Radiohead’s Phil Selway will be doing a live, unedited interview on AP Live today at 2:30 PM EDT. You can tune in then below:
UPDATE: Looks like the interview started early and is now over. We’ve been told there will be a replay which we’ll post as soon as we can.
According to Phil Selway, the band is taking a break from recording their new album. This conflicting news comes a month after Ed told BBC 6 Music that they were “a matter of weeks” from completing the album.
Phil told EW MusicMix: “It’s not finished yet. It’s still ongoing. We like where we are so far.”
The musician also refused to set a release date.
He said: “Oh, I don’t know. We keep on hitting those points where you think, ‘We’re there’. And then you think, ‘No, it’s not’. We’re having a break from it at the moment… and then we’ll come back to it later in the summer and see where we are.”
What do you think? Are we reading too much in to this?
(via EW Music Mix)
Wow, we picked the wrong time to go on vacation. In case you didn’t hear last week, Ed O’Brien announced during an interview with BBC 6 Music that Radiohead are “a matter of weeks” away from completing their next studio release.
He told 6 Music’s Adam Buxton that the Oxford five-piece changed their working methods on the new material, to avoid the lengthy recording process involved in recent albums such as In Rainbows.
“It was such a slog. We decided at the end of the record never to do it like this again. That was kind of the end of Radiohead mark two.”
To listen to the interview, go here.
Meanwhile, Thom and Jonny delighted everyone with a surprised slot at Glastonbury on Friday night. Organiser Michael Eavis introduced the pair, saying, “Welcome to the biggest surprise of the weekend. There’s two superstars, I’ll not name them but they’re standing right there.” Thom Yorke then rather unnecessarily introduced himself with “Hi, my name’s Thomas Yorke” before launching into ‘The Eraser.’
The pair played a mix of Yorke’s solo material and Radiohead favourites, including ‘Harrowdown Hill,’ ‘Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,’ ‘Idioteque’ and ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out).’ Their rendition of ‘Karma Police’ naturally prompted a mass crowd singalong.
The lucky few who had witnessed this most special of impromptu sundown shows Tweeted rapturously about the experience afterwards. It was fitting that Radiohead, a band whose 1997 headline slot is widely considered one of the all-time classic Glastonbury performances, should show up to make sure the festival’s 40th anniversary year was one to remember.
Setlist:
01 The Eraser
02 Harrowdown Hill
03 Black Swan
04 Cymbal Rush
05 Arpeggi
06 Pyramid Song
07 Idioteque
08 Karma Police
09 Street Spirit (Fade Out)
What’s that? You want some video? Greg Clarkson at your service! Here’s ‘Weird Fishes/Arpeggi’ shot from the 2nd row. Check out his YouTube Channel later as he says he’ll upload more.
Ed O’Brien will be speaking at the MIDEM 2010 Music Conference this week and has given an interview which you can watch. Here is part of the interview:
“I have a problem when people in the industry say ‘it’s killing the industry, it’s the thing that’s ripping us apart’. I don’t actually believe it is … (Pirates) might not buy analbum, but they’re spending their money buying concert tickets, a t-shirt, whatever.
“It’s an analogue business model in a digital era. The business model has to change. You’ve got to license out more music – have more Spotifys, more websites selling more music. You’ve got to make it slightly cheaper to get music in order to compete with the peer-to-peers.
“BitTorrent is very utilitarian, it’s deeply unsexy. The Richard Branson of nowadays would be able to set up a really amazing website for 14- to 24-year-olds that deals with their music … and do something really innovative and make it really easy for people to buy music, and cheap.
“A lot of 14-to 17-year-olds don’t have credit cards, so how are they going to get music digitally? These are very, very, very basic issues – I find it staggering that the industry seems to be really dragging its heels on this –this is stuff that you could do in one week. Move quicker!
“That’s been the whole problem in the last 10 years. Why are we here now? Because the recording industry dragged its feet over digital.”
(via paidContent)
The Australian has posted an interview they did with Jonny recently. The band has been in their Oxford studio rehearsing for the upcoming festival tour dates later this month. They’ve also been recording new songs. “There’s a bunch of stuff slowly growing, some more finished than others,” Jonny says.
Two years ago, no longer signed to a major record label, the band released In Rainbows online, inviting fans to pay whatever they thought the album was worth. It was a bold move, seen as undermining the recording industry and testing new modes of distribution. Where Radiohead goes next, though, is less certain. The members aren’t even sure whether to release another conventional album at all.
“Traditionally we’d be looking for 10 or 11 songs and putting them together, but that doesn’t feel as natural as it used to, so I don’t know what we’ll do. Maybe we’ll find four songs that work together and we’ll call that a release. I don’t know,” Greenwood says.
After changing direction so many times, it’s perhaps no surprise that Radiohead finds itself, once again, at a crossroads. After starting off in 1993 with Pablo Honey and then the more accessible The Bends, the band established its place at the cutting edge of contemporary music with the landmark OK Computer. It then headed off in new directions with Kid A, Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief, embracing alternative forms of rock and electronics before 2007’s In Rainbows. Meanwhile, digital music and downloads changed the way music was consumed.
During the past few days, music circles around the world have been in a flutter after the band’s singer, Thom Yorke, told an American magazine he was “not very interested in the album at the moment”. Greenwood confirms that a conceptual shift is under way. “No one knows how to release music any more, including us,” he says. “How to put it together, in what format, how long. We’re in the dark as much as anyone I think.”
Apart from that, Greenwood isn’t giving much away. He doesn’t seem worried though: Radiohead has always had a thing for reinvention. It’s no wonder, then, that the 38-year-old sounds relaxed as he discusses one of his other projects.
Could “These Are My Twisted Words” be one of the new songs Jonny talks about?
Stereogum has more from the intereview Thom gave The Believer last month. In it, Thom talks about his dislike of CDs and a new “plan” to distribute future music which unfortunately, he’s very vague on:
THE BELIEVER:…This isn’t the end of Radiohead album art as we know it?
TY: No, we’ve actually got a good plan, but I can’t tell you what it is, because someone will rip it off. But we’ve got this great idea for putting things out.
THE BELIEVER: In a digital realm?
TY: In a physical realm and a digital realm. But, yeah.. no, I can’t tell you what it is. [Laughs] Sorry to be so vague about everything.
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THE BELIEVER: Do you think [the In Rainbows pay-what-you-want method] worked?
TY: Oh, yeah. It worked on two or three different levels. The first level is just sort of getting a point across that we wanted to get across about music being valuable. It also worked as a way of using the Internet to promote your record, without having to use iTunes or Google or whatever. You rely on the fact that you know a lot of people want to hear it. You don’t want to have to go to the radio first and go through all that bullshit about what’s the first single. You don’t want to have to go to the press. That was my thing, like, I am not giving it to the press two months early so they can tear it to shreds and destroy it for people before they’ve even heard it. And it worked on that level. And it also worked financially.
BELIEVER: Do you think this method would work for other bands who aren’t as known as Radiohead?
TY: With the press, we’re in a lucky position where we don’t really have to rely on a reviewer’s opinion, so why would we let that get in the way? If people want to play it for themselves, why don’t we just give it to them to listen to? I just don’t want to have to read about it first.
BELIEVER: And that style of release definitely promotes the album as a work of art, rather than a bunch of singles floating around the Internet.
TY: Oh, that’s interesting. I appreciate that. Unfortunately, a lot of people got the album in the wrong order.
BELIEVER: What about the idea of an album as a musical form? You think that the format is still worthwhile amid iPod shuffling?
TY: I’m not very interested in the album at the moment.
BELIEVER: I’ve heard you talk a lot about singles and EPs. Is that what you’ve been moving toward?
TY: I’ve got this running joke: Mr. Tanaka runs this magazine in Japan. He always says to me, “EPs next time?” And I say yes and go off on one, and he says, “Bullshit.” [Laughs] But I think really, this time, it could work. It’s part of the physical-release plan I was talking about earlier. None of us want to go into that creative hoo-ha of a long-play record again. Not straight off. I mean, it’s just become a real drag. 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 … Jonny [Greenwood] and I have talked about sitting down and writing songs for orchestra and orchestrating it fully and just doing it like that and then doing a live take of it and that’s it — finished. We’ve always wanted to do it, but we’ve never done it because, I think the reason is, we’re always taking songs that haven’t been written for that, and then trying to adapt them. That’s one possible EP because, with things like that, you think do you want to do a whole record like that? Or do you just want to get stuck into it for a bit and see how it feels?
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THE BELIEVER: In some ways, the way Internet singles work is close to the way things used to be with the music industry in the ’50s, before full-lengths were the thing, and radio singles were what defined artists.
THOM YORKE: Right, and if you forget about the money issue for just a minute, if it’s possible to do that — because these are people’s livelihoods we’re talking about — and you look at it in terms of the most amazing broadcasting network ever built, then it’s completely different. In some ways, that’s the best way of looking at it. I mean, I don’t spend my fucking life downloading free MP3s, because I hate the websites. No one seems to know what they’re talking about. I’d much rather go to sites like Boomkat, where people know what they’re talking about.
BLVR: Boomkat is great.
TY: It’s brilliant. To me, that’s a business model. It’s like when I used to go to music shops in Oxford. You’re looking at this and you’re looking at that and there’s a whole line of other things going down the side saying, “You’ll probably like this,” and “You might like this.”
BLVR: I love those stores where everything’s hand-selected and the clerks write little descriptions about the music.
TY: Yeah, and you can listen to it all. I mean, Boomkat is very specific with the type of stuff they flog there, but I can’t see why that wouldn’t work for all music.