Thom Yorke, optimist

Has Radiohead's frontman finally lightened up? Maybe. The good news is, the music's still bleak

Ben Rayner
Toronto Star
08.06.03

"Fun" isn't a word one is prepared to hear from the mouth of Thom Yorke.

Yet the infamously put-upon Radiohead frontman appears, at least by Yorke-ian standards, in remarkably good spirits this afternoon in a tiny Old Montreal hotel as he discusses the various processes and circumstances that led up to the revered Oxford quintet's latest record, Hail To The Thief (out Tuesday).

"Fun" comes up several times, actually. And Yorke - whose control-freak tendencies were reportedly straining inter-Radiohead relationships to the breaking point during the making of the band's last, coldly experimental pair of records, Kid A and Amnesiac - genuinely beams, even lets loose a couple of chuckles, when talk turns to the uncharacteristically loose approach he and bandmates Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Phil Selway and Ed O'Brien took to making the new album. Could it be Radiohead, the world's pre-eminent source of dystopian, end-of-the-world prayers for the paranoid, has entered a lighter era?

Not really. But perhaps just a little.

"We came away from the last two records kind of wanting to just - well, I just got away from music, personally, for six months. Completely," says Yorke. "Then I did some demos for the others, just because it was something to do, really. Each one took about half an hour, and I didn't really think anything of it. I was just sending them out and in my head I was thinking, `Well, I really have no attachment to any of this stuff at all. It doesn't mean anything to me.'

"It was actually really good, because previous to that, that would have deeply worried me. `Oh, my god, I don't feel anything for this.' But if this was sh--, then great. I'd just send it out. I wasn't thinking, `Oh, my god, I've dried up,' which I was thinking before.

"But the others had listened to these demos a lot and were really enthusiastic," Yorke continues. "I was totally into just letting it happen and not trying to get a big hammer out and smash everything up along the way, which I was doing before. And because they were really enthusiastic about the stuff, it helped me see it for what it was... There was no desire to make some big musical leap of faith. We were in quite a good space. We ended up after the last bit of touring in quite a good headspace and lots of musical things were happening that we thought were interesting and we could go and pursue."

Hail To The Thief does indeed sound like the work of the Radiohead who last awed audiences in these parts with a 2001 tour stop at Barrie's Molson Park that brought material from the outwardly unperformable Kid A and Amnesiac to vivid life as a highly musical 21st-century prog-rock suite.

The new record nimbly grafts Kid A and Amnesiac's skittish avant-techno flourishes onto warmer, if no less ambitious, rock songwriting structures in tune with 1997's masterwork OK Computer and 1995's The Bends. Meanwhile, if Radiohead's celebrated guitars are no longer the focus of the music, they've certainly returned to the forefront - tellingly, the album's first cut, the Orwell-checking "2+2=5," opens with the buzz and crackle of someone plugging into an amp and announcing "That's a good way to start" before building to a sparkling six-string firestorm in the "Airbag" vein at its climax.

The androids have left the studio; the band has, apparently, returned. And Yorke confirms that, for the new album - much of which was road-tested during a European tour late last summer - "the frame of reference and the method was performance."

"What we were doing a lot the last time was assembling things from editing and jamming and programming," he says. "If there was any programming or if there were electronics this time around, it had to happen in the room with everything else. So there was this element of performance to it.

"Because we're all playing in the same room together, on the surface it has a sort of coherence to it. But actually, there's quite a lot of chaos going on.... We were rehearsing how loose we could be and how we could get away with it, really."

This levity of musical approach doesn't, however, extend to Hail To The Thief's lyric sheet, upon which blood, beatings, murderers, diseased cats, poisoned rivers, "the jaws of Hell" and numerous species of apocalyptic imagery figure heavily.

Yet while the album title is lifted from protest slogans that made the rounds after George W. Bush's contentious ascension to the U.S. presidency ("I'm surprised we got our visas," quips Yorke), the lyrical content is less direct political commentary than it is a horrified, cryptically personal reflection of a violent, uncertain time in human history.

"(The lyrics) are very much just absorbing what's going on around. There are two or three old songs in there that never made sense until now, like `Sit Down. Stand Up' and `I Will.' You just absorb. You can't help it, even if you try not to. I tried not to. I desperately tried not to write anything political, anything expressing the deep, profound terror I'm living with day-to-day. But it's just f---ing there, and eventually you have to give it up and let it happen."

Yorke hopes listeners can nevertheless discern a kind of twisted humour in his words, a hint of the gallows laughter that gives many world-weary global citizens some relief from their frazzled nerves and fizzing brains these days. One of the original titles he suggested for the record was, in fact, This Would Be Funny If It Wasn't So F---ing Terrifying.

"To me, a song like `We Suck Young Blood' has got a real humour to it," he says. "When I hear it, I think it's sick, but it's funny. The bubble's burst in the middle when we go into this terrible jazz exploration. There's a queasiness and terror to it, but there's also a joy, a not terribly serious side to it."

If Hail To The Thief can be read as a musical summation of the five Radiohead albums that preceded it, it's a fitting close to a chapter in the 14-year-old band's history that Yorke - already on record in the NME saying Radiohead will be "completely unrecognizable in two years" - predicts will end when the whirlwind of touring and promotion around this record subsides.
This is the last record within the band's current contract with Parlophone/EMI, and cue for the band to "heavily re-evaluate what we do and how we work." Maybe, says Yorke, it's "time to use the whole system in a different way" and work "at a different pace in a different atmosphere and towards different ends."

"I really loved making this record. I had a really good time. It's the most fun record we've made," says Yorke.

"But putting an album together now in an `album' format and knowing the format and knowing the level of bulls--t that goes with it - okay, now we have to make it into a coherent record and work out the running order and the mixes and the artwork - when the big cogs started turning, man, it f---ing nearly killed me.

"I really don't think I can do this much longer. You know the bulls--t that's going to happen. You know it's going to be 100 per cent bulls--t for the next six months. And then people will decide whether they like the record or not.

"Personally, I'm really f--king sick of the whole album thing and that level of scrutiny and just the format itself. Enough already."

Radiohead's future, he muses, might involve not just extracting the band from the standard recording-contract situation, but also bidding farewell to the album - a format that Yorke suggests "might actually be one of the things that's killing music today" - and simply releasing single tracks or EPs in the future at a pace creatively comfortable for the band.

"I don't know what (the focus) would be musically, but if we were to pursue this idea of EPs - if you have, say, four tracks - you can do something coherent in a different way with four tracks than you can do with a record, where you're sort of paranoid about how things will go together. If it's four tracks, that's license to explore that one area for one EP and another idea for another EP. And that's what excites me.

"I'm into the idea of releasing things (where) maybe people just don't know who it is and stuff like that," he says, musing on Radiohead's future with the kind of optimism one has come to expect from Thom Yorke.

"I don't know. Maybe it dies like that."