Phil Selway says Radiohead have about 20 songs for a third album

The Bends is barely out, and Phil Selway says Radiohead already have about 20 songs for the next album, which they hope to start in the studio in their time off this year.

We've about twenty songs there, ready to go.

Phil Selway²

He was talking to Nigel Harding of the email zine Consumable Online, which ran the interview on 8 May, four days after the Edmonton weekly See Magazine printed a shorter one.

Both interviews come back to how long The Bends took. Fans of the first album, Selway told See, will find big changes in the songs and the production.

We spent three and a half months last year recording the new album, where with Pablo Honey we went in and bashed it out in about three weeks.

Phil Selway¹

The songs had been played live a year before, but three weeks on Pablo Honey was all the studio experience the band had, and “Creep” was hanging over them.

When we first went into the studio, things were a little stilted for us, we were suffering from studio paralysis really.

Phil Selway²

John Leckie, the producer, was hands-off, Selway says. He focused the ideas coming out of the five of them and showed them new ways to use a studio. As for the talk that the band nearly split during the sessions, everyone in a band toys with storming out when things get stressful, but breaking up was never seriously on the table.

He has no regrets about “Creep”. It brought far more listeners than they could have hoped for, but with no track record behind it they were tagged the Creep band, a one-hit band. Before they signed they had never played outside Oxford, and for five years they had mostly written songs for themselves and made demos. The record industry came to them.

So this time they wanted every song on the album to hold up, after the good songs on Pablo Honey were lost behind “Creep”. Selway reckons most of The Bends could be singles. With three guitarists, nobody is pushed forward as the lead; they spur each other on and do what suits the song. Selway waves away the press's habit of calling Radiohead the new U2.

It's lazy journalism isn't it?

Phil Selway²