Ed O'Brien laughs off a Godspeed You Black Emperor rumour

Radiohead are not working with Godspeed You Black Emperor on “How to Disappear”, one of their new songs, whatever the internet says. Ed O'Brien read the rumour and answered it in his studio diary on radiohead.com on 1 September. Whoever started it had strung together chance happenings, Godspeed coming to see Radiohead at a gig among them.

if that were sufficient corroborating evidence then, judging on the bands i’ve seen recently, you can hear us with ‘the divine comedy’ and the mighty ‘asian dub foundation’.

Ed O'Brien¹

O'Brien has kept the diary since 22 July, through the band's rehearsals for the album that follows OK Computer. These entries run from 31 August, the first rehearsal after a break of about two weeks around the solar eclipse), to 9 September.

On the first day back Jonny Greenwood thought the C minor song was getting a little too tasteful and nice, and O'Brien agreed it sounded too slick. On 1 September “You and Whose Army?” saved the day after two unimpressive goes at “Follow Me Around”, with Jonny arguing for voice and guitar alone until the end section. The 2 September rehearsal was a bad one, and keeping the diary has shown O'Brien for the first time that the band's behaviour runs in cycles.

On 3 September, with what he calls “only” two months of rehearsal and three of recording behind them, the band decided they should now be trying to get basic arrangements.

we’re like fucking lasers, us.

Ed O'Brien²

Almost the whole day went on “Cuttooth”, which until then had nothing fixed but a bass riff. With no verse, chorus or middle eight, he writes, a song needs other markers to show how it moves along.

The bulletin board on the band's new website opened in the middle of a rehearsal the following week. Most of the messages posted were about East Timor, where pro-Indonesian militias turned on the population after the vote for independence on 30 August. O'Brien bet that mass killing would happen again before international forces got in, and said he did not mean it flippantly.

O'Brien signed off on 9 September for a couple of weeks, finding the tone hard to strike when he is not a journalist. That day “Knives Out” sounded rather like the Smiths, with Phil Selway getting the style of their drummer, Mike Joyce, down exactly. And “Optimistic”, which he had called blinding earlier in the week and the most formed of the songs, was still not on tape. The band played “Lift” live through 1996 and then left it off OK Computer.

on to ‘optimistic’ -must record that soon before we lose it (remember ‘lift’?).

Ed O'Brien²

Songs worked on, 31 August to 9 September 1999 (working titles)