Thom Yorke says Radio 1 won't play anything decent

Thom Yorke has turned on Radio 1 in an interview that NME bills as a world exclusive, in the issue on sale from 5 April. Asked about the rise of Arctic Monkeys, whose debut album came out in January and is the fastest-selling debut in UK chart history, he says new music would do better if the mainstream loosened up and let things through. Radio 1 won't play anything fucking decent. You need to sort the radio out.¹

He has nothing against the band themselves (“poor Arctic Monkeys”), and puts the fuss around them down purely to how hopeless the mainstream music business is, which he sums up with a crude insult. The paper takes it as a swipe at record companies and radio stations that have only now started looking to the internet for new acts.

In a recent post on Dead Air Space, the band's blog, Yorke wrote that Radiohead were finally getting somewhere, with too many songs to get ready at once, so they would rehearse and write as they went. Quite into the idea of singles at the moment (that don't get on the radio)², he wrote in the same post.

The band are recording with Mark “Spike” Stent, whose clients include Madonna and Oasis, and NME says up to 16 songs are in the running for the album. “Nude”, “15 Step”, “Arpeggi” and “House of Cards” are among the current favourites. Fans get a first hearing on the tour in May, whose British dates are two nights each in Blackpool, Wolverhampton and at London's Hammersmith Apollo.

Yorke says the writing for the follow-up to Hail to the Thief is like OK Computer's in a way, a record with some terrifying lyrics of its own. It's much more terrifying.² Rumours that the new record is political are wrong, he says, and the opposite is true. It's about that anonymous fear thing, sitting in traffic, thinking, 'I'm sure I'm supposed to be doing something else'.²