Hail to Radiohead

IC Coventry
09.06.03

In 2001, around the time that his first child was born, Thom Yorke took the habit of spending the early evenings driving alone around the fields and by-ways surrounding his home just as dusk was drawing in.

"I've got one of these cars with the natty blue headlights and the colours of the headlights got mixed in with the wild-life running into the bushes. The twilight invoked a dream-state within me. It's incredibly beautiful where we live but I used to listen to this Penderecki tune that's really ominous and scary and I'd just get this perverse sense of foreboding," said the singer.

These solitary drives helped inspire the ideas that bolster up much of what would eventually become Radiohead's sixth album, Hail To The Thief.

"I wrote a lot of stuff quickly: pages and pages of notes that seemed pretty incoherent at first. Most of it was taken from the radio because - suddenly being a parent - I'd be confronted by the radio giving a news report every hour of the day. It was during the Afghan war and it would ring bells in my head.

"I'd sit there making mad lists on pieces of paper of the people in the public eye that I had it in for," he laughs.

A year on the quintet reconvened at their Oxfordshire rehearsal/ recording studio for six whole months of ironing the new material into workable shape.

"We're an old-fashioned band in the sense that we work very intensely on our arrangements", claims Jonny Greenwood. "The rehearsals were all recorded endlessly and we'd eventually got a compilation of the best songs, so that once we reach the studio we could present (producer) Nigel (Godrich) with finished material and work quickly."

Unlike previous sessions, Godrich insisted the band fly out to Los Angeles.

"We'd always been hesitant about working in Los Angeles because - let's face it- Radiohead mixing in with the Hotel California mind-set doesn't sound like a potential marriage made in heaven," says Ed O' Brien. "But we quickly realized you can function out there without becoming tarnished by whatever else going on there. It was the best recording experience we ever had. We finished one song each day we were booked. We didn't over-scrutinize. We didn't get too cerebral. We trusted in ourselves, Nigel, the studio and the songs and just let go, really."

Phil Selway concurs: "During the time-off from touring Kid A and Amnesiac, Thom started distributing these CD's with new songs - just a vocal, a guitar or piano. We'd listen to them, let the songs seep in and - over time - ideas would develop about how to best develop them. This was the opposite of Kid A which involved no preparation beforehand and enormous pressure in the studio. Occasionally that can be stimulating but too often it becomes incredibly daunting. Two months of pre-production meant we could work much faster in Los Angeles where we ended up recording a song a day. On Kid A we were recording one track every one and a half months!"

O' Brien sees the new material as a nod back to the Bends era.

"This time we captured our actual energy - an energy that's been missing since The Bends. Climate affects the way you make music and a lot of The Bends was re-recorded in the sunshine during the summer of '94. This time, we had good weather and each day we'd leave the studio at about 5.30 and drive up to Griffith Park Observatory for a walk and look around. Looking out over L.A. reminded me of Bladerunner: no green spaces, all grids, motorcars and sandy-coloured buildings."

But these sunny promenades did little to lighten the menacing images cooked up by Thom. For example, "We Suck Young Blood" was inspired by his trips through Hollywood.

"It's got a sex thing about it -sex being a form of currency in Hollywood," Yorke says. "There's a malignant quality to it - a dark force devouring everything in its path. It's an expression of that desperate urge to be somebody at any cost, even if it means being preyed on and sucked dry by every scheming parasite in the world. You find examples of this in the music industry and the porn industry but it could just as easily relate to the way the extreme right seduce young people to enlist in their ranks. Fascism starts with the embittered 50 year old sado-masochist who finds dysfunctional teenagers who he then works on for a couple of years until they become transformed into homicidal little skinhead mother******s."

But despite the darkness that prevails in many of the tracks. Hail The Thief [sic] has proved to be a positive record.

"The music sounds really positive to me," says Yorke. "We came off the Kid A/ Amnesiac experience and we'd all become really confident with the things we'd learned and just wanted to carry on and enjoy it. And celebrate the way we were playing as a unit. The music sounds extremely confident to me. There's a darkness to it but it's also really shiny and bright."