Radiohead turned down headlining Reading and Phoenix, Yorke tells W.A.S.T.E.

Radiohead were offered the headline slots at Reading and Phoenix this summer and said no, and Thom Yorke is pleased about it.

also id like to proudly confirm that we turned down headlining reading and phoenix

Thom Yorke¹

The point, he writes in the twelfth W.A.S.T.E., the band's mail-order and fan club newsletter, was to keep out of the press's way. The rest of the letters come from the American dates supporting Alanis Morissette, which Phil Selway expects to be the band's last shows before the next album is out.

Jonny Greenwood writes with four of them left to play, in the half-covered amphitheatres known as sheds. The crowds there have no expectations, which has freed the band to try out new songs and drop old ones; his highlights of the new set are “Paranoid Android” and “Climbing Up The Walls”. Colin Greenwood says the tour has given them several well-played new songs to take into the studio next month.

That studio is now called Canned Applause, the winning name in a W.A.S.T.E. competition. It has no toilet, Yorke writes, so the band have hired a very large house with 20 of them, which he says is extremely haunted.

Michael Stipe and Patti Smith sent him a postcard of a cat, wishing the band luck with the album. It made his year.