Radiohead start a lyric game and a free phone line for Hail to the Thief

The first level of The Gloaming, an online labyrinth made from the lyrics, artwork and sound of Hail to the Thief, is due today on radiohead.tv, Radiohead's new site. The Gloaming is a working title. The game has four levels, this one four weeks before release and one each Monday after it, and each must be finished before the next opens; the fifth stage is a contest to meet the band. The “There There” video and a trailer for the channel went up on the site today, as a plan that reached the desk on 1 May said they would.

The plan's phone maze was running early. Since the first days of May a free call from the US has offered nine options. One plays a long, loud tone until a key is pressed; others play “I Will” or “Go to Sleep”, and pressing the star key during either switches to “2+2=5”. Fans outside the US have been passing round recordings.

In the week before 6 May the number, 1-866-868-4433, turned up around Los Angeles on posters that looked like a recruitment notice for a Pop Idol-style talent contest and named neither Radiohead nor the album. Their words came from “We Suck Young Blood”, a song Thom Yorke has said is about Hollywood life. NME read the number as 1-866-TOT-HIEF on a keypad, rang it to offer its services, and nobody answered.

Most of the rest happens on radiohead.tv, which went up in April. Registered visitors get a front page built like a television set, playing a loop of live film, videos and fans' films that is to grow over the next year. Away from the site, fans can enter a friend's mobile number so that the friend's phone gets a voice shouting the album's title.

Yorke had another name in mind for the channel. On 14 April Waste Products Limited, the band's company, registered two web addresses spelling out “the most gigantic lying mouth of all time”, one run together and one hyphenated, and a source close to the band told NME that this was what Yorke wanted to call it.

The plan, May and June 2003