Thom Yorke joins Bono in Cologne to hand over the debt petitions

Thom Yorke was in Cologne for the G8 summit weekend. On Saturday 19 June he and the other musicians there handed Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, the summit's host, petitions calling for 200 billion dollars of the poorest countries' debt to be cancelled. With him were Bono and the Edge of U2, Perry Farrell, Youssou N'Dour and Bob Geldof. The petition carried about 17 million signatures from around the world, and the same day tens of thousands of people formed a human chain around the centre of the city.

The G8 leaders had agreed their Cologne Debt Initiative on Friday 18 June, the day before the handover, widening debt relief to 33 countries. MTV News puts it at 70 billion dollars written off, with work on the rest to continue to the end of the year.

On Tuesday 15 June Yorke had taken questions in an online chat on MSN for Jubilee 2000's Drop the Debt campaign, as Bono had before him. Anyone who asked about Radiohead's touring or the title of the next album got the same answer, That's not relevant.³ Asked what he would do for the millennium, he said he would stay very sober and try to keep it together.

He came to the cause, he said, through reading the 20th-century history he had missed at school, whose last chapter was about world debt, and then an editorial by Bono. His first years in Radiohead were tunnel vision. Touring, and the trips to Mexico and Thailand above all, showed him that the West was not what he had thought, and it's hard to sing about “humping your baby” when you're seeing all this other stuff³.

In the chat Yorke had expected they might cancel a first 100 billion dollars, and he told readers not to believe the next day's papers if they said the leaders had done everything asked of them.

He promised to be in Cologne and asked anyone nearby to come and join the chain.

No playing involved - no repeat of Live Aid. Only reason famous people involved because that's the way to get more cameras there.

Thom Yorke³