Q: (since we were already talking about it) Might as well start with the record label. Must be a fairly new feeling for you, being in a small office that’s a bit chaotic rather than corporate?

T: Yeah. This is first time I’ve been. Yeah - I think - it’s - (makes grimaces) - people don’t sell many records these days, and you go to these big corporate offices it’s like, who’s paying for this? Cause my records aren’t paying for it any more that’s for sure.

Q: You haven’t done badly!

T: No, but I mean - they spent a lot of money! There’s a lot of marble and things like that. So it’s a bit difficult to make the connection. So when you come here, and you make the connection, it makes sense. To have indies, nowadays. There’s a very very top-heavy structure with big companies. EMI, Warners. Doesn’t make sense a lot of the time. That’s why I’ve come here.

Q: (big record companies’ priorities, anyone musically interesting at the bottom of their priorities, don’t even get an interview cause they haven’t got the time or the interest to organise it).

T: That’s cause they have half the staff they did have 5 years ago. And they have to rationalise the budgets. I assume that’s the way EMI works. Universal as well. You just wonder why would you get involved with it? But that’s just me right now. It’s one of those weird things - we have lots of mates at EMI that we get on with. It's a bit of a strange situation. But you see the way the companies are morphing into - it's like they're self-imploding thing. Doesn’t seem to be a very creative environment at all. They have been in the past. When we first signed with Parlophone it was incredibly creative environment. Much like this. The offices weren't flashy. It was mayhem. Tony who run it was great, inspiring, and lots of shit came out at the time as well. It goes in phases, I guess. But they weren’t doing what you were saying. Everyone on the label was on the label for a reason.

Q: (press people used to appreciate taste, preferences, and honesty. Now it’s a marketing thing…)

T: That’s - that just also shows how radio are operating. The radio are like: you’re either with us or not. There's a lot of low-level blackmail that goes on with corporates and radio stations in this country. Can smell a mile off. “it’s a priority”. We’ve had instances in the past - won’t name the radio station - but they came and asked: how much are you actually spending on this? They’re deciding on whether to play the record on the basis of how much the record company is gonna spend promoting it! Which is like, hang-on, isn’t that the wrong way around?

Q: As Radiohead or yourself, have you ever been tempted to do it by yourselves and start own label?

T: Yeah. We’ve talked about it. I think Ed sort of half did it once and gave up. Mostly cause - how much energy do you have to spend? Any additional distraction is a distraction. And it means your focus on music suffers. It’s that whole Apple scenario.

Q: So what swayed you towards XL?

T: Pfft - I don’t know really. Lots of things. They’re the biggest independent. And they seem to do some amazing things - with the White Stripes, The Prodigy, M.I.A. and Dezzee. And they’re all very different. And there aren’t a lot of bands - which was important for this. It’s not a BAND label. "We're developing THE BAND". Although they have Be Your Own Pet who are a good band! It was between them and Domino, and we looked at Domino and thought, you have your hands full with the Arctic Monkeys! Also we liked Martin and Richard from Beggars.

Q: Plans with Radiohead after EMI?

T: We’re not ruling it out at all, EMI, that would be silly. Despite all the things I’m saying. Lots of people we worked with there we really really trust. And we don’t blame them it’s a weird situation. No, we haven’t decided. We’ve scheduled in doing the record now, for after the festival in August, and that’s what we’re doing for the rest of the year. But we haven’t actually discussed how or where or what it comes out on. Doesn’t feel the right to do. It’s another distraction!

Q: The - apparently - painful birth of your next Radiohead album, and the worry about distractions, how did you find yourself slipping into the distraction of doing your own thing?

T: That was something - to be fair - when we finished Hail to the Thief, we wanted to take a break, and the first thing I said was: I want to do this. Something I’d wanted to do for ages. And everyone was I think relieved I wanted to go and get it out of my system. It felt like a really good time to do it. Cause after the Thief tour everything felt really weird. And everyone was going off to have kids anyway. And we’d been doing it for a long time without questioning genuinely what we were doing, and there were, at the end with the contract with EMI - it felt like a good time to go away and think it over. It took a long time. Cause every one gets stuck into other lives. And then it’s almost like you have to pull yourself out of that. I mean - it happens to everybody. You get stuck into all this other stuff. And then you get up one day and you go: nononono! THIS is what I do. Get me out of here, I need to do this! That’s why we decided to go on tour in the end, to go and check the cobwebs out.

Q: And try new material?

T: That was the other reason. We gave ourselves quite a tough deadline to sort everything out - ten weeks.

Q: You never intended to tour with these songs by yourself?

T: No. I mean - I'm surprised that later on I'm having to play some of these songs anyway. But it's really - They weren't written like that. So I don't feel particularly comfortable. I'm not particularly happy with it. But - it's a song, and so you can represent it and do it justice in a way. But they were written in the context of certain sounds, and when those sounds aren't there it's a really odd feeling, as if someone's pulled the carpet from under me completely. But I'll do it. Whatever.

Q: Was it a sense of curiosity that made you want to make this album? Did you need to find out what would come out if you were left to your own devices? Not as part of an ensemble.

T: Absolutely. That thing about left to your own devices, and you have to come up with all your own ideas, and not have the privilege of editing other peoples’ ideas. And having to think on the spot, and having to work specifically on the computer, and come to it with not a lot of preparation. Wing it blindly all the way through. These were the things I really needed to do. Also, I wanted the challenge to make something coherent that people wanted to hear, but was predominantly electronic, but wasn’t like - it’s an electric record, although that's not what I hear when I hear it. I wanted to use those sounds and shit. But originally when I did it it was just a bunch a doodle. To be neither Nigel nor I expected it to be a coherent thing. It was just an excuse to sit down and mess around with these sounds to begin with.

Q: To work like that, the spontaneity, nobody else to tell you that that's crap...

T: Oh, no, that was most definitely Nigel's job! Hahaha.

Q: Did it bring you surprises - thoughts and music you hadn't expected - things where you thought, fuck, how did this happen?

T: Yeah. A lot. That's always been the best way when you suddenly think, how did I get to this point? But the really interesting thing is assembling it as a serious of accidents and what you think are doodles, and mucking around with what you think are doodles, but actually there's a really coherent idea somewhere in the middle of it, and then you build on that. So it's sort of like sampling. You go in stages and then you forget how you got to that point and then you hear it completely cold, and you hear something completely different, so you take those sections and sample them and you get those 3d, 4th and 5th generation ideas where you lose track of where you originally set off from. That was something that's always really excited me. We've done that a lot with Radiohead as well. And I just wanted to do something that was just like that.

Q: Lyrically, would you say you wrote different things then you'd write for Radiohead?

T: Pfft - I don't know. That's a really difficult one to answer. No - I don't know. It was what was going on in my head at the time, so they could equally have been on a Radiohead record.

...

(music from next door)

Q: What I also like about the album, the website with those drawers - and the whole thing as a, erm, "package"...

T: Waheyyy!!! Haha.

Q: ...has the feeling of a collage. I really like that fragmentary thing...

T: Yeah. Me and Stanley had this idea of doing a website where we tried to minimise absolutely any text up to the moment where you get the notes and stuff in the drawers. The idea of doing the whole thing as a schematic - I don't know why but it made real sense at the time. It was real fun doing it. And we didn't code it up, I can't do flash and things like that. Also it was in the context of - we knew for a fact that there was a limited amount of things I could do. Cause right at the moment of when we were doing that I was about to go on the road with Radiohead. Ahhh - how do we do something that's interesting? But, again, if you have limitations sometimes you come up with good shit. Cause you just have to do it there and then. You have no choice. That's another interesting lesson for. Nigel's always banging on about things. And you go, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. But he says once you're put in a pressurised situation you do much better work. Me especially. If you're given six months to prepare something you can just forget it! You've done every different parameter you can, you can't tell the difference, you don't know what you're doing, you've got an awful lot of work, but you have no idea what to do with it. And he took the piss out of me, cause I'd say, "yeah, I've pretty much got the words for ... sorted out now", and he'd go on the phone to me, "so what does that mean, you've got 30 pages of nonsense". "Yeah". "So when are you gonna cut it down?" "Well, I was gonna do it..." "NO, do it NOW!"

Q: Have you ever read that Eno book, one year in his life, memoirs...

T: He lives near us now, actually. Anyway.

Q: In there he describes working on a James album. Not enough money, not enough time, band said impossible, Eno said, let's do three albums, and he set up two studios...And they did, "Wah Wah" was a second album that came off it...

T: My favourite thing is that thing - there's a particular thing we have on the website which is called Scrapbook. That's where I put everything that doesn't end up - which I like but can't make it work in a song. Which is deeply frustrating, because I do write 30 pages of stuff and then it all gets jettisoned. So it's all randomised in the scrapbook and when I'm stuck for a line I go there. Rather than having to go through my - well, they're all in a safe now, but: my notebooks I do that. It's great. That's something that I vaguely remember from an Eno idea I read somewhere. There you go.

Q: How does it work - you've got your doodling room at home, sometimes you do a bit of laptop, sometimes you do other things, and then you take the laptop stuff to the studio, and Nigel...

T: This particular thing the way it started - I had a series of ongoing musical doodles, being done on the laptop or one of the other systems at home. Usually they didn't have vocals on. They were things kicking around in my head. And the way I was looking at it was like you'd have a chord progression and you'd play it every now and again, and you then - you wanna sing to it but you don't know exactly what, yet. So you'd have it on in the house on rotation, randomising CDs rammed with these ideas to the point of having so many you lose track and it's a surprise when it comes on. That's when it becomes inspiring, when they come on in the car, or whatever, and you go: ahh, actually, I've got something for that now. So it starts with little tiny grains and you build it up and build it up. But it's not too dissimilar to me to M.I.A. record for example, she builds it up from bits of samples she can or can't get clearance from, and things are forming up from there. And the idea that you had played it at some stage almost gets forgotten. But then later on you might play bass on it. Like "Harrowdown Hill", that's a classic one for that. It's got that scratchy rhythm I cut up from the Radiohead archives, and then added bass line, and it all went bang bang bang very quickly. But I'd had the idea for the bass line in my head endlessly, when listening to the rhythm, but never got round to do doing it...

Q: Would you say - having kids has - I'd imagine that - it happened to me and I imagine it happens to everybody that when you have kids you become much more aware of ecological things...

T: Yeah.

Q: But has it also had any bearing on the rest of your creative motivation?

T: Erm, sometimes it's a real hassle cause you have less time than you used to. It just makes you realise how you squandered your time. Blablabla. That's just what my parents used to say, boring! And the other thing is - erm, just a kind of weird sense of urgency about what you're doing. Rather than what people might assume - you're old and tired now, you're a parent now. It's actually just the opposite: fuck off, let me have it! I have to get this out for more than one reason now! Not a very good way of explaining. I thought originally when I'd become a parent I'd get lazy and I'd lose my focus. But I think it just makes it a different thing. I personally think I'm less tolerant of empty gestures. That's kind of a judgmental way of putting it. But maybe it's a bit more compassionate. It really annoys me - one day by accident I turned on the radio and some guy was bitching about me. And how I was talking about kids and saying how marvellous it was. I can't remember saying that - OK, I said briefly that was great, but HELLO! But this guy was ranting about he's all washed up, it's over - laying into me cause I'd reproduced! I thought it was the most extraordinary thing. So for some reason I'm feeling really uncomfortable now, cause it's like - maybe I should be feeling ashamed! It's supposed to be complete anathema with being a creative person, apparently. It didn't stop fucking Picasso, though, did it!

Q: Also, how could you not - not being a creative person who predominantly creates to make money but to...

T: But because that's what he has to do.

Q: Quite, anything but actually reflecting the life around is...

T: Yes, absolutely absurd! You'd have to give up. One of the biggest kicks I get is when my son Noah comes in and starts mucking around with the synthesizers and we're having a laugh making stupid drum sounds. I love that. I think that's just brilliant.

Q: What's his favourite album?

T: He really likes that Stephen Malkmus album, "Tell the Truth". And he likes that a lot (his solo album). But obviously he listens to that when I'm not around. Cause I've heard it. He really likes "Harrowdown Hill". He sings it in the bath.

Q: What sort of conclusions do you draw from the fact that such an individualistic album is at number 2 in the Billboard Charts?

T: I think that's brilliant! I have to say that I was really proud and very very happy that anybody gave a shit that particular week when it came out. I was amazed. Really amazed and really happy. Me and Nigel and my partner went to see the Chili Peppers. It was good fun actually, to see them. And it was a really good week. I was really happy. And I was really shocked that people gave a shit, considering that - as you say - it's in a world of its own in a lot of ways.

Q: I think it's just such a positive sign - as is Radiohead's career as a whole - that...

T: It's nothing short of a fucking miracle, hahaha!

Q: It's a finger up at the corporate people who're telling us you can't sell anything unless it fits the marketing boxes.

T: The only time - nowadays when they're talking about singles and what you can get on the radio and what not - it just doesn't make any sense to me. To me you could put every song on that album on a single. And they'd go, nonononono. Not XL, of course. It's the radio stations themselves. You go: you're not actually listening. But what hey!

Q: Reading at the moment?

T: Howard Hughes biography. Republished after "The Aviator" came out. It's fucking - it's a bit trashy....I've always wanted to know the underbelly of the Howard Hughes myth. And fuck, it's all there...At one time he was fucking Ginger Rogers, Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn and someone else....
The Geography of Nowhere by a guy called Kunstler, fucking brilliant book, about how trains in US were ruined. You kind of assume things were always like this, and then you realise, oh no, some people got together and planned to make our environment to look like shit for a reason. That inspires you to think, OK, possibly we can change this rather than assuming that it's always gonna be like that...

Q: Anything add?

T: No. I just hope The Eraser doesn't end up in that nice little neat art house corner. I just don't feel it's like that. That's the bee I have in my bonnet at the moment. When we finished the album me and Nigel went, man, this is so - to us the record is so obvious. It's not at all one of those records to us where you go, "yes, that's a bit weird". That's how it seems to be seen in this country and it just drives me nuts. I appreciate the fact it's done really well. It's fucking great. But it really surprises me how people see it. It seems so obvious...