Thom Yorke on The Eraser and a Radiohead with no record deal

Radiohead have no record contract and no album to sell, and they are on tour anyway. David Fricke of Rolling Stone talked to Thom Yorke over coffee in a Blackpool hotel bar during the May dates, and to Colin Greenwood backstage after the first of the two nights at the Empress Ballroom, on 12 May.

The band's deal with Capitol/EMI is over, and Yorke's album, The Eraser, out on XL on 10 July, is the first record by any of the five since. It is a one-album deal, and Yorke says that is the only kind he will sign now. Asked whether that goes for Radiohead too, he says the band have not talked about it yet. What he objects to in a lasting contract is the loyalty a corporation expects. It grows or dies, like any virus. And you use it for your own selfish ends.²

The band are playing two months of small halls in Europe, Britain and North America, with a headline set at Bonnaroo in Tennessee on 17 June, and, by Fricke's count, as many as seven new songs a night, all written at their Oxford studio over the past year. We didn't have any direction last year. We were rehearsing without producers or outsiders. We had no one to be accountable to.¹ By Christmas, Colin says, they had decided to take the songs on the road rather than go mad in Oxford. Jonny found the lack of a release date hard, and the tour gives them something to work toward.

Yorke reckons they have rough versions of about half the next album. “Videotape” was one of the first songs they had, and one they have struggled with. Fricke writes that the band expect to record in the autumn.

The Eraser began on a laptop after the Hail to the Thief tour, when the band hardly saw each other for a year and it had stopped being fun. Yorke made it with Nigel Godrich from late 2004, between Radiohead rehearsals, and the ideas only worked in that isolated space, so there was no point asking Phil Selway or Colin to play. “And It Rained All Night” is built on a shredded piece of the band's “The Gloaming”, and the piano on the title track is Jonny's, chords Yorke taped on a dictaphone at Jonny's house. A year and a half later, I had to own up that I had sampled them, cut them into a different order and made them into a song², he says.

Godrich would not put reverb on Yorke's voice however often he asked, and made him cut his electronic doodles down to the best parts. Yorke says it turned him from admiring his own programming back into a singer. I've got my confidence back. Which is no small thing, believe me.¹