Author: Jonathan

New York, NY

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Ed O'Brien Radiohead

Buy Ed O’Brien’s guitar, help out a good cause

Ed O'BrienWe recently received an email from Luke Bainbridge, one of the founding editors of Observer Music Monthly, letting us know about a special cause that may interest you hardcore Radiohead fans. Luke writes:

“My four year old niece was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumour earlier this year, and a charity trust fund has been launched to help raise money to help pay for treatment in Texas. Ed heard about the campaign and extremely generously gave us the guitar he used on Kid A and Amnesiac, and toured with up to In Rainbows to auction for the charity.

The charity website is www.billiebutterflyfund.org“

Click here for the auction.

The guitar is a white Fender Telecaster, as seen in the picture to the right. Even more cool is that all five members of Radiohead signed it.

A note by Ed accompanies the guitar and it reads:

To whoever ends up with this Tele…

It was bought in the summer of ’98, just prior to us going into record the albums which came out as Kid A and Amnesiac. It was pretty much the only guitar I used at that time. It’s also been gigged a lot, up until and including the In Rainbows tour.

Hope you enjoy it – all the best

Ed O’Brien

If you’d like to own it, check out the auction and get to bidding! It’s a great cause and we’re happy that Ed and the rest of the band were able to donate the guitar.

Photos:

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Jonny Greenwood Thom Yorke

Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, and DOOM’s ‘Retarded Fren’

Thom Doom

While we are talking about collaborations, we should mention that Thom and Jonny recently collaborated with DOOM on a track called “Retarded Fren” for a compilation celebrating the 10th anniversary of Lex Records called Complex. The song samples  “Proven Lands”, a track Jonny did for the There Will Be Blood score.

You can listen to the track over at Pitchfork

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Thom Yorke

Watch: ‘Shipwreck” by Modeselektor featuring Thom Yorke

If you haven’t seen it, check out the video of Modeselektor’s “Shipwreck” which is one of two songs off their new album, Monkeytown, that Thom Yorke collaborated on. Enjoy.

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Phil Selway

Philip Selway at the Pegasus Theatre November 10 & 11

Philip SelwayAaaand we’re back from a short break…

While we were gone, it was announced that Philip Selway would be doing a couple of solo shows in Oxford this month. The Radiohead drummer writes on Dead Air Space:

Hello

Next month, on the 10th and 11th November, I will be doing a couple of shows of my solo material at The Pegasus Theatre in Oxford to mark the start of their 50th Anniversary. I’m a patron of the theatre and these shows are fundraisers to support the fantastic and really valuable work that Pegasus does in providing access to the creative arts for young people. It’s a wonderfully intimate place to see a show, so if you fancy coming along, I’d love to see you there. Tickets cost £25 and are available from my store here:

http://tickets.philipselway.com/Store/DisplayItems.html

Or the Pegasus ticket store here:

http://tickets.pegasustheatre.org.uk/Productions/Performances.aspx

X

Philip
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GP

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Ed O'Brien Radiohead The King of Limbs Thom Yorke

Thom Yorke: The way TKOL was recorded was a gamble

Thom Yorke and Ed O’Brien recently gave an interview with NPR’s Guy Raz and talked about the recording process for The King of Limbs:

Speaking recently with NPR’s Guy Raz about recording The King of Limbs, singer Thom Yorke and guitarist Ed O’Brien agree that, after coming off the long tour cycle for In Rainbows, the band was feeling exhausted and uninspired. To make the new album work, everyone had to slow down and step back.

“We had an initial session of about five weeks, and it was really like kids in kindergarten,” O’Brien says. “You had to simplify what you were doing — you couldn’t do loads of ideas. You had to listen to one another. Believe it or not, in a band you can lose that.

“Part of what you do is rejection,” O’Brien adds. “I think everybody finds it hard, but I think part of creativity is bouncing back from that. What’s great about the environment that we have is that no one ever says, ‘You can’t do that.’ You try it, and then it’s judged on whether it’s right for the track.”

Radiohead tried a new approach for The King of Limbs: Each member worked, piecemeal, on his own contributions before sharing them with the group. Yorke says working that way was a big gamble.

“Almost every tune is like a collage: things we’d pre-recorded, each of us, and then were flying at each other,” Yorke says. “You get to a point where you think, ‘OK, this bit needs a big black line through it.’ It’s like editing a film or something.

“I don’t think we really genuinely thought anything would come out of it,” he adds, “certainly not an entire record.”

Playing live presents its own set of challenges. O’Brien says that, as happy as he was with The King of Limbs upon its completion, the prospect of turning an intricate studio creation into a concert experience was panic-inducing.

“That’s the scary part — you realize that you have created in this vacuum, in this bubble,” O’Brien says. “It plays tricks on the brain.”

But Yorke says adapting the new material was liberating, as well.

“That’s one of the ways we move on musically, is having to force ourselves to learn this thing,” he says. “It’s a backward process, but it really exists in another way once you can actually play it.”