Joseph Tate's book of Radiohead scholarship is due on 28 May

The Music and Art of Radiohead, the collection of academic essays on the band edited by Joseph Tate, now has an official release date of 28 May, from Ashgate in its Popular and Folk Music Series, at £50 in hardback and £15.99 in paperback. It was first due on 28 January and has slipped more than once since. Ashgate has put Tate's introduction online, and it opens with Phil Selway, who told Alex Ross of the New Yorker in 2001 that we don't want people twiddling their goatees over our stuff. What we do is pure escapism¹. Tate's answer is that not one of his authors is a teenager, and that they are a group of scholars doing just the goatee-twiddling Selway objected to.

Thirteen scholars read the band's music, lyrics, cover art and videos, and take on their interviews, their reviews and Meeting People Is Easy. Kevin Dettmar, the James Joyce scholar, wrote the foreword. The Times Higher Education Supplement, which reported the book in February, picked out nods to Orwell and Thomas Pynchon in the lyrics and to Anselm Kiefer and Jean Dubuffet in the art, and Tate told it there were more than enough interested scholars for two books.

The composer Paul Lansky, professor of music at Princeton, is in the book because of “Idioteque”. Jonny Greenwood got in touch with him in 2000, and Lansky let the band sample “mild und leise”, a piece he made in 1972-73 on a room-sized computer that took an hour to produce one minute of music. His essay, “My Radiohead Adventure”, tells his side. Curtis White answers Nick Hornby's New Yorker review of Kid A in “Kid Adorno”, and Lisa Leblanc writes on Stanley Donwood's paintings from interviews with him.

Tate teaches English at Oregon State University and is finishing a doctorate at the University of Washington. The book grew from the mail that came in after his 2001 essay in the journal Postmodern Culture on the Kid A “antivideos”, the blink-length clips with the grinning bears, and he writes on them again here, and on the lyrics of Hail to the Thief. As he told The Daily Barometer, Oregon State's student paper, in November, At least with faculty members, the response is most often, 'Who is Radiohead?' Or as someone asked me, 'So what is the music of Eraserhead like?'⁸