Thom Yorke on Wired

Thom Yorke sits down with David Byrne for Wired, weeks after Radiohead put In Rainbows out through their own website, and the talk keeps coming back to money. The songs had been played to audiences before the band went into the studio, which kept Yorke from dragging them off course. Now that the band have children, “the idea of actually committing to being in the same room is such a big deal”. “Videotape” was the agony. Yorke wanted a post-rave trance track like the techno of Surgeon, Jonny Greenwood was convinced the piano sat an eighth ahead of the beat, and it was going nowhere until Yorke left for a day and came back to find Jonny and Nigel Godrich had stripped it down to what is on the record.

The record went out with a leak date instead of a release date. Their last four records had leaked anyway, The Eraser included, and he wanted to stop the first reviews, which get cut and pasted everywhere, from settling its fate. Pre-orders opened while they were still mastering, and the server went down on the first day. Next they want a TV channel of their own off the website: mostly an annoying test card, then twenty minutes' or half an hour's warning that the band are about to play a new song. “We've not released any figures on any of it so they're making it up,” he says of the sums the papers say fans paid. They have made more from In Rainbows online than all their other records ever made them online put together, partly because the old EMI contracts paid them nothing for downloads. His first advice to a new band is never to sign a deal that strips it of its digital rights.

Touring is where Radiohead make their money, which he finds hard to square. A study of the carbon footprint of their last tour found the biggest problem was everybody driving to the shows. Albums still make sense to him because songs in the right order amplify each other, though settling that order is “knives out, weapons out, kill to the death”. He has just read that Neil Young never goes back to rewrite his words, and it explains a lot. Nobody, he says, could have sat down and rewritten “The Needle and the Damage Done”.