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Thom Yorke types his own answers in a live Guardian webchat
first posted on Treefingers by Miro · rewritten for the archive
Thom Yorke went live on Guardian Unlimited's talk boards just after 5pm today and spent a little over an hour typing answers to readers, who had been posting questions since Wednesday. To one who told him to shut up and sing, he wrote back Please don't come to our shows. Please don't buy our records
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The chat was billed as being about The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time, the band's four half-hour programmes on radiohead.tv, which mix old, new and unreleased songs with Yorke's drawings, animation and films sent in by fans. The title, he said, comes from a collage by John Heartfield, the German artist whose photomontages cut up the Reich's propaganda.
It all began when someone offered to rent the band some cable channels to fill as they liked. Dilly Gent went through the fans' tapes, the band made lots of odd bits of music, and Chris Bran pasted it together and invented Chieftan Mews, the character who links it all. Next time, Yorke said, he would want more time, and people he gets to know.
Asked whether Radiohead are now free of EMI and what comes next, he described a Warner Brothers cartoon character who walks off a cliff, keeps walking, finally looks down and waves bye bye. Now is a good time to step away from the precipice.
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He has no problem with America, he said, only with its current administration, and he called Michael Moore a very brave man. Was he disappointed not to be asked to serenade George Bush on this week's state visit? He could have cooked for him.
A former drummer of Blab Happy, who supported Radiohead on the Pablo Honey tour, asked for his fantasy festival bill and got Kraftwerk, the Pixies and Talking Heads. Another said each album makes the last sound like the work of amateurs. That's because we are amateurs. Whatever or whoever comes afterwards is professional. It's a joke, is it not?
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Asked whether Radiohead will ever split, he said he had never really thought about it, pointed to R.E.M.'s Bill Berry and said the future seems very uncertain. He signed off “love thom”.