Radiohead's new album is about six months off, says their French tour manager

Hilda Carr, who looks after Radiohead's touring in France, told Bernard Lenoir's France Inter programme C'est Lenoir this month that she had heard the new album in the band's London studio a couple of weeks before, and that it is about six months away. She had first heard one of the new songs, which she left unnamed, in February, and this time she knew it within the first few bars.

She found the record positive and very surprising, made for the alternative shows on the radio rather than the mainstream, and expects it to be the best album the band have made. For the shows that follow it, she said, they are looking at smaller venues. Ed O'Brien had written in his diary on 23 November that a tour needs about five months' notice) and that the record comes first.

With his diary on radiohead.com, O'Brien has become the band's main public voice on the album. Spain's MondoSonoro has built its end-of-year account from it and expects the record before the summer of 2000. NME said early summer after the band played a new song, “Knives Out”, on their webcast of 9 December). The sessions have gone from Paris and Copenhagen to Batsford in Gloucestershire, and now to London for mixing. O'Brien calls the Copenhagen recordings great-sounding but dark.

The magazine has gathered 16 possible titles from his posts, and picks “Everyone: The National Anthem” as one of the few that look settled.

On 1 December he wrote of eight jazz brass players coming in for a day to play on “everyone - the national anthem” in the manner of Charles Mingus, with Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood conducting. After three days of Nigel Godrich mixing in London, O'Brien counted about six tracks finished from a working list of about ten. MondoSonoro makes that ten songs done and an orchestra already recorded. No orchestra has played yet. A demo of “how to disappear”, often heard on the OK Computer tour, is being made so that it can go to an orchestral arranger. Jonny is particularly keen to use an orchestra but not in the standard cliched way…more like the end of 'Climbing The Walls'.²

Possible titles, as MondoSonoro printed them