Thom Yorke says Radiohead will not release Capitol's “Fake Plastic Trees” remix

Thom Yorke is on the cover of this week's Melody Maker, and he uses the interview to say that Radiohead will not let out the remix of “Fake Plastic Trees” that Capitol, their American label, have made. The song is to be a single in America, and Yorke thinks the remix is not as good as the original. The record company want us to release the remix, because they say it would suit American radio better. But that's a line we can't cross.¹

If one thing would make him give up the music business, he says, it is people trying to alter songs to fit a formula. If it doesn't get on the radio the way it is now, then I don't think it's going to get on the radio at all.¹

The Stud Brothers talked to him in the bar of the Randolph Hotel in Oxford, where EMI had brought in the foreign press for the launch of The Bends. Yorke tells them the band hired John Leckie to produce the album because of Magazine's Real Life, a record he and Colin Greenwood used to put on at school parties, and not for Leckie's work with the Stone Roses.

The people around the band, he says, are anxious that Radiohead will stay the band who did “Creep”. He calls it “that song” and never by its name, and in America he became “the Creep guy”. The paper puts Pablo Honey's sales at 1.5 million. The writers cast Yorke, 26, as the next doomed rock star after Kurt Cobain and Richey Edwards. He tells them he loves life. He admits the band's tea-drinking image does not survive a tour, where drink passes the time.

The Bends is out on Monday. In the same issue Jennifer Nine can barely recognise it as the work of the band who made Pablo Honey. To her it sounds like nobody else, and nearer to Big Star's third album than to U2.