Radiohead on Tibetan Freedom Concert

Thom Yorke talks to a television crew backstage at the Tibetan Freedom Concert in Amsterdam, where the band are regulars by now. He was asked to play and had been reading about Tibet anyway, including a translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, very serious and full of devils. He is not playing alone; Jonny Greenwood is with him, because he was too chicken to do it on his own.

New York had a great atmosphere. Washington was something else. There was something funny in the air from the first day, then the sky went green, there was lightning, and a girl was struck, though not during their set. Even the monks were unsettled, and he calls it the most peculiar weekend.

The crowd is better than he feared from cynical Europe. Then he turns on the West, which hides behind NATO as the new international police force, leaves alone anything inconvenient to trade, and solved Kosovo by throwing lots of bombs. Tibet's nonviolence, he thinks, means the Chinese are seen for what they are. He heard the Dalai Lama on Radio 4 one morning three weeks ago, when he was feeling down, and loved the way he laughs. Britain walked away from Tibet in 1949, he says, and has a selective memory, much as America does.