Scandal, fear, admiration! Radiohead decided to “offer” their new album on the Internet, baffling the record industry. Such “impudence” marked 2007 as a turning point in the history of recorded music, but in the middle of all this there’s an album to discover.
Phil Hoffman spoke with Thom Yorke and Colin Greenwood about the strategies behind In Rainbows, but, especially, about music. Real music.

The entrance to the Landmark Hotel is hot and smells of must; I see guitarist Jonny Greenwood leaving a room, then I see the tall guitarist Ed O’Brien pass by, and, finally, Thom Yorke appears: a short guy, clearly exhausted after a whole day of interviews. Half joking – or maybe not – he says: “Ok, where’s the next victim?” The next victim was me. But as soon as we began, Yorke could not have been nicer. With a yellow pale beard and the lazy eye, he looks somewhat like Vincent Van Gogh... He’s impeccably dressed. The bass player Colin Greenwood sits at his side. He is a calm and intelligent talker, who carefully punctuates his dialogue with “oh really?” and “that’s nice”.

PH – Phil Hoffman
T – Thom Yorke
C – Colin Greenwood

PH: How did the adventure go, in which you allowed people to decide how much they wanted to pay for the download of In Rainbows?

T: About half the people paid – it’s more than what we were expecting. We thought no one would pay. Panic!

PH: Someone is surely sitting somewhere, counting the number of downloads, the money that goes in, the requests for the Discbox that includes a second CD, how many have to be inserted in a box, with booklets, artwork, and everything…

T: Indeed, we need someone to do that.
C: Our parents are working on that at home: they’re old, with nothing better to do. No, I’m joking. But it could be true! I spoke yesterday with our manager and he said that the performance of the downloads is the same as when we were selling records in stores.
Sixty per cent of the downloads were made in the first week, but there’s still new people that keeps on doing it. It’s cool.
T: We crossed the mark of a million downloads.

PH: All over the world?

T: A lot of countries didn’t adhere much, because of the language barrier. That’s a problem. Especially in Japan – there was very few downloads.
C: Yes, it’s funny: if we had launched it in 20 different languages the result would have been different. We know this because Amazon and eBay offered to help us.

PH: Did they show up all of a sudden?

T: No, it wasn’t impetuous; they said “we’ll help you”, they wanted to improve things.
C: But we said no, we said “let’s keep things in a less sophisticated form”
T: We said “let’s keep this like crap”.

PH: Did you have this idea in mind while you were making the record – that you wanted to offer it on the Internet?

T: No. Every time our manager would approach us and talk about it we’d say “we haven’t finished the music yet”. The concept only became appealing, something in which we might want to participate, after the album was finished and we were happy with our music. Before that, we didn’t talk about it, we had no idea – it’s impossible to anticipate the consequences when you start something like that.

PH: At a given time you knew that you would release ten songs, saving another eight.

T: No, the ten songs which are on the Internet is the CD.

PH: But there are more songs, bonus tracks?

T: In the box, yeah, yeah.
C: When I heard the songs in the box again…
T: The second CD.
C: I think we really made a good choice between the songs which are in the main album and the ones in the second CD. I’m not speaking ill of the second CD – one of my two favorite songs of this project is in that CD.

PH: What’s the name of that song?

C: “4 Minute Warning”
T: “Down Is The New Up” is my favorite.
C: But those songs would never fit the main CD. Neither “Last Flowers”.
T: Dividing the songs into 2 albums was like solving an enigma…

PH: Is the box also called In Rainbows?

T: Yes.

PH: The first thing I saw when I left the train today – which I took casually at your request, to help the environment – was a rainbow.

T: So the man upstairs kept his part of the bargain! (laughter)

PH: Why did you name the album “In Rainbows”?

C: It was one of many suggestions – but it sounds well. It’s like there was an open ending. As a title, I liked it immediately: it’s not a slogan, it’s not direct.
T: Not polarizing – it also connects with the artwork in the cover. That’s funny, it happens so many times the artwork giving you an idea… Stan was doing some wacky thing, with a pile of ink bursting.

PH: Stan, your designer?

T: Yeah, Stan Donwood. It all started with him tumbling down a candle.
C: No really, he tumbled down a candle, in one night that he was working at home.
T: And then he digitized the candle wax: it was very pretty and it fit well with the title. I started getting totally obsessed with the words “In Rainbows” – the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to feel right with the idea of trying to reach something unreachable. It exists, but you can’t get there.

PH: Some songs appear to be about nature, about how humans, while a part of nature, do not realize what they’re doing.

T: Wow, that’s great!

PH: Is that what you were trying to say?

T: Absolutely. I hadn’t quite heard it yet in those words, but it seems fine to me.

PH: That song about fishes [“Weird Fishes/Arpeggi”] where the lyric goes “the people are poisoning the sea, where do the fish go to escape?”…

T: You know what? All the time, when I was writing the album, I tried to run away from that sort of thing – I was very worried about whether that subject would creep in or not, but it was there, whether I wanted or not. To me, the most important in this album’s lyrics is the word “denial” in “House Of Cards” – that’s the starting point of everything on this album. “Denial”, at all levels. That was the only time when I was aware of what you’re referring to.

PH: In the end of the song it says “your ears should be burning” – is it of shame? Should mankind feel ashamed?

T: Yes, that could be told. Of all the lyrics I ever wrote, I hope people will interpret the words in this album in the most varied ways possible.

PH: In most of the songs there’s a change of perspective: the perpetrator and the victim, the hunter and the hunted, the polluter and the species in peril. You sing from several points of view.

T: Wow! What a fascinating interpretation, I hope everyone sees it like that!

PH: And it all comes down to a sort of human portrait of the human being in the 21st Century, who no matter how hard he tries – “you can fight it like a dog” – will always lose against the system. The “Bodysnatchers” will get you anyway.

T: The lyric of that song comes from the cut-and-paste of segments of “Perfect Women” – I was obsessed with the book, took several notes, and then kept cutting.
C: It’s a 70’s book, that later became a film, written by Ira Levin, who died not long ago.
He also wrote “The Boys of Brazil”.
T: The idea of wearing someone else’s skin came from “Perfect Women”: at the end of the film you can see how a new consciousness enters someone’s body.

PH: But let’s look at the first song, “15 Step”, and the first sentences in the album:
“How come I end up where I started/ How come I end up where I went wrong”.
It’s definitely Radiohead. When I was coming here, I started thinking “No, these guys aren’t a logo, but oops, I have one on my t-shirt and another in my jacket” – I started looking around me and all I saw was logotypes.

T: [Points at his white sneakers] Here’s another one, you can’t escape them!

PH: In other words, everything in which, spiritually, we are against, we keep on doing.

T: However, I wrote the album from a non-antagonist perspective, I wasn’t trying to fight a battle. It was the mood I was in, not necessarily indifferent; the rest just came up along the way – it’s a personal album, or at least, a humane album. It was equally good not to continue in “attack mode”; I wasn’t trying to make value judgments, I just wanted to sing from my own personal way of being.

PH: Is it possible for you, that way, to avoid making judgments of value about yourself?

T: I’m just human – so, it’s all about me, but [sighs], I’ll skip that question.

PH: “Nude” is an old song. What changed so that you could now place it in the album?

T: It’s the classic case of a song that for years didn’t seem to make sense. Don’t you reckon, Colin?
C: One of the frustrating things of being a part of this band is that some songs mean a lot to one person, but not to everyone at the same time. Then we hear one of us talking, talking, talking about how much he loves a song, while the others look to the other side, uninterested.
T: For example, I felt very uncomfortable with the way I had to sing “Nude”, I didn’t know what note to reach and I felt the lyrics to be very intimate, very delicate. It was only when Colin began to scratch the bass that I had the idea that I could sing it this way, that I could pull it through. The words now also fit in, but before… There were no changes, they just didn’t mean anything – and now they do.

PH: I could make up a story about a band member that wants to hang out with a groupie and another band member says “don’t do that, don’t show off, don’t have any big ideas and don’t be tempted”.

T: I’m not sure – since “Nude” was written around the time of OK Computer – but I think it was more about “Don’t be cocky, kid! Make sure you don’t grow too big for your shoes”.

PH: You didn’t answer my question about making judgments of value towards yourself in your songs – even so, it must be no coincidence that Faust [“Faust Arp”] and Mephistophilis [“Videotape”] appear on the album – the devil and the man who sells his soul to the devil.

T: So many deliberate literary references on this album! No, really, until today, during this interview, I hadn’t thought about that twice. (laughter) How odd…
C: Don’t mind him: “Reckoner” is in the album.

PH: So, what is a “Reckoner” after all?

T: I’m not sure.
C: Jonny or Phil know what it is. It’s an old Bible word, about Saint Peter or Doomsday…
T: Really?!
C: Yeah, yeah, the one who announces the judgment, who balances the good and bad actions of each person.
T: “Reckoner, you can’t take it with you”. Do you see what a lousy writer I am? (laughter) I took a long time to write that lyric, I tried desperately that the melody would write the words. Even if you have to play the music a thousand times to yourself until the words come out, it’s preferable to sitting with a notebook, writing pages full of words and then searching for some appropriate segments. It was such a nice and fresh melody that, with this song, I tried to do the opposite. We already had the demo, and everyone wanted the song to be finished, so I just had to finish the lyrics. And I did, sort of in autopilot mode – I knew how to do it, it seemed the song was writing itself. The same thing happened with “Pyramid Song”, it was like: “knock, knock, knock, you have to do it now”; “this song is great, do you have the lyrics?”, “give me ten minutes and we’ll record it”. And that’s how it was. I often think about the way that Neil Young writes his lyrics: he never rewrites anything, never goes back to change anything. While I fill a notebook after another, non stop. And I like it a lot, as a rule. But I also learned that the final product is not always better, sometimes you have to say “ok, I give up, I’ll just write whatever seems good now, without thinking about the consequences”. “Reckoner” came out of autopilot fully formed, and that made it better. If I had sat down to write it step by step, it would never have happened.

PH: Almost all of the reactions to In Rainbows are: “what an accessible Radiohead record!”

T: Yeaaaaah! We didn’t expect that! C: Dare him! Open the champagne!

PH: You don’t think so?

T: No, not really. It wasn’t at all a conscious choice to make an accessible album. I spoke with our manager and he said that, actually, only a small group of people had heard the album so far – because it’s being distributed on the net there’s a lot of excitement. Everyone thinks it’s a big thing, but it’s still small. If more people heard it, that would be great.

PH: A lot of people say that the fact that you placed the album on the net was a very good marketing trick.

T: How so? The download thing?

PH: Yes, with 10 songs, and, only after that, an expensive box with 8 extra songs.

T: We were, beforehand, aware of this risk – that the download topic would come across the path of the record content.

PH: I read somewhere that, even if In Rainbows had been distributed by carrier pigeons, it would still be a great album.

T: We knew there would be a lot of critiques and talking, that would disperse the attention from the album. Our manager could be telling us that there weren’t that many people who had heard the album – but, a week after it was released on the internet, I was in a bar in Barcelona and suddenly “Reckoner” was playing. It played in all the stores and bars – that’s very exciting.
C: Isn’t that great?!

PH: Are you suggesting that, if the album had been released as a CD first, millions of people would go and buy it?

C: I’m not saying that millions would buy it – but it would be accessible to everyone.
T: The truth is, we don’t know. The interesting part is that the download has no DRM (Digital Rights Management); whatever you download you can copy and send to whomever you like. So, the truth is we have no idea what’s happening.

PH: I have a copy from a person who downloaded it.

T: And that’s exactly what we wanted: to try and distribute the music as extensively as possible, without restrictions. But, as a consequence (laughter), we have to wait and see what happens next. We have no guarantees of being played on the radio and we obviously want our music to be heard by the biggest possible amount of people; we thought about what would be the best way to do so and we decided this was the best option.
C: This internet distribution thing reminds me of a concert. When you play a gig, you don’t know how it’s going to be with the audience – it happens at a certain time and place and some things come out better than others, you can’t control it. It happens the way it happens. It’s the same with this internet thing: it makes me feel closer to the people that love our music, there is no institution between us, no newspaper, no magazine, no record store or record company. A fan can get the music at the same time you can, before you came to this interview. So, everyone’s treated the same.

PH: People will always say “Radiohead are claiming that music isn’t worth anything anymore”.

C: It’s not necessarily true that music isn’t worth anything nowadays. The question is more: why is the value of music, as one of the arts that’s become commonplace, being thrown to a huge amount? Does all the music have the same value? Is this music worth the same as a Neil Young or Roxette album? Go to a record store: all the albums have more or less the same price.
T: It all comes down to thaT: we shouldn’t look at the download issue as being about taking value away from music, but as being part of the current debate about that value. I don’t see what harm it can do to anyone – the people that are complaining the most come from the record industry, who is trying to protect its income. I would like to remit the complaining artists to their respective record companies – you’re not getting paid anyway, so you’re already losing! They are, right from the beginning, a bunch of losers, because they are not being paid; and if the manager hasn’t told them this before, fire him! Much of the conversation about music piracy on the internet comes from big record companies – and the musicians tend to join the choir of complaints. But, more and more, they’re waking up to the fact that they weren’t receiving anything anyway.

PH: Was this the right moment to take this step, since your contract with EMI is over, after 6 albums? What is, in fact, happening right now? In this new situation you became your own record company, in what regards the box, but afterwards, for the normal CD edition of In Rainbows, you go to XL Records, in Europe – the cards were shuffled but nothing’s really changed.

T: The main thing is: you’re bringing music. And the question is: what platform do you use? That’s the essence of it.

PH: Don’t you think that the people who have, on their bookshelf, 20 cm of Radiohead CDs will be annoyed if they have In Rainbows only on Mp3 files in their computers and iPods?

T: Yes, of course there’s a demand for physical product.

PH: Did you discuss this for hours before deciding to go ahead with the download? Did opinions divide, did ashtrays fly through the air?

C: Actually it was a very harmonious decision. We did talk, in fact, for hours, but the last 2 months have been very thrilling. Finally, we could decide for ourselves when and how the music would be released – it was “micromanagement”, but not in a frustrating way. Compare that to the 3-hour meetings we were forced to have with EMI, where we had to talk to everything that is a department. Now everything’s become much more direct. T: And now we’re left with uncertainty. It’s exciting that, we too, have to guess what is really going on – and what will happen.
C: A few weeks ago we did a webcasT: we played 2 or 3 versions (“Ceremony”, from New Order, “The Headmaster’s Ritual”, from The Smiths and “Unravel”, from Bjork) and we invited people to come to the Internet and see us play for a while. There were some less well played parts, but also others where we were brilliant! Some really unexpected fragments… The way how we played “Reckoner” at the end of the webcast was really very cool. What happens is that we started this like a process where people can see and listen; they will like some bits, others not really – but they can decide for themselves. It reminds me of my favorite artists from the seventies: Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne and Neil Young – at Geffen Records – they did exactly what they wanted; sometimes a lot of people were interested and in other times, just a few. But that didn’t matter. Both were possible. The prettiest thing about the internet is that now you can see how a masterpiece is formed – it’s like a “performance”. Much better than releasing a single 4 weeks before the CD, and wonder if it’ll be a hit or not. All of those things are worries for the wrong reasons. So let me say this again: it was very liberating for us.
T: For everything there’s a kind of right momenT: it’s very important to keep doing it in a way that people will continue to listen, but no longer through the monstrous wrestling mechanism of the record company. Now it’s: press enter, let’s go do something else. Excellent.