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 to how hopeless the mainstream music business is, which he sums up with a crude insult.

Julian Marshall talked to Yorke and Colin Greenwood in Oxford in March, a month into sessions with Mark “Spike” Stent, whose clients include Madonna and Oasis. Radiohead have no record contract, and Yorke calls that liberating, though he compares the band to Road Runner running off a cliff and only then looking down. The model he has in mind is Tom Waits, who stopped for years and came back with Swordfishtrombones. Greenwood says what they miss is not a label but an A&R man, someone to answer to.

NME says up to 16 songs are in the running. “Nude”, one of the old ones, now has a string part from Jonny Greenwood, played by a quartet. The band want to put songs out as downloads as they finish them, without the song and dance of the EMI years, and Colin Greenwood says they argued only last week over which: “Arpeggi”, “Nude”, “15 Step” or “Bodysnatchers”. Put 'em all out!⁴ 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 has been writing with town-planning software, building a little town of trees and men on bicycles as in SimCity, and the band have put a made-up phrase, “New Suburbian”, on a T-shirt. The record is like OK Computer in a way, he says, only more terrifying, and the rumours that it is political are wrong. It's about that anonymous fear thing, sitting in traffic, thinking, 'I'm sure I'm supposed to be doing something else'.² There is no title yet. His latest idea comes from a programme on “hyper-weather” he caught on an American TV channel.