Excellent recap of what’s been going on lately in Radioheadland from Spinner about the whole “Radiohead is not making any more albums” hysteria:
Is the world over-reacting about the possible “no albums” future of Radiohead?
Media reports have barked, blared and bleated this week that the band is turning its back on albums after an interview with frontman Thom Yorke in the Believer magazine hit the internet.
“None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again,” Yorke told the magazine. “Not straight off … It worked with ‘In Rainbows’ because we had a real fixed idea about where we were going. But we’ve all said that we can’t possibly dive into that again. It’ll kill us.”
Yorke then spoke of his desire to release an orchestral EP, using multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood’s increasingly impressive talents as an arranger.
Playing at the 7 Worlds Collide show at London’s Dingwalls on Tuesday, drummer Phil Selway showed an impressive voice as he sang two songs ‘The Ties That Bind Us’ and ‘The Witching Hour’.
He and guitarist O’Brien spent a month in New Zealand in December and January helping with the Neil Finn-helmed album ‘The Sun Came Out’.
Selway later told Spinner he will record his debut solo album in Radiohead’s studio in September.
Radiohead are currently rehearsing for their appearances at Reading and Leeds festivals later this month, the latest in a string of live dates since the digital-then-physical release of seventh studio album ‘In Rainbows’ at the end of 2007.
It seems that amid the revelations the band want to do more single-song releases or EPs — like the recent ‘Harry Patch (In Memory Of)’ — Yorke’s proviso “not straight off” has been glossed over.
The torturous recording of ‘OK Computer’ (1997) and the subsequent touring put Yorke in a less than sanguine mood, but after a three-year gap the band responded with not one album but two (‘Kid A’, ‘Amnesiac’) with a little over a year.
At the 7 Worlds Collide show, as Neil Finn rounded off the various band members recording achievements, guitarist Ed O’Brien offered a shaky hand single for “maybe” when Finn mentioned Radiohead might be working on a new record. That’s not a no, but a maybe.
Interviewed on the UK’s BBC Breakfast TV news on Wednesday, Selway left the question regards “no new albums” unanswered.
Maybe Radiohead need to attend to some personal projects before they reconvene to make another album, with all the effort that requires. It would be churlish not to let them.
