Thom Yorke on The Eraser, David Kelly and turning down Tony Blair

Thom Yorke has turned down a chance to meet Tony Blair, too disgusted with the government's record on the environment and the Iraq war to see any point, he tells Robert Everett-Green of The Globe and Mail. Yorke, who has spoken for Friends of the Earth, met Everett-Green after breakfast in a Toronto hotel during the tour; Radiohead played the city's Hummingbird Centre on 7 June and 8 June.

Feeling powerless over the environment and the war fed The Eraser, the solo album he made with Nigel Godrich, which XL Recordings release on 10 July. Yorke calls this a dark period in Britain's history. There are these huge elephants that we have in the room at the moment, in the West, and people are desperately trying to erase them from public consciousness.¹

He had written part of “Harrowdown Hill” before he saw that it was about David Kelly, the government weapons expert found dead in 2003 in woods near Yorke's old school in Oxfordshire, after he was linked to a leak about British intelligence on Iraq's weapons. Lord Hutton's inquiry found in January 2004 that Kelly took his own life. Yorke holds the government and the Ministry of Defence directly responsible for outing him and putting him under pressure he could not bear. I've been feeling really uncomfortable about that song lately, because it was a personal tragedy, and Dr. Kelly has a family who are still grieving.¹

Working with Godrich was like being let loose in the tool cupboard, Yorke says. Making sounds was so easy it felt like cheating, and he often cut and pasted samples at random without looking at the screen, then sifted through what came out.

He had meant to use shreds of his voice only as texture. Nigel basically dragged me kicking and screaming toward the concept of them being actual songs.¹ To finish the words he had to learn to play the half-built tracks. On guitar “The Clock”, begun at home under the spell of an album of Arabian music, came out like a Johnny Cash skiffle tune, and the guitar parts he found for “Black Swan” stayed on the record.

Radiohead went quiet for about 18 months, largely for their families (Yorke has two children), and getting back together was hard. They are recording again with no record label to answer to, and Yorke says the point is to enjoy the studio after years when it was a drag, without the need to make an album turning into one. If we do something we really like, maybe we should just put it out in the interim.¹