Radiohead start four months off with a letter each to W.A.S.T.E.

All five members of Radiohead have written letters for issue 15 of W.A.S.T.E., the band's mail-order and fan club newsletter, now that the OK Computer tour is over. It ended in April with two nights at Radio City Music Hall in New York. Thom Yorke, writing from a new house by the sea, answers the pile of worried letters fans have sent him and says there is nothing to worry about.

we are not about to give up or go off the rails.

Thom Yorke¹

Yorke is glad the touring is over. The band could never take all the ink spent on OK Computer seriously. They were ready for the next record the day they finished this one, and a year later they were still touring it. He apologises for the nights when he did not have what was needed, and compares himself to the character in Charles Mingus's “The Clown”, who gets bigger cheers the more he beats himself up. Now he has bought record decks and a mixer, and wants the band to start again from scratch. It is, he says, after all it's just pop music¹.

Ed O'Brien is two weeks into the break and finds it bizarre, after six and a half years of hardly stopping. The band's one engagement in four months is the Tibetan Freedom Concert in Washington, where they play on Saturday 13 June. O'Brien thanks everyone who willed the band on when they were not playing that well, and is listening to bossa nova, Jobim and Tamba Trio above all.

Phil Selway is proudest of how the five have worked together, and says they are becoming the band he hoped for.

After two years of recording, promoting and touring the album, it seems unsettling to be released from its grip.

Phil Selway¹

Then he jokes that the band are spending the summer seeking spiritual instruction in India, with a brief stint in rehab and a book about it, and signs off that he doesn't think they have lost it.

Colin Greenwood counts almost a year since they first played the OK Computer songs, at their biggest shows, Dublin's RDS and Glastonbury a week later. This is the band's first long break since 1992 and his first uninterrupted summer at home, and he has planted sweet peas. The one sour note of the year, he says, was the touts outside the shows selling tickets to fans at inflated prices, and the band are looking at ways to stop them.

Jonny Greenwood is home and already bored. His record collection is filling up with 1970s electronic music made on Moogs, Morton Subotnick's The Wild Bull among it. He is making music of his own that he rates about a fifth as good as Radiohead and means to keep away from everyone's ears.

It sounds like a lot of bleepy keyboards falling down the stairs, followed by a drum-kit or two.

Jonny Greenwood¹