Jonny Greenwood announces Radiohead's return to the studio

Radiohead are back in the studio, Jonny Greenwood wrote today on Dead Air Space, the band's blog on radiohead.com, in a post headed “Clocking on again.” All is fun and well, he says.

Stanley Donwood, who makes the band's artwork, is with them again, painting in the shed behind the studio. The rats have got in and eaten all his blue paint, and there's blue rat shit everywhere³, Jonny reports, though Donwood does at least have a dub CD to work to.

This is the band's second session of the autumn. Thom Yorke closed the first, six days long, on 23 August with the band due back in a couple of weeks. In between, on 8 September, they recorded “I Want None of This” for War Child. NME, reporting the post, says the new album is due next year.

Most of the post is about dub reggae. Since April there has been nothing else on Jonny's iPod. Six solid months of nothing but Lee Scratch Perry, Ken Boothe, Junior Byles, Marcia Aitkin and hundreds of others.³ It is all for a compilation he may never finish; if he does, he will put the list up for readers to disagree with. Perry's records are magical, he says, and Marcia Griffiths was a revelation, though the emptiest dub bores him. Making a compilation for someone else, he adds, is a good way to clear out the records he only thinks he likes.

He has also never heard a note of the Stooges. How, he asks, can he call himself an Iggy Pop fan without ever having heard “I Wanna Be Your Dog”? Part of the reason, he suspects, is knowing how good they are meant to be.