Thom Yorke tells Blender he backed the Iraq war at first

Thom Yorke is on the cover of the September issue of Blender, the US monthly, and in Miranda Sawyer's feature, partly done in a dressing room at the Edinburgh Corn Exchange after the show on 21 May, he admits that he supported the Iraq war to begin with. Initially, I supported the Iraq war. I had arguments with Ed about it, because he was anti- straight off.¹ By the time the war began he was firmly against it, because Britain, he says, had no moral authority and had ignored and subverted the UN. He protested at Fairford in Gloucestershire, the base the B-52s flew from.

Yorke understands why fans have heard the album's lyrics as an antiwar tract, and admits that politics weighs on him. Bono says I'm a zealot. Whereas he's a pragmatist. He gets things done.¹ Bono, rung up by the magazine, calls Yorke an angel singing about his devils. In a playlist sidebar Yorke calls “I Will”, inspired by the US bombing of an air-raid shelter in the first Gulf War, the angriest thing he has ever written.

Making the record in Los Angeles was, Yorke says, out of character for Radiohead; they kept to a track a day, and Jonny Greenwood says they loved the city. The band have taken to calling it their shiny pop album. The fast piano in “We Suck Young Blood” makes him laugh, and so, for ages, has the thought of someone paying to put the words “hail to the thief” on walls around the world. For Ed O'Brien it took ten years to get here. We used to live the pain. Now we've made a dark record, but we're OK.¹

Radiohead are not a democracy, Yorke says, but he is built to listen, and if one of the others says something is not right, he goes off it until it is sorted out. That, he jokes, would make him a very good president.

Jonny, walking in for a soda, is asked what Yorke will be like when he is old. He'll be mental.¹ Yorke agrees that he will be shouting, and enjoying his deafness.