Thom Yorke on OccupyTV

Thom Yorke and 3D of Massive Attack talk together for OccupyTV, in support of the Occupy movement. One of them always imagined change coming from something romantic, the way it seemed in Bristol in the 1980s, but this year's riots were sad and scary and solved nothing; a nonviolent occupation puts pressure in the right places, and anyone can join. For one of them the starting point was the film Inside Job, which explained why he had never understood how the City works: “they've made it so you don't understand it.” The banks took money that was meant to keep people safe, called the loss an act of God, and politicians who don't understand the system either are told to mop up.

“You don't need to be an anarchist, you don't need to be someone who smashes the state to have sympathy with that viewpoint,” one of them says. In the prime minister's place, he would be asking himself how to keep the anger behind Occupy at bay, because it is going to get worse. Banks can't be protected as part of the country's infrastructure and then do what they like with the capital, and if the government won't penalise them, people should do it themselves. Keeping the consumer bubble going by spending at Christmas is no answer.

Their Christmas message to Occupy is admiration for the way it started in New York, where the police moved the protesters on, they came back, and it kept getting bigger, because it means something.