Radiohead play two new songs on a Christmas webcast from Oxford

Radiohead broke off from finishing the sixth album on Wednesday evening to webcast four songs from their studio in Oxford, two of them heard for the first time anywhere. Colin Greenwood hosted with Thom Yorke, and the band played records between the songs. We've sort of finished the first bit of it, but we've still got to mix it. So this is getting us off the hook a little bit.² Capitol say the album has no release date yet, and that early summer is likelier than the 25 March going round online.

The new songs are “I Froze Up”, a plain ballad over an organ, and “Good Morning Mr Magpie”, faster and led by acoustic guitar, which Greenwood introduced as “Morning, Me Lord” and NME likened to the Beatles. Neither was played at any of the 12 shows in Portugal and Spain in the summer. “Punch Up at a Wedding”, heard at 11 of them, came back as a sparse piano piece, and the fourth song was a Christmas cover of “Walking in a Winter Wonderland”.

The band shared work in progress the same way during the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions. Yorke had announced this one with a note on radiohead.com telling people to have RealPlayer ready by 10pm (5pm on the US east coast), and hedged his bets. Nothing may happen. Every day I wake up and wonder whether this is the day it will happen.⁴