Thom Yorke on ITN Interview

In a short ITN interview, Thom Yorke says what offends him is how the culture treats success, the Hello magazine invitation to look round the houses of the rich and famous, this is your future, which he calls obscene. He got involved with Amnesty International by default, he says: flying all the time between posh hotels and seeing nothing, he decided something was wrong, that people had decided they had no power and that was the end of it. Radiohead came out of the culture of complaint, Generation X as it was called for a while, but they have all grown up, and it has slowly dawned on them that their problems are utterly irrelevant. Having those problems hammered down people's throats on MTV is offensive, he says, and he feels responsible; playing for Amnesty is his very small way of trying to redress that guilt. He feels lucky to be able to write exactly what he likes, knowing that in many countries people are shot or tortured for doing the same.