Eight to ten thousand is the ideal crowd, Thom Yorke tells La Stampa

Thom Yorke has told Luca Dondoni of Turin's La Stampa that Radiohead think eight to ten thousand people is the ideal audience, which is why the autumn tour will travel with a tent built to hold that many. Dondoni was at the Villa Reale in Monza for the first of two nights there on Sunday, which opened Radiohead's short Italian run.

The stage stood in a corner of the square in front of the villa, plainly lit, and 2,500 people were let in. Yorke opened with “Optimistic”, one of nine unreleased songs the band are playing each night, and the crowd listened rapt before they started moving their heads up and down and side to side the way he does. Dondoni found the five as well prepared as students sitting an exam.

The small places are a choice, Yorke says, a way out of the marketing logic record companies impose. Everything around the band is chaotic and music is in danger of becoming marginal; playing to few people is meant to put it back at the centre, at least for those who follow them. The ten British dates in the tent, announced on 9 June, keep to the same idea, and he warns against expecting huge venues.

The new album will not be out until the autumn. The songs are written and only the title is missing, which Yorke says matters little, because a title always comes last and can come from a song, a mood or whatever is going on at the time. The band describe the record as perhaps more fragmented, its pieces shorter than “Paranoid Android”, with computers paired with samplers and the latest drum machines, a lot of electronics and a lot of heart.