As you know, Phil’s mum passed away the other night. He posted a note on Dead Air Space:
Just wanted to say sorry to the people who were due to come to our show in Amsterdam last night, particularly those who made wasted journeys. My mum died suddenly in the early hours of yesterday morning and so I just wanted to be at home with my family. Mum was a big Radiohead fan, and was very proud of all we’ve done as a band. I love and miss her very much.
Phil
(Thanks to Chris.)
Longtime reader Ari sends this clip from a Premiere Magazine interview with Richard Linklater, director of A Scanner Darkly:
Premiere: Did you get the Radiohead song you wanted for Scanner?
Richard: Thom Yorke is letting us use a great song of his new album for the closing credits, “Black Swan.” It has a chorus, “because it’s fucked up,” that will never get airplay.
This is unconfirmed until we can find a hard copy.
(Thanks to Ari.)
Todd from Twitch (a great site dedicated to independent and cool mainstream films) wrote in with some very interesting information. It’s still squarely in the rumor pile, but someone supposedly connected with the film wrote in to Twitch to report that Radiohead has been approached to score A Scanner Darkly, the new animated science-fiction film from Richard Linklater (Waking Life, Slacker, School of Rock). From the posting on Twitch:
“I have a friend who is an animator on Richard Linklater’s A SCANNER DARKLY. I thought you might be interested in this scoop.
The movie is doing very well in test screenings, but the #1 complaint audiences have is with the score. So I can only tell you this anonymously, but the producers have approached RADIOHEAD about doing a new score for the film and it looks like everything is going to go through. So in addition to an awesome animated Phillip K. Dick film, we will have a brand new Radiohead score to look forward to. as far as I know, this is the first time Radiohead has ever done a score for the film. While this is still a “rumor” at this time, I would give it a 99% accuracy rating at this point.
Also, I’ve seen the new trailer for the film and it is absolutely outstanding. It should be hitting the web any time now.”
Twitch has historically been very accurate in the past, but in this case I’m not sure the timing works out- with Radiohead hard at work on a new album, it seems odd that they’d take time away from that to score a film. Still, members of Radiohead have mentioned in the past that they’d love to do a film score, and this film (go check out the first trailer here) looks like the perfect film for it.
The film was originally scheduled for release in early 2005, but has been pushed back to mid-2006, supposedly to give the animators more time to “work on the film”. It either means Warner has great faith in the film, or it’s bad to the point of being unreleasable. We’ll see…
(Thanks to Todd and Twitch).
Joseph Tate (of Pulk-Pull.org) has been working on his book for some time, and he’s written in to let us know he finally has a release date. The Music and Art of Radiohead will be out on May 28th.
He also let us know that you can read the introduction online here. It’s worth a look…most Radiohead books have been glorified Tiger Beat biographies, but Joseph’s collection of essays from noted intellectuals promises to be significantly more interesting, even for the fan that knows it all.
In their singles review section, Pitchfork Media reviewed the two new Radiohead songs played at the recent Trade Justice Rally, giving them three stars. Sort of.
When Yorke leaked a few weeks ago, Mark Richardson joked he didn’t see why anyone would actually want to hear the song for the first time– or any song– in such a compromised state: Live bootleg recording, sub-128kbps rip, mostly unintelligible and probably not how the artist would want the song to be experienced initially anyway. This is no-good voyeurism, mum caught kissing Clause for what– double-presents and heard-it-first cred?
We’re data whores simply because we can be– that’s one reason– a respectable downloader possessing at least three or four gigs of music on the FireWire he’s still probably not listened to (but he keeps queueing up more). Here comes the old horse: “Hear it first” trumps “hear it best” trumps “maybe sorta have a relationship with a song like you did when three CDs and a few cassingles were all you had.”
That’s too much, but seriously, why did I download these songs (from longtime Radiohead site ateaseweb.com) again? The crowd in attendance– talking throughout both songs, probably about how the person making this bootleg had headgear or looked like the Napster cat– surely must have access to some Truman Show-type booth where they watch us squirm for mindfucks. The songs are awesome, I think.
Trey Anastasio of Phish fame covered ‘Knives Out’ during his Richmond, VA show on 4/26. The show will be available for download sometime in the future.
(Thanks to Phil & Mike.)