Thom Yorke wrote “A Wolf at the Door” on a stag-party train, he tells Bang

Thom Yorke wrote the words of “A Wolf at the Door”, the song that came very close to being left off Hail to the Thief, on the train from Bath to Oxford. He tells Bang that he paid for First Class to get some peace and spent three hours there with about 30 rowdy, rich city boys on their way to a stag party, two crates of Stella, a ghetto blaster and the groom dressed as Elvis. Thirty of them in First Class and me.¹ The lyric, he says, is his revenge on them.

Bang, a new UK monthly, gives Radiohead 12 pages in its fourth issue, and Yorke's interview, done in Oxford, is one of four pieces in them. He calls the idea that this is a political, anti-American album a bit far-fetched, and thinks he keeps reading it because of the title and one or two quotes he gave. He tried hard over the past year to write about anything else and could not ignore what was going on. This record to me, these new songs, they're not so much songs about politics as me desperately struggling to keep politics out.¹

He is still the only one in the band who cannot read music. He once asked Jonny Greenwood to teach him, and Jonny refused, telling him he was staying the ignorant one.

A second interview, which the issue's introduction credits to Colin Greenwood (a caption reading Phil Selway sits at its end), says 80 per cent of the record is the band playing together in one room in one take; the middle of “Sit Down. Stand Up”, “Backdrifts” and “The Gloaming” are the exceptions. The songs began coming together just after the band put together the live recordings for I Might Be Wrong, and the interview calls this the first record since OK Computer to come straight off the back of playing shows. The title points at Bush, though the band have no collective position on him, and at the leak of the early, unfinished mixes, which crushed the band; money had nothing to do with it. It was like we'd been burglarised when we'd gone out to get some more paint.¹ Asked for a word for each record, he calls Kid A an e-mail and Amnesiac a direct conversation. Hail To The Thief is a concert, isn't it? Or maybe it's a group therapy session?¹

The cover, a map of Hollywood with words written over the city blocks, points at a third thing, consumerism. Stanley Donwood, answering by e-mail and in lower case, made eight paintings for the album, each one and a half metres square, in Artex, acrylic and blackboard paint. All are cities, taken from maps off the internet; he names London, Grozny, Baghdad, Santa Monica, Manhattan and Kabul. His first idea combined topiary and pornography. Los Angeles changed it, because the city sells itself in red, green, blue, orange, yellow, black and white, so he bought tubs of the most vivid colours and painted every inch of canvas as if it were real estate. He first met the band when On a Friday wanted a support act at an Oxford pub and he was a busking fire-breather; he was stopped from breathing fire that night on health and safety grounds, luckily, he says, since he was very drunk.

Neil Kulkarni saw two nights of the May tour for the issue. The Edinburgh Corn Exchange on the 21st, the night “A Wolf at the Door” was first played on the tour, disappointed him; the flat, boxy hall turned the sound to mud. The Manchester Apollo the next night made up for it, with Yorke standing grinning at the front for a full minute before the first song, and the hall falling silent for “Fake Plastic Trees”, the last song of the second encore.