Thom Yorke on Hechos

Thom Yorke tells Mexican television that he never meant ANIMA to be political. They were working in his art room with parliamentary arguments playing every day, and it fed in without his noticing.

He sums up the referendum as being promised unicorns, and his complaint is about procedure rather than party. People were asked a question they did not understand, without the real conditions attached to it, answered it, and then found it had not been the question at all.

Public lying, he says, has stopped registering. A politician announces a policy and its reversal within days, and nobody stops to ask why he is lying. He calls it words used as clowns, stripped of their meaning, and connects it to anonymity online, where identities and bots are made and discarded and people end up arguing with something that does not exist.

His working principle in a crisis is not to make more candy. People are fed it daily, so he would rather make something dirty and broken and real.

For the ANIMA shows he credits time spent with Flying Lotus in Los Angeles, and admits the projections let him avoid being a performer in the usual sense.