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Radiohead give Chuck Klosterman eight hours for SPIN's July cover
Radiohead are on the cover of SPIN's July issue, posted online on 29 June, after Chuck Klosterman spent about eight hours with them at the Old Parsonage, a hotel in Oxford. He saw the five one at a time, each in a different room. Thom Yorke turned up 20 minutes late, having gone home to do some yoga.
The first time I ever saw Thom, he was jumping over a car.
Yorke, Ed O'Brien explains, was a gifted gymnast at school, and he cleared it with a handspring.
Yorke says that tying Hail to the Thief to the 2000 American election alone would be shallow. To me, it's about forces that aren't necessarily human, forces that are creating this climate of fear.
1 He has given two accounts of where he heard the phrase: in Rolling Stone's 26 June issue it was a BBC report on the rigged Florida vote, heard on a drive; to Klosterman it was a radio programme about the election of 1888.
Being a father has made him fear for the future, he says, but he will not go into detail, because it would bring death threats and he will not put his family at risk.
He credits Michael Stipe with getting him through the years after OK Computer, mostly by listening. The nicest thing Michael did for me was pull me out of a hole I would have never escaped from otherwise.
1 Klosterman thinks Stipe almost certainly kept the band together. Colin Greenwood names the low point of their career as the British shows just after OK Computer, with Yorke plainly not wanting to be there.
Yorke writes alone, usually at the piano, and gives the others demo CDs to live with for a few weeks. Then all five arrange the songs in rehearsal, Jonny Greenwood's favourite part, try them on stage and record them last. Most of the album was made in two and a half weeks in Los Angeles with Nigel Godrich, often a song a day.
Jonny says “I Will” arrived finished. “Sail to the Moon” started out with different chords and half an idea until the band reworked it, with an arrangement idea from Phil Selway, and now he rates it close to the best song on the record. Yorke says “Myxomatosis” is about mind control; he chose the word for its sound, remembering his parents pointing out dead rabbits on the road.
O'Brien expects Yorke to make a solo album one day, and expects it to be very good. In Radiohead, no one is replaceable.
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