I was surfing around the net when I found an interview with Radiohead by chance. The band rarely give interviews, which explains my joy when I finally found 1. Fearing that the article may juz disappear from the net in the future, I figured that it'll be safer if I copied down the entire thing and post here in my blog... And well, juz in case, here's the
link to that website...
radiohead: played in full
Radiohead seem to live, metaphysically, at least, in a fantastical place. A place of demure Martians and jagged, lonely mountains. A place where they sometimes don't even recognize themselves. And because they like to inhabit this kind of place, American concert arenas can be the stuff of nightmares. But that doesn't stop them from writing songs about homesick aliens and the coming ice age. Or from looking at people like they're dopey for thinking Radiohead's music is "experimental."
Radiohead, as we know them, shouldn't exist. They make melancholy music that can be as tough to digest as a butter-soaked filet mignon. Yet, somehow, it sells. Not like Britney sells, but certainly better than your garden variety concept albums about alienation. That's because they are seen as the real deal, as artistes.
Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway sat down with MTV News' Gideon Yago to talk about how none of this can last, why their music should be considered pop and how they'd like to throttle their 21-year-old selves.
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Gideon Yago: Do you ever worry that by experimenting so much, like you have on Kid A and Amnesiac, that you'll lose some of your fans?
Thom Yorke: Kid A and Amnesiac were not that much of an experiment. Really, they weren't. I mean it's not f---ing rocket science. It's not. Compared to the music we listen to, it's pretty f---ing mild.
Jonny Greenwood: It's all repetition again, and chords. I think if we wanted it to be obscure we could do a much better job of it, but that's never a reason to make music.
Yago: It seems like Radiohead is the only major label band that's allowed to take these huge artistic and stylistic risks. Why is that?
Ed O'Brien: Well, not for any longer.
Yorke: We ended up on the wrong side of the fence when the bombs went off.
O'Brien: It's the economics of the fact that OK Computer sold 4.5 million records [worldwide] — it gives us some leeway. That's the bottom line. They wouldn't be giving us this amount of freedom if OK Computer sold 200,000 copies. No way.
Yago: But not everyone who sells almost five million albums decides to go into a studio and play around with noise and tone down the guitars.
Yorke: That's their prerogative. That's fine.
O'Brien: We dreamed about doing this. Even before we signed [to a label] we talked about it. All these things bizarrely came to fruition and it's, "Oh yeah, we can actually do this now. He, he, he." And we f---ing bought a studio and it's great. We piled up all the beeps. For years we felt guilty doing this stuff, or we didn't have the means to do it. But now we're like, "Why not? What the hell?"
Yago: You recorded all of the songs for Kid A and Amnesiac in one session, right?
Yorke: We did, although some people tend to think that Amnesiac was a panic reaction to Kid A, especially in Britain, which is hilarious.
Yago: Why were you in such a rush to put an album out eight months after the previous one?
J. Greenwood: It was going to be three months. It was finished, so why sit on it?
Yago: Why didn't you release Kid A and Amnesiac as a double album, then?
O'Brien: It wouldn't have worked. The tendency with a double album is that if there's quite dense material in there, you tend to skip it, you tend to move on. We realized that maybe at first listen it wouldn't come to you, but it warranted coming back to. It wouldn't have happened if we put it on a double album.
Yorke: It would have been a massive overload.
Yago: Can you tell me the story behind "Pyramid Song"?
Yorke: That song literally took five minutes to write, but yet it came from all these mad places. [It's] something I never thought I could actually get across in a song and lyrically. [But I] managed it and that was really, really tough. [Physicist] Stephen Hawking talks about the theory that time is another force. It's [a] fourth dimension and [he talks about] the idea that time is completely cyclical, it's always doing this [spins finger]. It's a factor, like gravity. It's something that I found in Buddhism as well. That's what "Pyramid Song" is about, the fact that everything is going in circles.
Yago: Does America seem different to you three years after the OK Computer tour?
O'Brien: Yeah, very. When we came over here, I remember it being a really dark time, and really not enjoying touring America. In fact, it was a f---ing nightmare. We suddenly found ourselves in these arenas at the end of the tour, and we were not in the right frame of mind to be doing that. But we did it.
Yago: Did having such a bad experience on the OK Computer tour scare you guys about going on tour again?
Yorke: Touring in America is very good at making you do lots of histrionics, hardcore stuff that makes you go, "Yah!" You do this move here, and you do that move there, and everything is scripted because it makes everybody in the crowd go, "Whoo!" But I would much rather be someone like Miles Davis who turns his back on the audience and just listens to what everybody is doing because that is why they are really there. They want you to f---ing play.
Yago: Thom, in October 2000 you told Kurt Loder that you heard yourself singing "Fake Plastic Trees" and you didn't recognize your own voice, and that that made you happy. I was wondering if you could explain that.
Yorke: That's why I still say what we do is like pop music, because there's an element of it that's supposed to be disposable and supposed to be something you don't remember. When I hear "Exit Music (For a Film)," I don't recognize the person singing it. The same happens with music like "Airbag" on OK Computer. I don't recognize us playing it. It's just that that's the way you were that particular moment and then you're something else.
Yago: When "Creep" came out, a lot of critics pegged you guys as one-hit wonders. Was there ever a time where you thought that might have actually been the case?
Yorke: Oh yeah, all the time. We're still doing it.
Colin Greenwood: We really didn't think about it so much. We were just enjoying being in America and playing little clubs then. It's a real privilege to see that side of things, and it's really cool because you get to hang around record shops and bookshops and stuff.
Yago: Do you find that you are inspired by the same stuff when you write songs now as you were eight years ago when you first put out Pablo Honey?
O'Brien: No, of course not. Music you listen to when you are 23 is very different from the music you listen to when you are 33. You can't stay with the same stuff. You can come back to stuff and realize why you liked it then if you haven't listened to it in nine years.
Yago: What does your studio look like?
Yorke: Messy.
Yago: Is there just stuff lying everywhere? Computer equipment? Instruments?
Yorke: A collection of old vintage computers, but of course we don't know what to do with them. They look great. There's lots of tapes all over the place that we can't remember what we put on them. There's a lot of gear.
When we built it we wanted it to [also] be a house where we could just hang out. But it's like we built it and then we immediately started working on Kid A and Amnesiac. So at the moment, it is literally a bum sight. [It's] like what we always dreamed of having, a neutral space we would go to when we do our own thing.
Phil Selway: It's kind of reminiscent of when we did live together.
Yorke: It smells the same.
C. Greenwood: Jonny never does the washing up.
Yorke: I have someone who does that for me.
Yago: In 1978, NASA sent out the Voyager Space Probe with a soundtrack from Beethoven to "Johnny B. Goode" and attempted to contact extraterrestrial life with these songs. If you could've put any one song on the Voyager space probe to contact alien life, which would it have been?
C. Greenwood: While we were doing the record, Jonny got the satellite program for listening to broadcasts from outer space, so we had that running on the computer. It was cool.
J. Greenwood: Yeah, I got a bit obsessed with all that. I copied the list of music you're talking about. I've got it in my book, all the things that people thought summed up with music. As to what I'd choose, they sort of got it quite right in a way. A song you want [on there]?
Yago: [Yes], a song.
J. Greenwood: "Shipbuilding" by Elvis Costello is a very good song to do.
Yago: Any from your own repertoire?
J. Greenwood: No.
Yago: Do you guys have any interest in scoring movie soundtracks in the future?
J. Greenwood: Yes. We're sort of tentatively trying a few things out. We're trying to turn our studio into something that can do that. We're assembling old televisions and video recorders and trying to work out how we're going to do it.
Yago: Is there any one director that you would absolutely kill to do a soundtrack for?
Yorke: Well, yeah, but it's best not to say. If we do it, it has to be a very chilled out thing. Because having never done it, we might f--- it up really badly.
Yago: "I Might Be Wrong," off of Amnesiac, is going to be in a commercial for the 2002 Winter Olympic Games?
Yorke: Yes! We need the cash.
O'Brien: There's no cash. It's charity!
C. Greenwood: There's no money involved. We're into the snowboarding event, it's really good.
C. Greenwood: It's advertising the lifestyle before the advertisers get to it. We thought we'd get there first with music.
Yago: You didn't include any songs from your first album, Pablo Honey, in your setlist for this tour. Do you guys never want to play those songs again?
J. Greenwood: Every time we rehearse all the songs we can just about play and whichever ones are sounding fresh and still sounding good, we'll include them. That's sort of how it works.
Yago: I read that Brian Eno used to keep these cue cards in his studio that said, "Whatever worked last time, never do it again." Do you guys have a similar philosophy?
Yorke: Don't have time to write the cue cards.
Yago: What would the Radiohead of 2001 say to the Radiohead of 1991?
Selway: There's going to be a dark moment in about one-and-half years when you record a song called "Pop Is Dead." Don't do that!
Yorke: And then there's that bit around '98 where you sort of have to take it easy and chill out a little bit, and do less of the distortion guitars and choruses. And maybe forget about the rock thing a little bit earlier. And take it easy, don't be quite so hard on yourself around '97, '98 and attempt to get a life of some description because it tends to help.
Selway: We wouldn't have listened anyway.
Yorke: No, no, we were bloody pig-headed. If I met my 21-year-old person, I would have bloody throttled him.
