Aussie paper The Age has a very interesting article on Radiohead. Featured topics include their contract situation, Bush/Blair, and how generally well-adjusted all of the chaps are these days, although points are docked for calling Ed a “Hugh Grant lookalike”.
Here’s a taste-
While the band undoubtedly abdicated some kind of generational figurehead status with their diversion into electro-jazz noodling, this was partly a deliberate ducking manoeuvre following the massive global acclaim that greeted OK Computer in 1997. Five years ago, feeling scrambled and exposed, the band was running scared. They discussed splitting up, and Yorke spent long periods consumed by depression.
“It’s not particularly strong, it’s not particularly destructive, it’s not particularly bad,” he says with a hint of tetchy impatience of his experience of the black dog. “I’m very lucky. Lots of people are much, much worse. Lots of people can’t leave the house. They’ve got no idea why, maybe they never will find out why. And all the drugs they get given don’t work, and all the therapy is completely pointless.”
Yorke’s personal therapy involved buying a new house overlooking a windswept beach in a remote corner of south-west England, where he cooled his overheated brain with fresh air. “I got back into drawing,” says the man who left Exeter University with a degree in English and Art. “Lots of drawing, and lots of walking. It was the best help I could get, really, especially the extreme weather and strong winds and things like that. It kind of reflects what’s going on inside.”
A thoroughly English cure. Because, however global their reputation, Radiohead remain deeply, almost comically, English in person. Aticulate, literate and soberly dressed, they could pass for junior theology professors or 19th century polar explorers. Even Thom Yorke, bent double by misery and self-loathing, recalls the mad genius figures of Victorian literature.
Go over and read the whole thing here.