Thom Yorke says the second Radiohead album will be quieter

Radiohead's second album will be calmer and simpler than Pablo Honey, Thom Yorke tells Dave Jennings in this week's Melody Maker. It will still range across styles, he says, but the hysteria will be subtler.

We're learning to play quietly again, and to rely on the strength of the songs.

Thom Yorke¹

Yorke is not happy with the first record. The band were naive and did not know how to use a studio, and “Creep” was one of the tracks where they began to see what a studio could do beyond copying their live sound. He and Jonny Greenwood have written a lot on the road, new songs are being learned at soundchecks, and once this run of dates is over the band mean to disappear until the album is written.

“Creep” is back, reissued by Parlophone, and has reached number seven. Last year it missed the Top 75 when Radio One found it too depressing to play. The band refused to put it out again for a long time, and changed their minds after America, where, Melody Maker reports, the single made the Top 40 and Pablo Honey has just gone gold. Many American journalists asked Yorke whether it was a joke song, which shocked him. He calls it an accident he could not repeat, and would not want to.

The interview was done on the day Yorke moved out of a dark basement flat into a bigger house across Oxford, and the day before the band flew back to the United States to tour with Belly. A British tour with James follows in December. He puts the year's gigs so far at about 100, enough to turn them from amateurs into a professional band.

He still remembers the first American trip: some 20 hours from Paris to Boston by car, ferry and plane, then switching on MTV in the hotel at seven in the morning and finding “Creep” on.