Thom Yorke weighs a climate meeting with Tony Blair

Friends of the Earth have asked Thom Yorke to meet Tony Blair at Downing Street about what the government is not doing on climate change. Yorke, who took the charity's Big Ask campaign for a climate law to Parliament in May, wrote on Dead Air Space, the band's blog on radiohead.com, on 28 September that he did not know whether the meeting would ever happen, or whether he should go.

He would not, he wrote, let spin doctors use him to make words look like progress. He expected to be told to stop meddling in politics and get on with the music, and would feel a hypocrite whether he did nothing or got involved. Politics is poison, he wrote, as dull to him as to his readers. Blair had lately been talking nonsense about Kyoto, as if the American right had eaten his mind, which was a reason not to meet him, or perhaps exactly the reason to. but i dont have powers of persuasion, i just have temper and an acid tongue.²

He wrote that he would love to know what readers thought but could not ask, then ended the post by asking them. NME, reporting the approach the next day, put the question to its own readers, and by 7 October it said 70 per cent of those who wrote in had told him to go.

The same evening he was at work on something he thought was called “Pay Day”, laying the lyrics out line by line on the floor to shuffle them and playing gentle fingerpicking over a furious beat. In a second post he had the words to “Burn the Witch”, a good one, he said, and one of many that Jonny Greenwood now has to orchestrate. Colin Greenwood was reading a book about synthesisers, Stanley Donwood was hammering and making greetings cards, and Ed O'Brien was off sick, sending the others sad little texts.

Today, in a post headed “letter to loosie”, Yorke set his terms. He will refuse if going means compromising what he might say there or afterwards, or if the meeting is to be spun as an agreement; he will go as himself, say what he thinks and walk out if it smells wrong. im calm. im zen. i have my armour on and my phazors on stun.²