Christopher O'Riley says Thom Yorke called his own song mediocre

Christopher O'Riley, the pianist behind True Love Waits and the new Hold Me to This, two albums of Radiohead songs, has met Thom Yorke and Colin Greenwood only once. He tells Kate Sullivan of LA Weekly that he introduced himself to them a few months after True Love Waits came out.

We're all so excited about what you're doing.

Thom Yorke¹

Thom wanted to know what classical listeners made of the arrangements, and ran himself down at every turn. He called “How to Disappear Completely” a mediocre song.

O'Riley is now working through Elliott Smith's whole recorded output for a concert of Radiohead and Smith arrangements at UCLA's Royce Hall on Thursday 26 May. He has listened to 60 of Smith's live shows. Five live versions of “Paranoid Android” differ little in quality, he says, while Smith gave every performance a different character. His iPod holds about 30 Radiohead gigs beside them.

Some of his Radiohead solutions come from Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto, which he has played for so long that its shapes come to his hands by themselves. Apart from Smith and Radiohead he cannot imagine doing a whole album of anyone. For his funeral he wants his own version of “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”.