us and made us look at ourselves in the mirror and realise where we were at. We are a gang, a posse.”

In Rainbows carries some of Radiohead’s most beautiful tracks. Soulful and melodic, it’s a u-turn from the harsher electronic sound of earlier albums Kid A and Amnesiac.

The eerily delicate "House Of Cards" and the stunning "Reckoner" are among the highlights.

Colin says: “I also love "Reckoner", because it’s like happy/sad music. It reminds me of "Lucky" on OK Computer or "Yellow" by Coldplay.

“You listen to it because you want to but it still tugs at you.

“When Tom’s singing the main melody, it repeats again and again. We recorded our own breaks and we are all playing little percussion instruments and recorded it on this one piece of tape.

“But my favourite is "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi", which is amazingly beautiful. The song gives you hope and then it goes down again.

“It’s up and down, with self-belief and self-doubt and emotional rushes and surges.”

Old track "Nude" made it on to In Rainbows, even though it had been played live as far back as 1998.

Colin says: “Thom felt it was right now, as he is in a place in his life where the words make sense to him.

“When we wrote it in the early Nineties, it didn’t feel right to him. Thom would say this album was also right for it because I finally came up with a bassline. It’s a soul thing.

“It was like a picture that wasn’t right for years and now it works for him.

“And in the context of the record it’s kind of about love so it works in that setting.”

So how did Radiohead decide which tracks featured on the original download album and as the extra tracks on the box set?

“It wasn’t a case that they weren’t good enough. They just didn’t fit. I like the fast ones on the record and I love the slow ones on the other one.

“The song "4 Minute Warning", I love. It starts with this white noise. Thom was writing it around that period of the July 7 terrorist attacks and that air of panic and fear. It’s really downbeat and downtempo and deals with really heavy stuff.

“Then the song, "Last Flowers" is about dealing with crap on a daily basis. How you deal with a bad day.

Thom said that In Rainbows “was much more about the f**king panic of realising you’re going to die! And that any time soon I could possibly have a heart attack when I next go for a run. You know what I’m saying?”

Do Colin and the rest ever quiz Thom about his lyrics?

“No. Thom doesn’t have to explain his lyrics to us as they are really clear.

“These songs are so beautiful and so personal, about who you could be with and the choices you’ve made in your life.

“They’re love songs or songs with the promise of love. They’re emotional songs that relate to people’s lives directly. Everyone falls in and out of love.

“Thom is such an emotionally honest person. He’s either on or he’s not,

“There’s no pretending to put the light on, which is why he’s such an amazing performer. He doesn’t take a back seat and fake the emotions.”

And so in 2007 Radiohead found gold at the end of their rainbow with an album that not only turned the music world on its head, but boasted some of the most gorgeous songs they’d made.

And the good news is there won’t be as long a wait for their next album.

“We’re never going to do it like this again or take as long,” Colin says.

“From now on we know what we’re doing and we have Nigel back. Things look good again.”

In Rainbows — there really wasn’t another album that came close all year.[/QUOTE]--http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/sftw/article625150.ece

2008 January 3 | The Independent

2008-01-24T10:42:00.000-08:00

Thom Yorke: Why he's glad to have made such a big noise

Radiohead have always preferred to stand outside the mainstream. But when they announced that they would allow fans to decide the price of their new album, the implications for the music industry were profound. The band's singer, Thom Yorke, tells Christoph Dallach and Wolfgang Höbel why he's glad to have made such a big noise

Published: 03 January 2008

Thom Yorke: Why he's glad to have made such a big noise Radiohead's Thom Yorke says the band never thought they would create such a fuss

Q: Music critics have described you as either the saviour or gravedigger of the rock'n'roll industry after you released an album on the internet without the help of a record company. Which description do you think is the right one?

Thom Yorke: I've heard it said that we are saving rock music so often over the past few weeks that I'm going to have it printed on toilet paper soon. We would have never thought that the whole thing would create such a fuss. In Britain, it's all over the prime time news on the BBC, 60-year-old stock exchange tycoons are congratulating us on our fabulous business idea, and cynics imply we plotted an ingenious advertising coup. But that's all rubbish.

Q: It's a fact that hundreds of thousands of fans downloaded the latest Radiohead outing In Rainbows from the band's webpage and could decide themselves if and how much they wanted to pay for it. We also did that, but didn't pay a cent for it. Does that bug you?

Yorke: Why should it? Our idea was that everybody paid as much for the music as they felt it was worth to them. If you think our songs are no good after listening to them, that's a pity indeed. But if you enjoyed listening to the songs, it would be fair to pay something for them afterwards.

Q: Is it the beginning of the end of the much-maligned music industry, when a band like Radiohead, selling albums by the million, decides to sell their music without a record company?

Yorke: It is an inevitable step, somebody had to take it. Everybody knew it would happen. We have some famous colleagues who have had similar ideas for quite a while. But these colleagues are contractually bound. We were lucky that our contract with EMI had expired.

Q: Nevertheless, there is fierce speculation that you might be earning a lot less with your new work than with the help of a large company. Was your experiment worth it, financially?

Yorke: We don't discuss figures. But we are not complaining. Anyway, we have the copyright for our songs. All that we published before belongs to EMI. That is unbelievably unsatisfying. After all, we are talking about art and hard work. I believe in the rock album as an artistic form of expression.

In Rainbows is a conscious return to this form of 45-minute statement. Of course, it was possible to make it shorter. But our aim was to describe in 45 minutes, as coherently and conclusively as possible, what moves us. In Rainbows is, at least in our opinion, our classic album – our Transformer, our Revolver, our Hunky Dory.

Q: Lou Reed, The Beatles and David Bowie were at the height of their creative powers when they recorded those albums. What ambition drives a highly successful band like Radiohead, that's existed for 16 years, to work?

Yorke: In previous years, there were times when we didn't know the answer to that question. We started families, brought up our children and everybody was just living their own lives. But then one day it just got us again. You're stuck in traffic on a Friday, the kids are wailing in the back, the supermarket shopping is boiling in the boot, it's summer, the weekend of the Glastonbury Festival. A radio station airs a listeners' poll, asking which band the people associate with their best Glastonbury memories, and 76 per cent are voting for Radiohead. Suddenly things shoot through your mind: what am I doing here? Wouldn't I prefer to be on stage there? Even my family would be happier if I didn't hang out at home, all grumpy, any more. Yes, that's how it was.

Q: Do you regret that there's nothing left of the alleged, or actual, wild and revolutionary spirit that rock music represented in the 1960s and 1970s?

Yorke: No. Music is always a reflection of its time. We are living in a world of consumerism. That's why, first and foremost, the purpose of music is to accommodate demand. For many people, the decision about a particular type of music is a lifestyle commitment, they are kind of associating their existence with the music they are listening to, without being touched by it too deeply.

In addition, there will always be people who interact passionately with music, people for whom there are songs that indeed change lives; songs that open their eyes about the state of the world.

Q: Do you condemn pop fans who acquire your music merely as a consumer product?

Yorke: No, I pity them. For them there is no real satisfaction, they have to gather more and more and more songs, as if the endless accumulation could ensure them immortality.

Q: Have you ever downloaded a song from the net yourself, for free?

Yorke: No, I always pay. Well, I got our own album from our webpage free of charge. I wanted to play my mum the new songs and downloaded them on to her computer. A journalist found out. And he announced immediately that I wouldn't pay for music from the internet. But why should I pay for my own possessions, and in practice, just shovel my money from one pocket to the other? That's ridiculous.

Q: What was the highest price that a buyer paid online to download In Rainbows?

Yorke: £99.99. That's the limit we had set beforehand.

Q: And how many buyers were willing to pay that much?

Yorke: Until now, 15. And I swear the band members are not among that 15.

Q: Why do you offer a sumptuous CD and LP box-set for £40 as well as the download? Is this because the compressed music from the internet sounds so poor, causing many fans to complain?

Yorke: MP3 files from the net never sound optimal. We had always planned to release a regular CD and get it into the record stores a bit later. We thought about trying to produce and distribute that CD ourselves – but it seemed too difficult in the end. So we looked for a small record company as a partner.

Q: Is there anything that you'd find sad, should the demise of the music industry come to pass?

Yorke: Of course. For example, these companies are now closing all the beautiful old recording studios. A whole craft gets lost, a valuable tradition. All the acoustic basses and old mics and great instruments get flogged.

We try to buy as much as possible of those to use them for our own work, but it's not the same as if really working in one of the old studios.

Q: It sounds as if you're nostalgic. How much do you use the modern medium of the internet. Do you know your way around Second Life and MySpace?

Yorke: Oh yeah, Second Life, isn't it this world in which you buy land and property and sunglasses for yourself and a second ego, where you go into a virtual bar and say hello? I don't want that. For me it just lays bare the isolation of many internet users, who've got too much time on their hands. Sad. I prefer expressing myself in the real world.

Q: Do you read what's been written about you in internet blogs?

Yorke: No. And we never read what critics write about us. Never. Anyone who does that suddenly hears a lot of strange voices in his head. And there are plenty of those buzzing around in my head already.

Radiohead play Malahide Castle, Dublin, on 6 and 7 June. In Rainbows is available on CD and vinyl now. The single 'Jigsaw Falling Into Place' will be released on 11 January. This interview first appeared in Der Spiegel.

The new world order

It's eight years since Napster was dragged to court to face the music for illegal file-sharing. In 2000, the record and music retail industries feared the worst – that the digital age would spell the end of the recording artist as they knew it. In a way, they were right. The revolution that has been unleashed, courtesy of MySpace, iTunes and Napster imitators like Kazaa, LimeWire and BitTorrent, has seen the record companies cast as unfortunate tsarists. Forced first to watch their profits plummet, the moguls must now stand by as they are cut out of the equation altogether. But very few fans or, indeed, artists will shed a tear for them, not least because the new medium has given those very fans and their heroes a more intimate relationship than ever.

Radiohead, now freed from the shackles of their EMI contract, were early-adopters, one of the first major acts to realise the potential of the internet and harness it for their own ends. Their website has always been impeccably maintained. No surprise then, that they were also the first premier league band to take the logical next step and release an album by download only, using the "suggested donation" method – asking fans to pay only what they wanted to pay. Far from bankrupting them, the band claims it has been a more lucrative endeavour than anyone predicted.

While no official figures have been forthcoming, sources at the time suggested the band sold well over one million In Rainbows downloads before the end of the album's first week online. Estimates as to the average price paid have been pitched anywhere between £2.50 and £5; even a conservative estimate of the profits sounds impressive. The balance sheet will encourage other bands to follow in Radiohead's footsteps.

The Charlatans, for instance, have already announced plans to release their upcoming LP free online via their own website and that of the radio station XFM. Ash claim last year's Twilight of the Innocents will be their last album, and that from now on they will release only singles, in a mixture of online and physical formats. Meanwhile In Rainbows was finally released as a CD on Monday (by the independent XL label) – and who would bet against it making the top five by this weekend?

By Tim Walker[/QUOTE]--http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/features/thom-yorke-why-hes-glad-to-have-made-such-a-big-noise-767870.html

2008 February | Mojo

2008-01-24T10:04:00.000-08:00

CHASING RAIN_BOWS

Four years in the making, In Rainbows is both tortured and triumphant... Here, for the first time, is the unexpurgated inside story of the album that nearly destroyed RADIOHEAD and gave the music industry a heart attack...

Words: MARK_PAYTRESS
Pics: KEVIN_WESTENBERG

THEY WENT DEAF DURING THE SESSIONS. Imagined themselves as the Monty Python team with guitars. Battled rat poison and, more deadly still, their own desperately doubting ways. They thought it was all over (it wasn't). Four studios, two producers, endless tweaks and retakes followed. But now, four years on from 2003's Hail To The Thief, Radiohead are back with a record that even they themselves grudgingly admit has left them feeling "really excited and really proud". That record is, of course, In Rainbows, MOJO's album of 2007.

As well as shaking up the industry itself with its pay-what-you-want model, it's an album that artfully distils the band's very essence while at the same time avoiding the customary curses of cliche or complacency. And then, of course, there's new eight new tracks on the bonus CD Discbox edition available exclusively via the band's own website which paints an even more panoptic picture. A picture that will fully reveal itself during a week-long round of interviews with all five members of Radiohead as they unravel the titanic tale of their creative rebirth.

"I GUESS WE HAD HIGH EXPECTATIONS THIS TIME round," shrugs Thom Yorke, in the quiet of a book-lined private room in The Old Parsonage Hotel ("The Old Parsnip," jests Jonny Greenwood), an establishment with the ambience of a country house on the outskirts of Oxford city centre. In the relative tranquility of the city Yorke still calls home, he exudes a warm glow, one that's accentuated by the generous stubble of an incipient beard. He's so relaxed, in fact, that he takes MOJO for a short tour of the city centre at the end of our interview. "Now that's where several students were executed by the locals," he says with a glint in his eye, while pointing at a blink-and-you'll-miss-it bricked-out patch of Broad Street. Actually, the youthful-looking Yorke blends in perfectly here; all that's missing is the college scarf.

Back at the Old Parsnip earlier, Yorke unleashes the first of several loud laughs that belie public perceptions of him as an arch, lemon-sucking miserablist. We're talking about the difficult days of Hail To The Thief. "Yeah, we knew that was a lower part of the curve," he says after a characteristic pause for thought, "and, yes, we knew we'd carry on. But it felt very much that the branch had become a twig - and that we could fall off the tree at any point!"

Yorke can laugh now, but on reflection the Hail To The Thief experience almost brought Radiohead to their knees. Indeed, no one could have foreseen the car crash ahead when, in July 2002, the band road-tested the material for two months before decamping to Los Angeles in September where they laid the basis of the album down in one two-week session. "It was very much a reaction to the protracted recording of Kid A," says drummer Phil Selway, referring to the three years it took the band to follow-up 1997's standard-bearer, OK Computer. "It was also a response to the excitement we'd rediscovered by playing the Kid A material live. We wanted to capture that on record."

To some extent, it worked. Guitarist Ed O'Brien talked up the album's "swagger" on its release, Yorke recalled how he wept when he first heard the playback to There There, and the band proved that they could do it without squirrelling themselves away for years and hiring a stately home for inspiration - as they'd done for both OK Computer and Kid A. But despite its intermittent brilliance (and There There does sound like a spellbinding peak of sorts) and initial commercial success, Hail To The Thief was a short-term compromise solution that quickly proved to be no solution at all.

"We should have pruned it down to 10 songs, then it would have been a really good record," says O'Brien. "Working on In Rainbows, I was aware that we were making something that was really engaging, that moved people again. and I don't think Hail To The Thief consistently did that. I think we lost people on a couple of tracks and it broke the spell of the record."

Colin Greenwood knew as much from the start. "I didn't want three or four songs on there, because I thought some of the ideas we were trying out weren't completely finished." Such as? "The Gloaming". We played it live and it was cool. My brother [Jonny] sampled each of the instruments on stage, cut them up then sent them back into the mix. It was so exciting, like a live DJ show, and Thom performed off of all of that. But it wasn't the same in the studio. For me, Hail To The Thief was more of a holding process, really."

SITTING IN THE QUIET OF "PROBABLY OXFORD'S first and last London-style private members' club" above the QI bookshop, guitarist Jonny Greenwood, the most restless Radiohead member - "he has the patience of an insect!" says Yorke - also concedes that Hail To The Thief was a few songs too long. "We were trying to do what people said we were good at," he admits. "But it was good for our heads. It was good for us to be doing a record that came out of playing live."

If the suspicion that the record wasn't quite up to their usual standard didn't break them, then a year on the road touring Hail To The Thief very nearly did. After a short tour of Japan and Australia in April 2004, the band retreated back to their various young families. "It was definitely time to take a break," says Phil Selway. "There was still a desire amongst us to make music, but also a realisation that other aspects of our lives were being neglected. And we'd come to the end of our contract [with EMI], which gives you a natural point to look back over at what you've achieved as a band."

Any suggestion that this 'natural' break was a cover for a more ruinous rift within the group is rebuffed by O'Brien. The most relaxed band member in person, he is also the one least bound by what might be termed Radiohead-speak. "No, I didn't think the band would collapse. I wasn't scared. You know, if it all collapses, it's only a fucking band." But a livelihood, too. "Yeah, it's a living, it's a very nice living. But we've all got nice houses. We're not gonna starve. There are always other things we can do. But I wasn't ever worried about it. The good thing that came out of it was confronting things.

Confrontation they can do, but they don't really do compliments. Mention Nick Kent's claim in this magazine in 2001 that they were "the most important band in the world", and they'll pretend they haven't heard what you've said. It is proof, if more is required, that the group consider themselves the best judges of their work... and, perhaps, of a little moth-eaten modesty. Wanna see Thom Yorke in fits? Float a rhetorical 'top of your game' across the table and watch his reaction. "Wait till you see the file of photos that comes with the record box," he splutters. "Then ask yourself whether we look like we're at the top of our game." MOJO reminds him of a picture posted up on the group's Dead Air Space yellow blog that accompanied the October 1, 2007 announcement that the release of In Rainbows was imminent. In it, Thom, Ed and Colin [!] hold mugs of tea and look almost insanely happy. "OK, that was a good moment," Yorke concedes. "They do happen."

Good, often astonishing moments have dogged Radiohead during their 15-year recording career. The 1992 single, "Creep", the stand-out on what was otherwise a fairly humdrum indie-rock debut, Pablo Honey, became such an alternative nation anthem that the band dropped it from their set. 1995's The Bends marked a great leap forward, thanks to stronger material, more sophisticated arrangements and growing studio savvy. Next, OK Computer confirmed Radiohead's standing, prompting - with some justification - all those "Pink Floyd for the '90s" comparisons. Excepting Thom Yorke's misguided early recourse to blond hair extensions, they were, after all, largely anonymous figures that appeared to shun the usual temptations of the rock'n'roll lifestyle in favour of a more considered, almost morbidly serious approach to their music. Oh, and let's not forget Radiohead's Oxford to the Floyd's Cambridge.

Although the genre has since been largely rehabilitated, the 'prog' accusation became a stick with which to beat the band, especially among the Britpop pack whose geezerish anthems grafted the sound of The Beatles' Revolver onto the simple gratifications demanded by Loaded Man. Just as they'd raised their game after being accused of being "a pitifully lily-livered excuse for a rock'n'roll group" in their early days, Radiohead again reacted wildly, deflecting the "Is this the best record ever?" hype around OK Computer by a hard-left turn in search of a new direction. It took the best part of three years and resulted in two laptop rock albums, the stunningly taut Kid A (2000) and its troubled twin, Amnesiac (2001).

The spur for this defiant dive into electronica was Thom. It was mooted at the time that not everyone in the band was as fanatical as he was about the fractured beats and alienated textures that he had discovered after buying up the Warp Records catalogue. While Ed O'Brien looked in vain for melodies, Phil Selway wondered whether the laptop beats would put him out of a job. Hence, Hail To The Thief--a let's-work-together bonding exercise, the effect of which, as we have seen, threatened the band's unity more than at any other time in their 20-year tenure. Cue Thom's solo album.

"YOU CAN'T GO ANYWHERE WITH THOM WITHout him having a laptop and headphones on," says Jonny Greenwood. "It's been like that for years, and he's still doing it. We drove to London yesterday and he had his laptop out and his headphones on for the whole journey. That's what he's like. Always filling notebooks, too..."

While Radiohead are definitely A Band in the sense that all five musicians contribute greatly to the overall sound and character, it is Yorke who is very much first among equals. From the beginning, it's mostly been his demos that form the basis for each Radiohead record, not least because he's the proverbial creative - totally unable to switch off. He claims he's been "training" to change all that. "But you'll have to talk to my missus - sorry, it's Rachel, she hates being called that - to see if that's worked," he smiles. "Yes, it's true: I constantly have bits of paper in my pockets, backs of envelopes, notebooks. But, you know, 95 per cent of it doesn't get used."

Released in July 2006, Yorke's solo record, The Eraser, provided an outlet for some of his excess creativity. Despite Thom's twig analogy, there was, Radiohead insist, never a suggestion that he was abandoning the band. Now portrayed as an itch that needed scratching, The Eraser is a slow-burn melance of dislocated dance textures, piano-led moodsong topped with melodies that grow deliciously with every listen. "Great record, amazing singing," enthuses Jonny Greenwood. "He had to get this stuff out, and everyone was happy that it was made. He'd go mad if every time he wrote a song it had to go through the Radiohead consensus. The combination of him, [producer] Nigel Godrich and a few months seemed to get it all unblocked."

Yorke himself clearly appreciated the experience. "Actually, I did learn something from it," he says. "It made me realise that all the stuff I do on laptops gets me excited because I can hear what I'm gonna do vocally. But unless I have a vocal in place, it's a bit unfair to expect anybody else to understand what the fuck's going on." For example? "I was playing bits of "Black Swan", six minutes of, er, mostly drivel, and Nigel's like, 'Bloody hell! I'm not interested in any of this.' I said, I've been working on this for ages. It's great. 'No it's not,' he says. But as soon as I put the vocal on, he was like, 'OK, now it makes sense.' It reminded me just how important the voice is."

And that realisation, as much as anything else, was to serve the group well during two long, cold winters and one long touring summer, in which time In Rainbows was painstakingly put together.

According to Jonny Greenwood, his own solo activities - two soundtracks, Bodysong (2003) and There Will Be Blood (2007), as well as being BBC composer in residence since 2004 - haven't had anything like the impact on the band that Yorke's renewed vocal awareness has. "Er, I don't think I've done one [a solo album]," he shrugs. "I did music for a film but that's different to cobbling together 50 minutes of music with your name on it and expecting people to listen to it. That doesn't interest me at all. If I've brought anything new along, then I suppose I'm slightly less scared of asking violin players to do stuff than I was..." And a scary dub habit. "I spent six solid months listening to dub all day every day," he says. "My wife still hasn't forgiven me."

The rest were publicly quieter but hardly immune from new influences. Ed O'Brien feasted on Rip It Up And Start Again, Simon Reynolds' extensive survey of post-punk, and found it remarkably liberating. "That cemented a lot of the insecurities and boredom I was feeling about music. I realised, Hang on a sec, this is where I come from, and that's the stuff that still moves me. It's got melodies, it's got pop, it's trying to do things a bit differently - and you don't have to work so hard at it..."

Colin Greenwood, meanwhile, continued to feed his eclectic musical interests, turning on to DJ Surgeon, encouraging fans to go out and catch Scouse screwballs Clinic, and learning a bunch of Macca and Motown ace James Jamerson basslines. Phil Selway joined Jonny Greenwood in the fictional band The Weird Sisters in Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire film. So far, so fragmented.

MID-FEBRUARY 2005: TWO YEARS AFTER FINISHing Hail To The Thief there, Radiohead regroup at their Oxfordshire recording studio. Initially, the prospects appeared favourable in terms of the music they set about making. Speaking the following month, Jonny Greenwood enthused about the "good songs" and the renewed hunger within the band. He also said that early rehearsals had been "fun".

Ed O'Brien: "The moment Thom came in with the songs and the lyrics, it was the first time in a long while that I felt really engaged with the lyrics. I thought, These are great, these are moving me, these are lyrics written by somebody who is engaging with the stuff of life. That was exciting." While no one admits to anything so simple as a gameplan, O'Brien probably expresses the band's collective unconscious when he says, "I think ultimately we were looking for 10 or 11 songs, a really concise body of work, with no fat."

Eight months later, on October 21, Thom Yorke posted an online bulletin on Dead Air Space, a new blog page at radiohead.com. It was the first of many, often fraught online updates he'd write over the next two years, that give a good indication of the agonising that went into the making of what became In Rainbows. Within two months, Yorke was back again, after another difficult two-week session. This time, his mood had darkened significantly. "We're splitting up. It's all shit. We're washed up, finished," he write.

"There was this sense," admits O'Brien, "that we could finish this all tomorrow and so what. But it felt like it would be a shame to, particularly because when you got beyond all the shit and the bollcosk, the core of these songs were really good."

"It was difficult to get back," Yorke says, "and because things didn't move forwards for ages and ages, it grew more and more tense. Things didn't really ease until we started to feel we had something that had the emotional impact that we hoped the songs would have."

Colin Greenwood: "I suppose we were paying the price for not taking the pain on Hail To The Thief. As this project progressed, we realised there are no short cuts to the process being exciting for us."

The initial high of February 2005 soon dispersed. Months of rehearsals, followed by the band's own attempted to get some of the material down in a studio, gave way to debilitating--and characteristic--self-doubt. "There's been such a crisis of self-confidence in making this record," Colin Greenwood blurts out, his face etched with discomfort as he recalls the experience. "It's been... really... terrible, you know." This man is not joking. Like his brother Jonny, Greenwood thrives on the immediacy of a band playing together. His happiest memory of the entire process was "when we reheased at our old apple storage warehouse, a flattering room, which made everything sound big and rocky." It didn't last long. Much of the next two-and-a-half years were spent studio-bound.

In retrospect the problem appears both recurring and simple. Radiohead, a five-piece rock band, desire to make music that refuses to be bound by the limitations of their chosen genre. But movement away from the traditional into the unexpected often results in a frustrating process of distillation. "At the rehearsal room stage, things often sound very standard," agrees Phil Selway. "The trick is to stick with that, because it does ultimately get you to a much better place. You must also be prepared to jettison the lot, too."

So they did. In December 2005 Mark 'Spike' Stent was asked to work with the band in a bid to help them work through the material they'd recorded and stockpiled. "He listened to the stuff we'd been self-producing," says O'Brien. "These weren't demos, they'd been recorded in proper studios [in autumn 2005], and he said, 'The sounds aren't good enough.'"

Stent, known for mixing the likes of Bjork, U2 and Massive Attack, took over the production of sessions from February through to April 2006. Early versions of "Nude", "Bodysnatchers" and "Arpeggi" were among the songs worked up, but he didn't last long. "It never really took off," says O'Brien. "But he was good for us because he galvanised the whole process," adds Selway. "That had been missing up to that point." Thom Yorke was far from happy, though. "I've been fucking tearing my hair out," he wrote on the band's blog in March. "Furiously writing, working out parts, cracking up."

Despite their singer's malaise, this first preparatory phase in the making of In Rainbows came to a head during May and June 2006, when the band toured Europe and the States, returning to the stage in August for two weeks of festival appearances, forcing them to concentrate on the material in hand. "That took us to the next phase," says Selway, "because if you're playing new songs live, you're going to have to commit to some arrangements."

MAY 1, 2006. AS THOM YORKE AND JONNY GREENwood performed an acoustic warm-up show at the Big Ask Live fundraiser for Friends Of The Earth at Koko in Camden Town, produced Nigel Godrich watched from the audience. Having worked with the band since 1004 and co-produced every album since OK Computer, Godrich had been the fall guy in the band's initial attempt to break out of what Colin Greenwood calls "the safe zone". His return to the fold took a further three months. By September 2006, says Selway, "We had prepared ourselves sufficiently for that whole working process to come back together."

"Thing came together when Nigel started working with us again," nods Colin Greenwood, "because he was someone we knew when we had to be accountable to. Before then it was pie in the sky."

All five members clearly hold Godrich in high esteem. "This is someone who, when he was six, built a mixing desk out of yoghurt pots and a black pen," laughs Jonny Greenwood. "And he's still like that." Godrich's patience, diligence and evidently obsessive interest in the music-making process make him an especially ideal partner for Thom Yorke. “I can keeping going with something for a very, very, very, very, very long time,” says Yorke, “until eventually I’ll realise I’ve been listening to the same two bars for hours. Nigel’s even more patient. We share that, and that’s one of the tensions, one of the dynamics within the band.”

In a bid to bridge those tensions, and ease Godrich back into the fold after three years, in October 2006 band and co-producer decamped to a condemned Palladian country mansion, Tottenham House, outside Marlborough in Wiltshire. After all, decamping to a stately home worked for OK Computer and Kid A.

“It was literally an old country pile,” smiles Ed O’Brien, “huge and crumbling at the seams and with a Capability Brown front acreage that was astonishing. But the house had never properly functioned. It was expensive to maintain, and Stanley [Donwood], who does all our artworks, said the ley lines were not very forgiving.”

During their three-week stay, the band occupied a couple of rooms, carefully avoided the rat pison, huddled together at nights in caravans, and recorded the basis of "Jigsaw Falling Into Place" and a ferocious take of "Bodysnatchers", both of which ended up on the album. “You can definitely hear the atmosphere of the place on that,” says Thom Yorke. “We did loads of recording there, and three or four songs survived, but "Bodysnatchers" is the one live track on the record where we’re all playing together.”

According to Colin Greenwood, the rumoured haunted ambience of Tottenham House imprinted itself into other parts of In Rainbows. “Nigel recorded the smudges and fingerprints of those rooms and put them back into the sound later,” he enthuses, “like the reverb on the House Of Cards vocal. His computer is like a rattle bag. He can pick out any sound, irrespective of where he recorded it, then map it on to a track we recorded somewhere else. Amazing.”

A second pre-Christmas bonding session away from home, at the grand Halswell House outside Taunton in Somerset, proved less fruitful. “It was along way home and we missed out families,” says Colin Greenwood. “We didn’t achieve much there, so in the new year, we started to record in our own studio.”

By then, several sessions has also taken place at Nigel Godrich’s Hospital Studio in London’s Covent Garden. There, in December 2006, Thom Yorke felt the first real glimmer of achievement. “We were looking for something that had a real effect on us, an emotional impact, and that happened when we were doing "Videotape" and I was semi kicked out of the studio for being a negative influence. Stanley and I came back a bit worse for wear at about 11 in the evening and Jonny and Nigel had done this stuff to it that reduced us both to tears. It completely blew my mind. They’d stripped all the nonsense away that I’d been piling onto it, and what was left was this quite pure sentiment.”

In complete contrast to the incendiary 21st century rock’n’roll of "Bodysnatchers", Videotape is spellbinding in its morbid, haunting simplicity, and at its centre is Yorke’s extraordinary voice. It set the tone for much of In Rainbows.

For many, though, Yorke’s vocal on "Nude", another key album cut, shines brightest. “Ten years ago, when we first had the song, I didn’t enjoy singing it because it was too feminine, too high.” He says. “It made me feel uncomfortable. Now I enjoy it exactly for that reason – because it is a bit uncomfortable, a bit out of my range, and it’s really difficult to do. And it brings something out in me…”

Yorke’s new found vocal confidence might well be an outward manifestation of a change in his creative habits. The man who once complained that he was consumed by “mental chatter” has been working on himself. “I’m able to switch off now. Whereas five or six years ago, I absolutely couldn't. I never switched off ever." Mental chatter is, he claims, "to the detriment of work. One of the reasons this record has worked for me is that I've been trying to reduce how mcuh I work. The fact that I'm a dad too means I don't spend an entire afternoon in front of a piano. Now I have to be a lot more focused when I work." But, ever the doubter, he's not entirely convinced by his own argument. "Hmm, I'm not sure that's true. Maybe that's all nonsense."

This aspiration to locate a purity of expression is clearly evident in much of In Rainbows--from the spacious, stripped down production on several tracks to what seems to be more impressionistic, but obviously personalised lyrics. Yorke raises an eyebrow. "Really? Well, "Reckoner" is very much like that. It's what sticks that I'm after and that happened a few times while making this. I try and do that thing where it's sort of automatic, that whatever comes out comes out and try not to censor it too much."

Yorke is certainly striving to find a new creative methodology. "The more you absorb yourself in the present tense, the more likely that what you write will be good," he says. "Especially in this fucking town, where everybody's sitting in front of their desks for far too long, endlessly sweating over words that don't ever get heard. People are obsessive in this city and work becomes an end in itself." Given the three-year gestation period for In Rainbows, and Radiohead's long-term 'no pain, no gain' attitude towards their work, his words come as a surprise. "There's no point in writing notes and notes and notes and notes," he continues, repeating words as he does habitually. "The polar opposite of that is Michael Stipe, who absorbs himself in other people and the life around him, and that's where he gets his ideas. I'm not like that, but I absolutely understand why he does it. Neil Young claims he writes lyrics and doesn't go back to them. If he does, he says, the worse they become. But my God, that's scary. I mean, "Faust Arp" is the exact opposite of that, pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages until eventually, the good ones stick."

Whatever his method, Yorke's colleagues certainly believe their main man is on a roll. "I'm lucky because I'm working with a songwriter who I consider to be a peer of all those great soulful songwriters," says Colin Greenwood. "And Thom's singing, his phrasing, and his timing are just sublime. Listen to the way he sings around the beat on Nude and 15 Step. I don't hear anyone who can do it like that, so instinctively, and in perfect takes."

Yorke has not been alone in upping his game. Phil Selway and Colin Greenwood are surely the most inventive rhythm section working close to the rock mainstream. Multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood brings a classically inspired serenity to several tracks, including celeste on "Weird Fishes" and the Discbox cut, "Go Slowly", as well as sweeping string arrangements on "Faust Arp" and "Arpeggi".

Typically, perhaps, Ed O'Brien is the only one who'll actually admit that the project's success was crucial to Radiohead's survival. "One of my mantras throughout the recording was, This is the last time I'm doing this. I'll never summon up the energy to do this again. So I'm going to put everything I can into it. I think everyone felt the same. This might be the last time. I really, really believed that."

O'Brien also harboured a secret desire to confirm the band's place in history. "I never felt we were one of the great bands, up there with The Smiths or R.E.M., you know. In my view, we've made three really great records, The Bends, OK Computer and Kid A. What we needed was another great record just to seal it."

JANUARY 2007. AFTER SEEMINGLY CHASING THEIR OWN shadows for two years Radiohead repaired once again to their own Oxfordshire bolt hole. "Once we got back into our studio, we re-recorded a lot of the songs," says Colin Greenwood. "But that was the period when it really came into its own."

Despite struggling with certain rhythm tracks, one song that particularly benefited from an early 2007 refit was the In Rainbows opener, "15 Step". "The original version came out of bits assembled in the computer," says Yorke, "and we were happy with that. Then we worked out how to play it live and the song ended up being something else again. We needed to push it as far as we possibly could. We're always looked for ways to get out of our safe zone."

As anyone who's mouthed along to "No Surprises" or "Karma Police" knows, no one does 'epic' quite like Radiohead. Or, more accurately, like Radiohead used to. "That was a big issue on this record," admits O'Brien. ""Arpeggi", for example, is a song that's obviously epic in scope. But every time we tried to do it, and fought against it being big, it didn't work. The problem is that you've got to convince people that big doesn't mean stadium. I think we do big music well; it's kinda natural to us. But the problem with big music is the connotations that come with it, all that candles and stadium stuff. But epic is also about beauty, like a majestic view, and what we did on this record was to allow the songs to be epic when they have to be."

In truth, Radiohead could have been the biggest stadium band of their generation. Yorke disagrees. "Actually, I can't do it, and that's why we're not," he says. "I'd have blown my brains out." Yorke's guarded approach to stardom is something which the rest of the band have used to their own benefit, allowing them to work in a mannger that involves a pronounced sense of self-regulation.

"Yeah, Thom is very wary of that and rightly so," nods Ed. "It's served us well. But equally you can stifle things if you don't allow things to just let be. If you just let things evolve, there'll always be a twist. What I like about this record are the times when we just let the song evolve and develop its own character."

Eventually, as far as the troubled genesis of the album went, the evolution could go no further. A deadline was imposed for the start of July 2007. Colin Greenwood: "When we'd finished all the songs, we played them to our managers, and Chris [Hufford] said, It sounds like you'd just made this overwordy book. He was right."

At a band meeting at Yorke's house, in late summer, the production of one mastered 10-track CD was greeted with a huge sigh of relief. It took its In Rainbows title from a lyric on "Reckoner"--a song that had mutated entirely during the sessions. Each track on the album had to earn the approval of all five members. "I was just relieved that we didn't muff up the arrangements, which is what you often feel when you finish a record," says Jonny Greenwood. "And as it's the first record where, a month later, I'm still listening to my six favourite songs, I think that's a good sign."

"The first time we all sat down and felt that it had worked was when we finalised the tracklisting and had the finished CD," adds Phil Selway. "It was only at that point that we completely believed that we'd made the record that we wanted to."

Indeed, the handful of tracks that didn't make the final cut were not rejected for reasons of quality. "All those songs were in the running for the main album," says Ed O'Brien, "but for one reason or another, they didn't fit. In fact, each of us made strong cases for a few of those songs going on In Rainbows." Jonny Greenwood was disappointed not to win the argument for "Go Slowly", while the spine-rattling "Last Flowers", Yorke's trump card, was turned down as it had been taped for The Eraser and felt slightly alien in the In Rainbows context.

All the hard listening done to get this far had almost destroyed Colin Greenwood's ears. "I used headphones incorrectly a couple of times and lost much of my hearing for two months," he says. "That affected me profoundly. I thought I'd lose a lot of my top end, but it came back over time." He wasn't alone. "Thom had the same experience making this record. He'd use these same 'closed' headphones and they destroyed his top end. It's terrible, it turns you off music."

Compensation came in the form of the finished master. "I was really excited and proud," says Yorke. "But at the same time, I desperately wanted to get the fuck away from it as fast as possible, because once I've played it all the way through and seen that finally it makes sense, that's absolutely it for me. You only have a few days where you do, 'Yeah, we got something right, thank fuck for that'. Then it's time to do something new."

That wasn't long in coming. Right at the beginning of the album sessions, early in 2005, Radiohead knew they were out of contract with EMI, and were in no hurry to renew. The takeover of the company by Terra Firma, a private equity firm, in May 2007 sealed it.

"They just didn't feel like they were in a very healthy position," says Jonny Greenwood. "Every couple of years you'd hear, Oh, there's a new person in charge. He used to work for a toothpaste company, or he used to run pensions. You'd think, What's that got to do with music? It’s not like that at XL." XL Recordings, part of the Beggars [Banquet] Group, secured the European rights to In Rainbows in the autumn, largely in the basis of Thom Yorke’s favourable experiences with the label when it handled The Eraser.

The idea of making In Rainbows available first via download had been germinating for some time, certainly as far back as a time when EMI were still hoping to re-sign the band. According to Phil Selway, the management company first suggested it. It obviously appealed to the band’s desire to make their material available more quickly, rather than groan through yet another three-month record company ‘lead time’. And it tickled Thom Yorke’s iconoclastic tendencies. “It’s the art school thing. I have a fundamental distrust of, er, everything” he says laughing loudly. “I’d much prefer to kick the dust up.”

And that, in a few words, is exactly what happened on October 10, 2007, now forever known as Radiohead Day. There was little warning. At midnight on September 30/October 1, Jonny Greenwood bashed out a short, simple message onto Dead Air Space from his kitchen at home.

“Hello everyone. Well, the new album is finished, and it’s coming out in 10 days. We’ve called it In Rainbows.
Love from us all.
Jonny.”

A link led to the In Rainbows site, where foragers soon discovered that they were being invited to name their own price for the download. Although Courtyard Management have yet to release firm statistics of their own, it has strongly refuted the results of one survey which suggested that 62 per cent of those who downloaded the album chose to pay nothing at all for it. Although they profess little knowledge-or even interest even-in the financial implications of the download approach, the band are fascinated by the art/commerce debate it’s stirred up. “We weren’t giving the record away,” says Colin Greenwood. “We were saying, What is it worth? Music is one of the only commodified art forms where when you walk into a store and records by Dylan, Roxette, Klaxons or The Hives are the same price. Does that mean they’re all as good as each other? Is there a way to say, by how much you pay, how good or bad something is? It’s good that the whole experience has got people asking those kind of questions.”

"There was a big risk that if nobody gave any money at all, technically speaking we'd lose a fortune," Yorke insists, "and I don't just mean the recording costs but the cost of paying for the physical process of sending the downloads out. At 4p to 6p a time, that's a lot of money when you add it up. Besides, we had no idea whether we'd get a load of shit for it."

Instead, the reaction, which made front pages across the world, and prompted much debate on the business pages, was almost overwhelmingly positive - and hailed as a revolution in the way major bands sell their music. "It's really not that radical," Yorke reckons. "The only thing that was radical about it was that we were prepared to give something away that one might not normally consider in our position. But we never saw it as giving away. It has a worth regardless of whether you make people pay for it or not. As Chris [Hufford] said all along, this would have meant fuck all if the songs were rubbish."

FOR YORKE, THE BIGGEST THRILL WAS MAKING A cultural impact "while sitting at home doing eff all. That's cool, I'm down with that! But it's not gonna happen very often. If we had our nuclear warhead, then I'm afraid that was it."

As Jonny Greenwood's simple announcement grew, virus-like, into an international story, it became obvious that In Rainbows was a taste of things to come. Record labels shuddered at the thought of other out-of-contract artists going the same route; fans found themselves thrilled at the prospect of downloading a new record knowing that hundreds of thousands of others were doing so at the same time. Radiohead Day was a remarkable event, but the band express no desire to go it alone and run their own record company. "The experiment was good, but we don't wanna be spending the rest of our career in meetings discussing Portuguese shop displays," says Jonny Greenwood. "It's rehearsing and writing and being back in the studio where we're happiest, really," he says.

Neither do the band carry any guilt at cutting out the middleman to pocket the lion's share of the money earned from the download. Of course, they're acutely aware that the big money comes from touring and merchandising, and Yorke accepts that the Radiohead brand has been "elevated" by the entire episode. Ed O'Brien plays down the idea that Radiohead Day was ever intended as an "industry bashing event" and is more candid. "We've been putting money into our merchandise arm, W.A.S.T.E, for 10 years now and they've built it up into a really good little company. So we thought, Let's make use of it."

Hence Discbox, a lavish 12-inch square box-set of CD and vinyl editions of In Rainbows, an exclusive second disc containing eight new songs (see panel), photographs, artwork and lyrics - all in a book-stule package. Manufactured in a strictly limited run, Discbox sells for £40 (estimated sales to date: 80,000). But it's not the only Radiohead box set on offer this winter - EMI have just released Radiohead, a similarly-priced package with all seven of the band's Parlophone albums, complete with MP3s of the same material and a limited edition USB stick to carry then around on.

"Isn't it nice?" says Thom Yorke, affecting his best Peter Cook voice. "No, I'm not really annoyed, and anyway there's nothing we can do about it. If the choice is to dwell on that, or make a sign of the cross and walk away into the light, I'm gonna choose the latter."

"It could have been far worse," admits Jonny Greenwood, "like a cheesy greatest hits with the worst photo of Thom with big hair on the cover." Well, that's probably next Christmas, Jonny...

Not that Radiohead are opposed to the idea of seeing their work in the high street. "We're really excited about the shop release of In Rainbows," says Jonny Greenwood. "When I'm in Sainsbury's and I see all the CDs stacked up, in a way I still want to be part of all that." But will shops want a Radiohead album that's been in free circulation for two months now? "That's a good question. Once again, nobody knows. It feels like we've been in that situation a lot recently. And I like it that way."

When it comes to hard and fast conclusions about the long-term ramifications of Radiohead Day, Yorke says, "I don't think it changes things a great deal. I mean, everyone says that the structure of the music business is imploding, so that's nothing to do with us. All we did essentially was give out a glorified leak date."

And taken at least some of the control into their own hands. "Well, it would be nice if what we did was free up artists and musicians to think, I don't have to sign my name in blood, maybe I can do this in a different way. But that's about it. All we did was respond to a particular situation, and it was the logical thing to do, captain. We saw it as the best way to get the music we'd worked so hard on heard by the most people."

OUR ALLOTED TIME IN THE OLD PARSNIP HAS LONG been exceeded, and the room needs to be vacated. "Are you rushing off?" Yorke says, before he offers to play Oxford City Guide. As one often chastised for his po-faced intensity, he's more feet-on-the-ground than most song-and-dance men. He expresses concerns about the band's tour later this summer. "That messes with my mind quite a bit from the environmental point of view," he sighs, "but if you do it in bite-sized chunks, that might be all right." If the campaigning Thom Yorke is less obviously present on the latest album - though House Of Cards and 4-Minute Warning on the second disc are informed by apocalyptic thoughts - his activism can be found all over Dead Air Space.

Oh, and one more thing--bearing in mind that one of the most startling images on In Rainbows involves Mephistopheles reaching up to snatch the singer away from the pearly gates at the commencement of "Videotape"--working in such a commercialised art form, does Thom Yorke really feel as if he's sold some of his soul to the devil? "When I was at college, I was completely anti the idea of the tortured artist in the corner with his solitary canvas that then gets puts on the wall to be revered. I was absolutely into the idea that there's no artefact at all, that there was just the reproduction, the aura of the original. I mean, you go to the Louvre, and there's the Mona Lisa in a bloody shrine. What's the point of that? The true art of the 20th century is art that's reproduced. You don't put it in a church or a gallery. You put it in a book or on a CD or on TV. So, no, I don't think I've sold my soul at all.

"But I think it's perfectly natural to be obsessed by the idea of selling out, or compromise, or losing it. I think that's totally natural. I mean, you could see that happening to Kurt Cobain really fast. That's because the place you write from is not the public cheesy-peezy person, it's the one that's left when all that crumbles. So it's difficult, but I guess because of the nature of the people that we all are, no one's ever really swallowed it whole."

Really? Not ever? "Well, I think it's human nature to want to get lost in it and believe that you're wonderful. But I went the other way too fast and assumed that absolutely all of it - and we're talking about the OK Computer era - was all bullshit, including me. I'd regularly stop midway through a song and think, I don't mean a fucking word of this, I'm off. Which, I guess, is the polar opposite of someone like Marc Bolan. But it's a product of the same thing. You're always trying to deal with the fact that you're a small crumbly piece of stuff when you write these songs, and maybe that's why the songs are good. So you're always taking one poison or another. Perhaps that's what makes carrying on so hard. You make a record, you wake up and start writing something new, and everything crumbles again."
[/QUOTE]
Transcribed by you look so pretty (ateaseweb)

2008 | Mojo

2008-01-05T14:42:00.000-08:00

CHASING RAIN_BOWS

Four years in the making, In Rainbows is both tortured and triumphant... Here, for the first time, is the unexpurgated inside story of the album that nearly destroyed RADIOHEAD and gave the music industry a heart attack...

Words: MARK_PAYTRESS
Pics: KEVIN_WESTENBERG

THEY WENT DEAF DURING THE SESSIONS. Imagined themselves as the Monty Python team with guitars. Battled rat poison and, more deadly still, their own desperately doubting ways. They thought thought it was all over (it wasn't). Four studios, two producers, endless tweaks and retakes followed. But now, four years on from 2003's Hail To The Thief, Radiohead are back with a record that even they themselves grudgingly admit has left them feeling "really excited and really proud". That record is, of course, In Rainbows, MOJO's album of 2007.

As well as shaking up the industry itself with its pay-what-you-want model, it's an album that artfully distils the band's very essence while at the same time avoiding the customary curses of cliche or complacency. And then, of course, there's new eight new tracks on the bonus CD Discbox edition available exclusively via the band's own website which paints an even more panoptic picture. A picture that will fully reveal itself during a week-long round of interviews with all five members of Radiohead as they unravel the titanic tale of their creative rebirth.

"I GUESS WE HAD HIGH EXPECTATIONS THIS TIME round," shrugs Thom Yorke, in the quiet of a book-lined private room in The Old Parsonage Hotel ("The Old Parsnip," jests Jonny Greenwood), an establishment with the ambience of a country house on the outskirts of Oxford city centre. In the relative tranquillity of the city Yorke still calls home, he exudes a warm glow, one that's accentuated by the generous stubble of an incipient beard. He's so relaxed, in fact, that he takes MOJO for a short tour of the city centre at the end of our interview. "Now that's where several students were executed by the locals," he says with a glint in his eye, while pointing at a blink-and-you'll-miss-it bricked-out patch of Broad Street. Actually, the youthful-looking Yorke blends in perfectly here; all that's missing is the college scarf.

Back at the Old Parsnip earlier, Yorke unleashes the first of several loud laughs that belie public perceptions of him as an arch, lemon-sucking miserablist. We're talking about the difficult days of Hail To The Thief. "Yeah, we knew that was a lower part of the curve," he says after a characteristic pause for thought, "and, yes, we knew we'd carry on. But it felt very much that the branch had become a twig - and that we could fall off the tree at any point!"

Yorke can laugh now, but on reflection the Hail To The Thief experience almost brought Radiohead to their knees. Indeed, no one could have foreseen the car crash ahead when, in July 2002, the band road-tested the material for two months before decamping to Los Angeles in September where they laid the basis of the album down in one two-week session. "It was very much a reaction to the protracted recording of Kid A," says drummer Phil Selway, referring to the three years it took the band to follow-up 1997's standard-bearer, OK Computer. "It was also a response to the excitement we'd rediscovered by playing the Kid A material live. We wanted to capture that on record."

To some extent, it worked. Guitarist Ed O'Brien talked up the album's "swagger" on its release, Yorke recalled how he wept when he first heard the playback to There There, and the band proved that they could do it without squirrelling themselves away for years and hiring a stately home for inspiration - as they'd done for both OK Computer and Kid A. But despite its intermittent brilliance (and There There does sound like a spellbinding peak of sorts) and initial commercial success, Hail To The Thief was a short-term compromise solution that quickly proved to be no solution at all.

"We should have pruned it down to 10 songs, then it would have been a really good record," says O'Brien. "Working on In Rainbows, I was aware that we were making something that was really engaging, that moved people again. and I don't think Hail To The Thief consistently did that. I think we lost people on a couple of tracks and it broke the spell of the record."

Colin Greenwood knew as much from the start. "I didn't want three or four songs on there, because I thought some of the ideas we were trying out weren't completely finished." Such as? "The Gloaming. We played it live and it was cool. My brother [Jonny] sampled each of the instruments on stage, cut them up then sent them back into the mix. It was so exciting, like a live DJ show, and Thom performed off of all of that. But it wasn't the same in the studio. For me, Hail To The Thief was more of a holding process, really."

SITTING IN THE QUIET OF "PROBABLY OXFORD'S first and last London-style private members' club" above the QI bookshop, guitarist Jonny Greenwood, the most restless Radiohead member - "he has the patience of an insect!" says Yorke - also concedes that Hail To The Thief was a few songs too long. "We were trying to do what people said we were good at," he admits. "But it was good for our heads. It was good for us to be doing a record that came out of playing live."

If the suspicion that the record wasn't quite up to their usual standard didn't break them, then a year on the road touring Hail To The Thief very nearly did. After a short tour of Japan and Australia in April 2004, the band retreated back to their various young families. "It was definitely time to take a break," says Phil Selway. "There was still a desire amongst us to make music, but also a realisation that other aspects of our lives were being neglected. And we'd come to the end of our contract [with EMI], which gives you a natural point to look back over at what you've achieved as a band."

Any suggestion that this 'natural' break was a cover for a more ruinous rift within the group is rebuffed by O'Brien. The most relaxed band member in person, he is also the one least bound by what might be termed Radiohead-speak. "No, I didn't think the band would collapse. I wasn't scared. You know, if it all collapses, it's only a fucking band." But a livelihood, too. "Yeah, it's a living, it's a very nice living. But we've all got nice houses. We're not gonna starve. There are always other things we can do. But I wasn't ever worried about it. The good thing that came out of it was confronting things.

Confrontation they can do, but they don't really do compliments. Mention Nick Kent's claim in this magazine in 2001 that they were "the most important band in the world", and they'll pretend they haven't heard what you've said. It is proof, if more is required, that the group consider themselves the best judges of their work... and, perhaps, of a little moth-eaten modesty. Wanna see Thom Yorke in fits? Float a rhetorical 'top of your game' across the table and watch his reaction. "Wait till you see the file of photos that comes with the record box," he splutters. "Then ask yourself whether we look like we're at the top of our game." MOJO reminds him of a picture posted up on the group's Dead Air Space blog that accompanied the October 1, 2007 announcement that the release of In Rainbows was imminent. In it, Thom, Ed and Colin [!] hold mugs of tea and look almost insanely happy. "OK, that was a good moment," Yorke concedes. "They do happen."

Good, often astonishing moments have dogged Radiohead during their 15-year recording career. The 1992 single, Creep, the stand-out on what was otherwise a fairly humdrum indie-rock debut, Pablo Honey, became such an alternative nation anthem that the band dropped it from their set. 1995's The Bends marked a great leap forward, thanks to stronger material, more sophisticated arrangements and growing studio savvy. Next, OK Computer confirmed Radiohead's standing, prompting - with some justification - all those "Pink Floyd for the '90s" comparisons. Excepting Thom Yorke's misguided early recourse to blond hair extensions, they were, after all, largely anonymous figures that appeared to shun the usual temptations of the rock'n'roll lifestyle in favour of a more considered, almost morbidly serious approach to their music. Oh, and let's not forget Radiohead's Oxford to the Floyd's Cambridge.

Although the genre has since been largely rehabilitated, the 'prog' accusation became a stick with which to beat the band, especially among the Britpop pack whose geezerish anthems grafted the sound of The Beatles' Revolver onto the simple gratifications demanded by Loaded Man. Just as they'd raised their game after being accused of being "a pitifully lily-livered excuse for a rock'n'roll group" in their early days, Radiohead again reacted wildly, deflecting the "Is this the best record ever?" hype around OK Computer by a hard-left turn in search of a new direction. It took the best part of three years and resulted in two laptop rock albums, the stunningly taut Kid A (2000) and its troubled twin, Amnesiac (2001).

The spur for this defiant dive into electronica was Thom. It was mooted at the time that not everyone in the band was as fanatical as he was about the fractured beats and alienated textures that he had discovered after buying up the Warp Records catalogue. While Ed O'Brien looked in vain for melodies, Phil Selway wondered whether the laptop beats would put him out of a job. Hence, Hail To The Thief - a let's-work-together bonding exercise, the effect of which, as we have seen, threatened the band's unity more than at any other time in their 20-year tenure. Cue Thom's solo album.

"YOU CAN'T GO ANYWHERE WITH THOM WITHout him having a laptop and headphones on," says Jonny Greenwood. "It's been like that for years, and he's still doing it. We drove to London yesterday and he had his laptop out and his headphones on for the whole journey. That's what he's like. Always filling notebooks, too..."

While Radiohead are definitely A Band in the sense that all five musicians contribute greatly to the overall sound and character, it is Yorke who is very much first among equals. From the beginning, it's mostly been his demos that form the basis for each Radiohead record, not least because he's the proverbial creative - totally unable to switch off. He claims he's been "training" to change all that. "But you'll have to talk to my missus - sorry, it's Rachel, she hates being called that - to see if that's worked," he smiles. "Yes, it's true: I constantly have bits of paper in my pockets, backs of envelopes, notebooks. But, you know, 95 per cent of it doesn't get used."

Released in July 2006, Yorke's solo record, The Eraser, provided an outlet for some of his excess creativity. Despite Thom's twig analogy, there was, Radiohead insist, never a suggestion that he was abandoning the band. Now portrayed as an itch that needed scratching, The Eraser is a slow-burn melance of dislocated dance textures, piano-led moodsong topped with melodies that grow deliciously with every listen. "Great record, amazing singing," enthuses Jonny Greenwood. "He had to get this stuff out, and everyone was happy that it was made. He'd go mad if every time he wrote a song it had to go through the Radiohead concensus. The combination of him, [producer] Nigel Godrich and a few months seemed to get it all unblocked."

Yorke himself clearly appreciated the experience. "Actually, I did learn something from it," he says. "It made me realise that all the stuff I do on laptops gets me excited because I can hear what I'm gonna do vocally. But unless I have a vocal in place, it's a bit unfair to expect anybody else to understand what the fuck's going on." For example? "I was playing bits of Black Swan, six minutes of, er, mostly drivel, and Nigel's like, 'Bloody hell! I'm not interested in any of this.' I said, I've been working on this for ages. It's great. 'No it's not,' he says. But as soon as I put the vocal on, he was like, 'OK, now it makes sense.' It reminded me just how important the voice is."

And that realisation, as much as anything else, was to serve the group well during two long, cold winters and one long touring summer, in which time In Rainbows was painstakingly put together.

According to Jonny Greenwood, his own solo activities - two soundtracks, Bodysong (2003) and There Will Be Blood (2007), as well as being BBC composer in residence since 2004 - haven't had anything like the impact on the band that Yorke's renewed vocal awareness has. "Er, I don't think I've done one [a solo album]," he shrugs. "I did music for a film but that's different to cobbling together 50 minutes of music with your name on it and expecting people to listen to it. That doesn't interest me at all. If I've brought anything new along, then I suppose I'm slightly less scared of asking violin players to do stuff than I was..." And a scary dub habit. "I spent six solid months listening to dub all day every day," he says. "My wife still hasn't forgiven me."

The rest were publicly quieter but hardly immune from new influences. Ed O'Brien feasted on Rip It Up And Start Again, Simon Reynolds' extensive survey of post-punk, and found it remarkably liberating. "That cemented a lot of the insecurities and boredom I was feeling about music. I realised, Hang on a sec, this is where I come from, and that's the stuff that still moves me. It's got melodies, it's got pop, it's trying to do things a bit differently - and you don't have to work so hard at it..."

Colin Greenwood, meanwhile, continued to feed his eclectic musical interests, turning on to DJ Surgeon, encouraging fans to go out and catch Scouse screwballs Clinic, and learning a bunch of Macca and Motown ace James Jamerson basslines. Phil Selway joined Jonny Greenwood in the fictional band The Weird Sisters in Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire film. So far, so fragmented.

MID-FEBRUARY 2005: TWO YEARS AFTER FINISHing Hail To The Thief there, Radiohead regroup at their Oxfordshire recording studio. Initially, the prospects appeared favourable in terms of the music they set about making. Speaking the following month, Jonny Greenwood enthused about the "good songs" and the renewed hunger within the band. He also said that early rehearsals had been "fun".

Ed O'Brien: "The moment Thom came in with the songs and the lyrics, it was the first time in a long while that I felt really engaged with the lyrics. I thought, These are great, these are moving me, these are lyrics written by somebody who is engaging with the stuff of life. That was exciting." While no one admits to anything so simple as a gameplan, O'Brien probably expresses the band's collective unconscious when he says, "I think ultimately we were looking for 10 or 11 songs, a really concise body of work, with no fat."

Eight months later, on October 21, Thom Yorke posted an online bulletin on Dead Air Space, a new blog page at radiohead.com. It was the first of many, often fraught online updates he'd write over the next two years, that give a good indication of the agonising that went into the making of what became In Rainbows. Within two months, Yorke was back again, after another difficult two-week session. This time, his mood had darkened significantly. "We're splitting up. It's all shit. We're washed up, finished," he write.

"There was this sense," admits O'Brien, "that we could finish this all tomorrow and so what. But it felt like it would be a shame to, particularly because when you got beyond all the shit and the bollcosk, the core of these songs were really good."

"It was difficult to get back," Yorke says, "and because things didn't move forwards for ages and ages, it grew more and more tense. Things didn't really ease until we started to feel we had something that had the emotional impact that we hoped the songs would have."

Colin Greenwood: "I suppose we were paying the price for not taking the pain on Hail To The Thief. As this project progressed, we realised there are no short cuts to the process being exciting for us."

The initial high of February 2005 soon dispersed. Months of rehearsals, followed by the band's own attempted to get some of the material down in a studio, gave way to debilitating - and characteristic - self-doubt. "There's been such a crisis of self-confidence in making this record," Colin Greenwood blurts out, his face etched with discomfort as he recalls the experience. "It's been... really... terrible, you know." This man is not joking. Like his brother Jonny, Greenwood thrives on the immediacy of a band playing together. His happiest memory of the entire process was "when we reheased at our old apple storage warehouse, a flattering room, which made everything sound big and rocky." It didn't last long. Much of the next two-and-a-half years were spent studio-bound.

In retrospect the problem appears both recurring and simple. Radiohead, a five-piece rock band, desire to make music that refuses to be bound by the limitations of their chosen genre. But movement away from the traditional into the unexpected often results in a frustrating process of distillation. "At the rehearsal room stage, things often sound very standard," agrees Phil Selway. "The trick is to stick with that, because it does ultimately get you to a much better place. You must also be prepared to jettison the lot, too."

So they did. In December 2005 Mark 'Spike' Stent was asked to work with the band in a bid to help them work through the material they'd recorded and stockpiled. "He listened to the stuff we'd been self-producing," says O'Brien. "These weren't demos, they'd been recorded in proper studios [in autumn 2005], and he said, 'The sounds aren't good enough.'"

Stent, known for mixing the likes of Bjork, U2 and Massive Attack, took over the production of sessions from February through to April 2006. Early versions of Nude, Bodysnatchers and Arpeggi were among the songs worked up, but he didn't last long. "It never really took off," says O'Brien. "But he was good for us because he galvanised the whole process," adds Selway. "That had been missing up to that point." Thom Yorke was far from happy, though. "I've been fucking tearing my hair out," he wrote on the band's blog in March. "Furiously writing, working out parts, cracking up."

Despite their singer's malaise, this first preparatory phase in the making of In Rainbows came to a head during May and June 2006, when the band toured Europe and the States, returning to the stage in August for two weeks of festival appearances, forcing them to concentrate on the material in hand. "That took us to the next phase," says Selway, "because if you're playing new songs live, you're going to have to commit to some arrangements."

MAY 1, 2006. AS THOM YORKE AND JONNY GREENwood performed an acoustic warm-up show at the Big Ask Live fundraiser for Friends Of The Earth at Koko in Camden Town, produced Nigel Godrich watched from the audience. Having worked with the band since 1004 and co-produced every album since OK Computer, Godrich had been the fall guy in the band's initial attempt to break out of what Colin Greenwood calls "the safe zone". His return to the fold took a further three months. By September 2006, says Selway, "We had prepared ourselves sufficiently for that whole working process to come back together."

"Thing came together when Nigel started working with us again," nods Colin Greenwood, "because he was someone we knew when we had to be accountable to. Before then it was pie in the sky."

All five members clearly hold Godrich in high esteem. "This is someone who, when he was six, built a mixing desk out of yoghurt pots and a black pen," laughs Jonny Greenwood. "And he's still like that." Godrich's patience, diligence and evidently obsessive interest in the music-making process make him an especially ideal partner for Thom Yorke. “I can keeping going with something for a very, very, very, very, very long time,” says Yorke, “until eventually I’ll realise I’ve been listening to the same two bars for hours. Nigel’s even more patient. We share that, and that’s one of the tensions, one of the dynamics within the band.”

In a bid to bridge those tensions, and ease Godrich back into the fold after three years, in October 2006 band and co-producer decamped to a condemned Palladian country mansion, Tottenham House, outside Marlborough in Wiltshire. After all, decamping to a stately home worked for OK Computer and Kid A.

“It was literally an old country pile,” smiles Ed O’Brien, “huge and crumbling at the seams and with a Capability Brown front acreage that was astonishing. But the house had never properly functioned. It was expensive to maintain, and Stanley [Donwood], who does all our artworks, said the ley lines were not very forgiving.”

During their three-week stay, the band occupied a couple of rooms, carefully avoided the rat pison, huddled together at nights in caravans, and recorded the basis of Jigsaw Falling Into Place and a ferocious take of Bodysnatchers, both of which ended up on the album. “You can definitely hear the atmosphere of the place on that,” says Thom Yorke. “We did loads of recording there, and three or four songs survived, but Bodysnatchers is the one live track on the record where we’re all playing together.”

According to Colin Greenwood, the rumoured haunted ambience of Tottenham House imprinted itself into other parts of In Rainbows. “Nigel recorded the smudges and fingerprints of those rooms and put them back into the sound later,” he enthuses, “like the reverb on the House Of Cards vocal. His computer is like a rattle bag. He can pick out any sound, irrespective of where he recorded it, then map it on to a track we recorded somewhere else. Amazing.”

A second pre-Christmas bonding session away from home, at the grand Halswell House outside Taunton in Somerset, proved less fruitful. “It was along way home and we missed out families,” says Colin Greenwood. “We didn’t achieve much there, so in the new year, we started to record in our own studio.”

By then, several sessions has also taken place at Nigel Godrich’s Hospital Studio in London’s Covent Garden. There, in December 2006, Thom Yorke felt the first real glimmer of achievement. “We were looking for something that had a real effect on us, an emotional impact, and that happened when we were doing Videotape and I was semi kicked out of the studio for being a negative influence. Stanley and I came back a bit worse for wear at about 11 in the evening and Jonny and Nigel had done this stuff to it that reduced us both to tears. It completely blew my mind. They’d stripped all the nonsense away that I’d been piling onto it, and what was left was this quite pure sentiment.”

In complete contrast to the incendiary 21st century rock’n’roll of Bodysnatchers, Videotape is spellbinding in its morbid, haunting simplicity, and at its centre is Yorke’s extraordinary voice. It set the tone for much of In Rainbows.

For many, though, Yorke’s vocal on Nude, another key album cut, shines brightest. “Ten years ago, when we first had the song, I didn’t enjoy singing it because it was too feminine, too high.” He says. “It made me feel uncomfortable. Now I enjoy it exactly for that reason – because it is a bit uncomfortable, a bit out of my range, and it’s really difficult to do. And it brings something out in me…”

Yorke’s new found vocal confidence might well be an outward manifestation of a change in his creative habits. The man who once complained that he was consumed by “mental chatter” has been working on himself. “I’m able to switch off now. Whereas five or six years ago, I absolutely couldn't. I never switched off ever." Mental chatter is, he claims, "to the detriment of work. One of the reasons this record has worked for me is that I've been trying to reduce how mcuh I work. The fact that I'm a dad too means I don't spend an entire afternoon in front of a piano. Now I have to be a lot more focused when I work." But, ever the doubter, he's not entirely convinced by his own argument. "Hmm, I'm not sure that's true. Maybe that's all nonsense."

This aspiration to locate a purity of expression is clearly evident in much of In Rainbows - from the spacious, stripped down production on several tracks to what seems to be more impressionistic, but obviously personalised lyrics. Yorke raises an eyebrow. "Really? Well, Reckoner is very much like that. It's what sticks that I'm after and that happened a few times while making this. I try and do that thing where it's sort of automatic, that whatever comes out comes out and try not to censor it too much."

Yorke is certainly striving to find a new creative methodology. "The more you absorb yourself in the present tense, the more likely that what you write will be good," he says. "Especially in this fucking town, where everybody's sitting in front of their fesks for far too long, endlessly sweating over words that don't ever get heard. People are obsessive in this city and work becomes an end in itself." Given the three-year gestation period for In Rainbows, and Radiohead's long-term 'no pain, no gain' attitude towards their work, his words come as a surprise. "There's no point in writing notes and notes and notes and notes," he continues, repeating words as he does habitually. "The polar opposite of that is Michael Stipe, who absorbs himself in other people and the life around him, and that's where he gets his ideas. I'm not like that, but I absolutely understand why he does it. Neil Young claims he writes lyrics and doesn't go back to them. If he does, he says, the worse they become. But my God, that's scary. I mean, Faust Arp is the exact opposite of that, pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages until eventually, the good ones stick."

Whatever his method, Yorke's colleagues certainly believe their main man is on a roll. "I'm lucky because I'm working with a songwriter who I consider to be a peer of all those great soulful songwriters," says Colin Greenwood. "And Thom's singing, his phrasing, and his timing are just sublime. Listen to the way he sings around the beat on Nude and 15 Step. I don't hear anyone who can do it like that, so instinctively, and in perfect takes."

Yorke has not been alone in upping his game. Phil Selway and Colin Greenwood are surely the most inventive rhythm section working close to the rock mainstream. Multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood brings a classically inspired serenity to several tracks, including celeste on Weird Fishes and the Discbox cut, Go Slowly, as well as sweeping string arrangements on Faust Arp and Arpeggi.

Typically, perhaps, Ed O'Brien is the only one who'll actually admit that the project's success was crucial to Radiohead's survival. "One of my mantras throughout the recording was, This is the last time I'm doing this. I'll never summon up the energy to do this again. So I'm going to put everything I can into it. I think everyone felt the same. This might be the last time. I really, really believed that."

O'Brien also harboured a secret desire to confirm the band's place in history. "I never felt we were one of the great bands, up there with The Smiths or R.E.M., you know. In my view, we've made three really great records, The Bends, OK Computer and Kid A. What we needed was another great record just to seal it."

JANUARY 2007. AFTER SEEMINGLY CHASING THEIR OWN shadows for two years Radiohead repaired once again to their own Oxfordshire bolt hole. "Once we got back into our studio, we re-recorded a lot of the songs," says Colin Greenwood. "But that was the period when it really came into its own."

Despite struggling with certain rhythm tracks, one song that particularly benefited from an early 2007 refit was the In Rainbows opener, 15 Step. "The original version came out of bits assembled in the computer," says Yorke, "and we were happy with that. Then we worked out how to play it live and the song ended up being something else again. We needed to push it as far as we possibly could. We're always looked for ways to get out of our safe zone."

As anyone who's mouthed along to No Surprises or Karma Police knows, no one does 'epic' quite like Radiohead. Or, more accurately, like Radiohead used to. "That was a big issue on this record," admits O'Brien. "Arpeggi, for example, is a song that's obviously epic in scope. But every time we tried to do it, and fought against it being big, it didn't work. The problem is that you've got to convince people that big doesn't mean stadium. I think we do big music well; it's kinda natural to us. But the problem with big music is the connotations that come with it, all that candles and stadium stuff. But epic is also about beauty, like a majestic view, and what we did on this record was to allow the songs to be epic when they have to be."

In truth, Radiohead could have been the biggest stadium band of their generation. Yorke disagrees. "Actually, I can't do it, and that's why we're not," he says. "I'd have blown my brains out." Yorke's guarded approach to stardom is something which the rest of the band have used to their own benefit, allowing them to work in a mannger that involves a pronounced sense of self-regulation.

"Yeah, Thom is very wary of that and rightly so," nods Ed. "It's served us well. But equally you can stifle things if you don't allow things to just let be. If you just let things evolve, there'll always be a twist. What I like about this record are the times when we just let the song evolve and develop its own character."

Eventually, as far as the troubled genesis of the album went, the evolution could go no further. A deadline was imposed for the start of July 2007. Colin Greenwood: "When we'd finished all the songs, we played them to our managers, and Chris [Hufford] said, It sounds like you'd just made this overwordy book. He was right."

At a band meeting at Yorke's house, in late summer, the production of one mastered 10-track CD was greeted with a huge sigh of relief. It took its In Rainbows title from a lyric on Reckoner - a song that had mutated entirely during the sessions. Each track on the album had to earn the approval of all five members. "I was just relieved that we didn't muff up the arrangements, which is what you often feel when you finish a record," says Jonny Greenwood. "And as it's the first record where, a month later, I'm still listening to my six favourite songs, I think that's a good sign."

"The first time we all sat down and felt that it had worked was when we finalised the tracklisting and had the finished CD," adds Phil Selway. "It was only at that point that we completely believed that we'd made the record that we wanted to."

Indeed, the handful of tracks that didn't make the final cut were not rejected for reasons of quality. "All those songs were in the running for the main album," says Ed O'Brien, "but for one reason or another, they didn't fit. In fact, each of us made strong cases for a few of those songs going on In Rainbows." Jonny Greenwood was disappointed not to win the argument for Go Slowly, while the spine-rattling Last Flowers, Yorke's trump card, was turned down as it had been taped for The Eraser and felt slightly alien in the In Rainbows context.

All the hard listening done to get this far had almost destroyed Colin Greenwood's ears. "I used headphones incorrectly a couple of times and lost much of my hearing for two months," he says. "That affected me profoundly. I thought I'd lose a lot of my top end, but it came back over time." He wasn't alone. "Thom had the same experience making this record. He'd use these same 'closed' headphones and they destroyed his top end. It's terrible, it turns you off music."

Compensation came in the form of the finished master. "I was really excited and proud," says Yorke. "But at the same time, I desperately wanted to get the fuck away from it as fast as possible, because once I've played it all the way through and seen that finally it makes sense, that's absolutely it for me. You only have a few days where you do, Yeah, we got something right, thank fuck for that. Then it's time to do something new."

That wasn't long in coming. Right at the beginning of the album sessions, early in 2005, Radiohead knew they were out of contract with EMI, and were in no hurry to renew. The takeover of the company by Terra Firma, a private equity firm, in May 2007 sealed it.

"They just didn't feel like they were in a very healthy position," says Jonny Greenwood. "Every couple of years you'd hear, Oh, there's a new person in charge. He used to work for a toothpaste company, or he used to run pensions. You'd think, What's that got to do with music? It’s not like that at XL." XL Recordings, part of the Beggars [Banquet] Group, secured the European rights to In Rainbows in the autumn, largely in the basis of Thom Yorke’s favourable experiences with the label when it handled The Eraser.

The idea of making In Rainbows available first via download had been germinating for some time, certainly as far back as a time when EMI were still hoping to re-sign the band. According to Phil Selway, the management company first suggested it. It obviously appealed to the band’s desire to make their material available more quickly, rather than groan through yet another three-month record company ‘lead time’. And it tickled Thom Yorke’s iconoclaustic tendencies. “It’s the art school thing. I have a fundamental distrust of, er, everything” he says laughing loudly. “I’d much prefer to kick the dust up.”

And that, in a few words, is exactly what happened on October 10, 2007, now forever known as Radiohead Day. There was little warning. At midnight on September 30/October 1, Jonny Greenwood bashed out a short, simple message onto Dead Air Space from his kitchen at home.

“Hello everyone. Well, the new album is finished, and it’s coming out in 10 days. We’ve called it In Rainbows.
Love from us all.
Jonny.”

A link led to the In Rainbows site, where forager soon discovered that they were being invited to name their own price for the download. Although Courtyard Management have yet to release firm statistics of their own, it has strongly refuted the results of one survey which suggested that 62 per cent of those who downloaded the album chose to pay nothing at all for it. Although they profess little knowledge-or even interest even-in the financial implications of the download approach, the band are fascinated by the art/commerce debate it’s stirred up. “We weren’t giving the record away,” says Colin Greenwood. “We were saying, What is it worth? Music is one of the only commodified art forms where when you walk into a store and records by Dylan, Roxette, Klaxons or The Hives are the same price. Does that mean they’re all as good as each other? Is there a way to say, by how much you pay, how good or bad something is? It’s good that the whole experience has got people asking those kind of questions.”

"There was a big risk that if nobody gave any money at all, technically speaking we'd lose a fortune," Yorke insists, "and I don't just mean the recording costs but the cost of paying for the physical process of sending the downloads out. At 4p to 6p a time, that's a lot of money when you add it up. Besides, we had no idea whether we'd get a load of shit for it."

Instead, the reaction, which made front pages across the world, and prompted much debate on the business pages, was almost overwhelmingly positive - and hailed as a revolution in the way major bands sell their music. "It's really not that radical," Yorke reckons. "The only thing that was radical about it was that we were prepared to give something away that one might not normally consider in our position. But we never saw it as giving away. It has a worth regardless of whetehr you make people pay for it or not. As Chris [Hufford] said all along, this would have meant fuck all if the songs were rubbish."

FOR YORKE, THE BIGGEST THRILL WAS MAKING A cultural impact "while sitting at home doing eff all. That's cool, I'm down with that! But it's not gonna happen very often. If we had our nuclear warhead, then I'm afraid that was it."

As Jonny Greenwood's simple announcement grew, virus-like, into an international story, it became obvious that In Rainbows was a taste of things to come. Record labels shuddered at the thought of other out-of-contract artists going the same route; fans found themselves thrilled at the prospect of downloading a new record knowing that hundreds of thousands of others were doing so at the same time. Radiohead Day was a remarkable event, but the band express no desire to go it alone and run their own record company. "The experiment was good, but we don't wanna be spending the rest of our career in meetings discussing Portuguese shop displays," says Jonny Greenwood. "It's rehearsing and writing and being back in the studio where we're happiest, really," he says.

Neither do the band carry any guilt at cutting out the middleman to pocket the lion's share of the money earned from the download. Of course, they're acutely aware that the big money comes from touring and merchandising, and Yorke accepts that the Radiohead brand has been "elevated" by the entire episode. Ed O'Brien plays down the idea that Radiohead Day was ever intended as an "industry bashing event" and is more candid. "We've been putting money into our merchandise arm, W.A.S.T.E, for 10 years now and they've built it up into a really good little company. So we thought, Let's make use of it."

Hence Discbox, a lavish 12-inch square box-set of CD and vinyl editions of In Rainbows, an exclusive second disc containing eight new songs (see panel), photographs, artwork and lyrics - all in a book-stule package. Manufactured in a strictly limited run, Discbox sells for £40 (estimated sales to date: 80,000). But it's not the only Radiohead box set on offer this winter - EMI have just released Radiohead, a similarly-priced package with all seven of the band's Parlophone albums, complete with MP3s of the same material and a limited edition USB stick to carry then around on.

"Isn't it nice?" says Thom Yorke, affecting his best Peter Cook voice. "No, I'm not really annoyed, and anyway there's nothing we can do about it. If the choice is to dwell on that, or make a sign of the cross and walk away into the light, I'm gonna choose the latter."

"It could have been far worse," admits Jonny Greenwood, "like a cheesy greatest hits with the worst photo of Thom with big hair on the cover." Well, that's probably next Christmas, Jonny...

Not that Radiohead are opposed to the idea of seeing their work in the high street. "We're really excited about the shop release of In Rainbows," says Jonny Greenwood. "When I'm in Sainsbury's and I see all the CDs stakced up, in a way I still want to be part of all that." But will shops want a Radiohead album that's been in free circulation for two months now? "That's a good question. Once again, nobody knows. It feels like we've been in that situation a lot recently. And I like it that way."

When it comes to hard and fast conclusions about the long-term ramifications of Radiohead Day, Yorke says, "I don't think it changes things a great deal. I mean, everyone says that the structure of the music business is imploding, so that's nothing to do with us. All we did essentially was give out a glorified leak date."

And taken at least some of the control into their own hands. "Well, it would be nice if what we did was free up artists and musicians to think, I don't have to sign my name in blood, maybe I can do this in a different way. But that's about it. All we did was respond to a particular situation, and it was the logical thing to do, captain. We saw it as the best way to get the music we'd worked so hard on heard by the most people."

OUR ALLOTED TIME IN THE OLD PARSNIP HAS LONG been exceeded, and the room needs to be vacated. "Are you rushing off?" Yorke says, before he offers to play Oxford City Guide. As one often chastised for his po-faced intensity, he's more feet-on-the-ground than most song-and-dance men. He expresses concerns about the band's tour later this summer. "That messes with my mind quite a bit from the environmental point of view," he sighs, "but if you do it in bite-sized chunks, that might be all right." If the campaigning Thom Yorke is less obviously present on the latest album - though House Of Cards and 4-Minute Warning on the second disc are informed by apocalyptic thoughts - his activism can be found all over Dead Air Space.

Oh, and one more thing - bearing in mind that one of the most startling images on In Rainbows involves Mephistopheles reaching up to snatch the singer away from the pearly gates at the commencement of Videotape - working in such a commercialised art form, does Thom Yorke really feel as if he's sold some of his soul to the devil? "When I was at college, I was completely anti the idea of the tortured artist in the corner with his solitary canvas that then gets puts on the wall to be revered. I was absolutely into the idea that there's no artefact at all, that there was just the reproduction, the aura of the original. I mean, you go to the Louvre, and there's the Mona Lisa in a bloody shrine. What's the point of that? The true art of the 20th century is art that's reproduced. You don't put it in a church or a gallery. You put it in a book or on a CD or on TV. So, no, I don't think I've sold my soul at all.

"But I think it's perfectly natural to be obsessed by the idea of selling out, or compromise, or losing it. I think that's totally natural. I mean, you could see that happening to Kurt Cobain really fast. That's because the place you write from is not the public cheesy-peezy person, it's the one that's left when all that crumbles. So it's difficult, but I guess because of the nature of the people that we all are, no one's ever really swallowed it whole."

Really? Not ever? "Well, I think it's human nature to want to get lost in it and believe that you're wonderful. But I went the other way too fast and assumed that absolutely all of it - and we're talking about the OK Computer era - was all bullshit, including me. I'd regularly stop midway through a song and think, I don't mean a fucking word of this, I'm off. Which, I guess, is the polar opposite of someone like Marc Bolan. But it's a product of the same thing. You're always trying to deal with the fact that you're a small crumbly piece of stuff when you write these songs, and maybe that's why the songs are good. So you're always taking one poison or another. Perhaps that's what makes carrying on so hard. You make a record, you wake up and start writing something new, and everything crumbles again."

Credit to you look so pretty (ateaseweb)

2008 January | Mojo

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