Radiohead ask Parlophone for a year to make the next album

Thom Yorke has told Parlophone that Radiohead want a year to make their next album, and the label, NME reports in its 9 December issue, has agreed. Andy Richardson's cover feature follows the band on successive nights at Rock City in Nottingham and the Cambridge Corn Exchange.

They do not want to go through another The Bends. At RAK studios in north-west London they were stuck, rowing, with tantrums and panic attacks. Jonny and Colin Greenwood, Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway wanted a break; Yorke insisted they carry on. It came to a head in Mexico, on a tour bus with 12 people and six bunks about five foot six long. Yorke says the fight left him believing in the band more. For now he is deliberately writing down the positive things he sees and hears, though he says he cannot get them into the music yet.

“Lucky”, their track on the War Child album Help, was the other way of working. Giving it away was Jonny's idea. The band had played it every night on tour, and audiences loved it without knowing what it was called. Yorke says it was written and recorded with no time and no conscious effort.

On the road the five travel apart. Selway drives himself home to Oxford between shows, Colin takes the crew bus, and the other three ride in a people carrier with the tour manager.

Yorke has no patience with the image-making of the late 1980s, and names U2 and Madonna.

The whole cult of personality surrounding bands, I think, is pointless. And I think the '80s really bore that out.

Thom Yorke¹