[recording starts here]

Nic Harcourt: "I'm your host Nic Harcourt and you're listening to a special edition of Sounds Eclectic with a live performance by Thom yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead recorded in front of a live audience at Electric Lady Studios in Greenwich Village New York. The songs in the first set were I Might be wrong, I Will, Sail to the Moon, and No Surprises. We have another set coming up later. I managed to persuade the whole band: Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Phil Selway, Ed O'Brien, and Thom Yorke to join me in a small room above the main studio for our interview. It was a rainy New York afternoon, and if you listen carefully, you can actually hear the rain falling outside of the windows. We talked about a number of things including the new album, Hail to the thief. But we began by discussing the recording of the group's groundbreaking previous records Kid A and Amnesiac. I asked them about the time that they were working on the songs for those albums and if they had been pushing themselves to explore the boundaries of what a group of musicians could accomplish within the confines of a band. Here is Thom Yorke.

Thom: "Someone said that...one of us said this recently...where...our minds kind of got blown as to the possibilities which we hadn't pursued yet. You know? And, so when we started KID A and Amnesiac, it was sort of: we had almost been frozen up by the fact that we could actually do anything we wanted. We were a band, but yet we were into using samplers and into programming and we were into basically, giving ourselves the freedom to go anywhere we wanted. And, it was kind of actually quite...it wasn't like exploring untouched territory in that sense. It was just like, well, what we've been doing up until now is not turning us on...me especially...anymore, so you start looking at every other possibility, and kind of freak out. *Laughs*

Ed: "*laughs*

Nic: "Well that was after, as you said, all the touring with OK Computer, I guess, right? You just really needed to look at things in a different way?

Ed: "Yeah. I mean it wasn't just the touring on OK Computer, we'd basically signed at the end of 91, and we pretty much went on the road from about May 92 and didn't stop until, you know, what was it, the summer, 98. And I think the beginning of, when we did the, when we started rehearsing OK Computer, we had a month off, but that was the longest we'd had off, so it wasn't just that, it was the continuation...and, we kind of wanted to get to that stage where we could go, Ok, let's stop, woah, we can stop.

Thom: "I remember: I remember the initial stages of OK Computer, when we decided to do Glastonbury and all that, and I remember saying to everybody,

Ed: "*Laughs* The soothsayer!

Thom: "Not that I hold it against you, but, uh, "Ok, we'll do Glastonbury and then we'll do a few months, but that's it. I can't do anymore or I'll crack up." You know, "I just won't be able to do anymore, we've been" you know, "I need to not do this" and uh, a year and a half later, we finally did. And it took me, very personally, a very very long time to recover. And that was just when the music... I think everybody suffered from it to an extent.

Ed: "Oh, yeah.

Thom: "Now, we had come, we had just, by the end of 98, we were vegetables...

Ed: "Fried, yeah

Thom: "We were vegetables

Nic: "A little earlier on with the audience here you were talking about how the songs can be different, from the studio to performing them live, and as we just said, you toured a lot during the last few years, and though you've taken time off in between, it's interesting to think of the songs and the last two studio albums in particular, as having been concieved and put together in a room or in a studio. How did they change? Or, how do they change, when you perform them live?

Jonny: "What's strange is how each process recording and performing live, can, they inform eachother, so, when it came to trying to play Kid A and Amnesiac live, we had to learn quite new processes of playing, and...

Thom: "But, it was surprisingly simpler than we thought it would be.

Jonny: "It was, it was much simpler, 'cos we were in that framework of just letting go and being excited by all, and then when it came to writing these songs, for this record, we could use those techniques without thinking about it. Um. And what had been a bit slow during recording Kid A and Amnesiac just suddenly felt very natural, and could just be grabbed, taken off the shelf, and used. Whatever process it was.

Thom: "Right.

Jonny: "Which is a great position to be in...

Thom: "It also meant that, in a way, when we got into like programming or spending like two or three days working on sounds before they went down or whatever, towards the end it wasn't such a big deal. It wasn't, I mean, because it was, because everybody now understood the necessary boring bits, in the recording. And it was sort of all right, when, you know, there, you remember Myxomatosis, when I sort of spent more or less twenty four hours straight cutting up what you 'd done on the drums, Phil,

Phil: "Mnn.

Thom: "The only way to have got it done was just like, Ok, "Leave me alone and I'll try and do it", and it worked! It was worth doing, but, you know, but that wouldn't have happened before, when we were doing Kid A and Amnesiac because, it was an insecurity thing, people were like, well why are we spending two days doing this?, Why are we spending two days cutting up drums? Or, programming the, you know, this bit here, or this bit there, and blah blah blah. And now it's like, yeah, whatever, fine. If that's what we need to do, let's do it. So, it was not just, sort of...it informed the live shows, as Jonny said, it then informed how we worked in the studio. And speed is being of the essence.

Nic: "So, each process kind of feeds the other one in a certain way.

Thom: "Yeah.

Thom: "And you're not like frozen up by the possibilities any more. You're just like, get on with it and try and do it quickly. Which is something that Nigel is really cool at 'cos Nigel tends to kick us up the arse saying, "If you want to try that, try it. And you've got four hours."

Nic: "Right.

Thom: ""If you ain't got it done in four hours then we'll do something else". And that's actually really good.

Jonny: "Yah. It's all about speeding up the time between what's in your head and what people hear, and so that it becomes hopefully as natural as possible, however much you use.

Nic: "Well, you were talking about Nigel...Godrich obviously who has produced the last four albums I guess now, and, you did this one in L.a.

Jonny: "Yup.

Thom: "We wanted to have a place where we did like an initial thing and we get away from everything else, and you just lock yourself in a room...and it was a little bit of like, yeah, just that we'd never dreamed of doing that, at all!

Jonny: "And a lot of studios you go to, um, things could just feel quite pretentious I suppose, portentious, um, and L.a. never does, really, it's just got quite a nice thing about it.

Nic: "I mean, did it influence any way that the songs came out, do you think? Spending the time there as opposed to the English countryside?

Ed: "Definitely, yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that when we went back and had the Autumn back in Oxfordshire, we did two weeks in L.a. and then five weeks in Oxfordshire, the songs change quite a bit, you know, I think the songs were really, really really warm, they were really warm. And we sort of, you know...

Thom: "I think we were pretty, I mean, it got a bit sticky towards the end of the two weeks, when we were tired, but I think we were pretty light...lightened up about being away.

Ed: "Right...

Thom: "and just sort of concentrating and...

Jonny: "I mean that's all you're there for, isn't it? Which is great...

Thom: "And we had two evenings off, and we managed to get out on a Sunday and go to the desert, and that was it! And we just worked, solidly, but it was fun, because we'd been waiting to do it for ages! You know what I mean? And it wasn't Britain. Ha!

Jonny: "heh!

(Splice)

You're listening to a special hour of sounds eclectic with Radiohead, we're stepping away for a moment but we' ll be back with the rest of my interview with the band and another set of live music, stay close: for more Sounds eclectic.

(Splice)

This is Sounds eclectic from PRI, "Public radio international". I'm Nic Harcourt and you're listening to a special edition of the program with a live performance from Radiohead, we have another set of music coming up with Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood in just a few moments' time, but first, more of my chat with the band:

Thom: "A lot of the record is about that frustration and powerlessness and anger, and the huge gap between the people that annoint themselves and put themselves in control, and the people that allegedly voted for them. That was something I really couldn't get away from on the record. It was really apparent.

Nic: "I know that a couple of you are "dads", I know that you became a "dad" a couple years ago, who else is a "dad"?

Phil: "I am!

Nic: "I became a "dad" myself three months ago, and, what a perspective shift I experienced just in this brief period of time. How does that life experience impact the way you write?

Phil: "Talking about writing, I'm looking at you, Thom...

Thom: "No! I was just thinking, the lack of time is the obvious one. When you go, and you work, you work quickly, and becoming a "dad" makes you think about, you know, think about what it is that you do yourself, and personally speaking it made me consider that music is much, is a something of a gift rather than something to be frustrated about, and angry over. But the other side of the coin is that: I think one of the most important things on this record, although I don't think I thought about it at the time particularly, or maybe I did, was that feeling of anger and frustration at being totally powerless to change the future that awaits our children. I think that you 'd not be human if you didn't feel like that. And, I think this record from the title to the music to the lyrics...everything is that, really. It's the core of the record. It's like "How dare you, how dare you destroy our children's future you motherfuckers"

Nic: "Ed, you said that in a recent interview that Hail to the thief represents the end of an era. What do you mean by that?

Ed: "Well, I don't know! I mean, it's just, there's something about the way that we've recorded this, we've made this record, that, it may be to do when I said that: It may be to do with the fact that it's the first time we've...the recording session has been really easy. And it feels like we've employed ways, that we've made this record in a way that has drawn upon things, particulary because of the live thing, but drawn upon things, that, over the last five records. And, you know, we've kind of: Nigel said; he said, at one stage, he said: "This is the album that you deserve to make," and, Ok, we've kind of done this now. So, you know, it, personally speaking it feels like we really need to sort of go away and do something completely, completely different.

Phil: "You're right, and it's also, I think it has set a lot of ghosts to rest.

Ed: "Yeah! Exactly!

Phil: "I think things that had been lurking there from as far back as Pablo Honey.

Ed: "Yeah!

Phil: "Actually managing to get through those anxieties when you're in the studio and do that, it's like, ok, right, that is behind us.

Ed: "We've got now, I mean, we had talked about it, but we haven't even talked, I mean I feel vaguely embarrassed saying that it feels like the end of an era, but it really, really does. You know? It kind of like...

Phil: " Yeah, it's time to ...we'll change again.

Ed: "It's time to really change, cos in order to, you know, what you do, or what we've been doing, is also a young person's game, you know? It really is.

Thom: "We're all old gits now.

Ed: "If you want to carry on doing it, you have to change the way that you, you know, and the music has to follow suit, maybe. I ...I don't...

Thom: "Do we have to go like mid-tempo...

Ed: "We've been doing that all our lives!

Phil: "Oh, we're getting faster then!

Ed: "We're actually getting faster!

Jonny: "It's where it's...

Phil: "It's a mid life crisis, isn't it...

Thom: "No, no, I can do this still, really: *straining noises* *gag noise*

Jonny: "I've just got to not get wasted the night before...

Thom: "*gags*

Jonny: "That's the key!

[recording ends]