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Radiohead's next album is recorded, Phil Selway tells TIME Europe
We've finished all the tracks
, Phil Selway tells Christopher John Farley, whose feature “Radioactive” runs in TIME Europe's issue of 23 October. Only the running order is left to settle on Radiohead's next record, and it could follow Kid A as early as the first months of next year. “Egyptian Song” and “Knives Out”, both in the live set, will probably be on it.
Every track on Kid A reached Napster weeks before the album came out, and Thom Yorke is glad of it.
The cool thing about Napster is it encourages bootlegging, it encourages enthusiasm for music in a way that the music industry has long forgotten to do
Thom Yorke1
Anyone defying the industry has his blessing. Kid A went to number one in America and Britain in its first week, and the band have still made no proper video for it, only clips of 10 to 40 seconds, animated bears and figures falling into volcanoes, which Yorke calls anti-videos.
Farley saw the band at Glasgow Green on 28 September, under the big blue tent they are touring Europe with because they dislike venues covered in corporate logos. The band covered Can's “The Thief”. After one in the morning, in a closed basement bar at the Malmaison Hotel, Selway was talking about his baby son, Leo.
Many of the words on Kid A were improvised, Yorke explains. For a few songs, partly because he had writer's block and partly after hearing Michael Stipe of R.E.M. describe walking into the studio with nothing prepared, he cut his lyrics up and drew lines out of a top hat.