Thom Yorke wanted to call the new album The Gloaming

Thom Yorke tells David Fricke of Rolling Stone that he first heard the phrase “hail to the thief” one evening long before the band began the record, driving with the radio on while the BBC reported that the Florida vote had been rigged and that Bush was being called a thief. The light that evening was strange, and he felt a foreboding he could not describe. Every feeling on the album, he says, comes from that moment. That line threw a switch in my head. I couldn't get away from it.¹

The twilight of that drive is why he wanted to call the album The Gloaming. It was dropped as too doomy, though Yorke says the record is not doomy at all but musically quite jubilant. Using the phrase as the title was the other four's idea. He liked it, then grew nervous that it made the album sound as if it were only about that. I smashed my head against the wall about it for ages. The others steered me back.¹ Capitol, the band's American label, never raised it with them.

Phil Selway and Ed O'Brien chose the running order halfway through the sessions, which put the opening lines of “2 + 2 = 5” first; Yorke had been trying not to be specific, and could not manage it. While writing he listened to the political programmes on BBC Radio 4 and wrote down the government's euphemisms in the kitchen in the mornings, giving his son breakfast. Those phrases became the background of the record.

“I Will” and “Myxomatosis” are three or four years old, he says. The 14 songs were recorded in two weeks in Los Angeles last autumn, at the suggestion of Nigel Godrich, who co-produced, and many had been played on stage in Europe the summer before. We did a track a day. It was sort of like holiday camp.¹

Yorke spoke to Fricke on his mobile from a car in England, at the end of a long day of promotion. He watched none of the Iraq war on television and followed it on the radio; Fricke notes that he marched against it in Los Angeles and San Francisco and spoke at an anti-war rally in England earlier in the year. Asked whether the title will make him look ungrateful to his American audience, he laughs. If I'm told that I should shut up and be grateful, then I'll do neither.¹