![]() The others steered me back.Įarlier this year, you marched in anti-war demonstrations in Los Angeles and San Francisco, and you spoke at an anti-war rally in England. I smashed my head against the wall about it for ages. Then I got really nervous: “No, the record is not just about that.” But everyone said, “This phrase conjures up all the nonsense and absurdity and jubilation of the times.” The title had it all. With the other guys – it was their thing, really. What were the initial reactions to the title – from Capitol Records in America, from the rest of the band?Ĭapitol have never said anything about it. I wanted that because of the twilight, that night in the car. The other possible title was The Gloaming. To me, all the feelings on the record stem from that moment. I had this tremendous feeling of foreboding, quite indescribable, really. And the light - I was driving that evening with the radio on - was particularly weird. The BBC was running stories about how the Florida vote had been rigged and how Bush was being called a thief. It was a formative moment – one evening on the radio, way before we were doing the record. When did you first hear the phrase “hail to the thief,” and what made it appealing as an album title? “Myxomatosis” is three or four years old. But there was not much analysis going on in writing these songs. The whole record is about thinly veiled anger – very thinly veiled. They picked up on that line, so you have to blame them. Halfway through making the record, they thought it would be a good idea to find out what the running order would be. I wasn’t involved in choosing the order of the songs – not initially. Radiohead then recreated the volume and thrill of those live performances in the studio, during two weeks of sessions last fall in Los Angeles with co-producer Nigel Godrich. Yorke, guitarists Ed O’Brien and Jonny Greenwood, bassist Colin Greenwood and drummer Phil Selway debuted many of the album’s fourteen songs onstage in Europe last summer, long before the crisis in Iraq turned into war. In fact, Hail to the Thief is more prophecy than protest. Bush’s disputed victory in the 2000 presidential election, and songs such as “2+2=5” and “We Suck Young Blood” seem drawn from the latest cable-news dispatches on Iraq and Wall Street. The title is an unflattering allusion to George W. On Hail to the Thief, which comes out in North America on June 10th, Yorke – Radiohead’s singer, lyricist and outspoken conscience – dives headfirst into the dangers and challenges of living in a world run by cowboys, guns and money. “The music is the thing,” he contends over a cell phone, speaking from a car in England after a long day of promotional action on behalf of the record. “People should listen to the record before they judge any of the other bullshit,” declares Radiohead‘s Thom Yorke, after nearly an hour of explaining and defending the provocative title and guitar-driven foreboding of the band’s new album, Hail to the Thief.
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