Thom Yorke confirms “Harrowdown Hill” is about David Kelly

Thom Yorke has confirmed that “Harrowdown Hill”, a song on his album The Eraser, is about the death of the government scientist David Kelly, whose body was found in the Oxfordshire wood of that name in July 2003. He says so reluctantly, because the Kelly family must still be grieving, in an interview with Craig McLean of the Observer Music Monthly published on 18 June. It's the most angry song I've ever written in my life.¹ He won't go into his view of what lay behind Kelly's death; what disturbed him most, he says, was the way the Ministry of Defence is able to operate. They met in an Oxford hotel on the day of Phil Selway's mother's funeral, which Yorke left the interview to attend.

The Eraser is nine songs made with Nigel Godrich, deliberately on computers, at the band's Oxfordshire studio, at Yorke's second home by the sea and at Godrich's studio in Covent Garden. It is out on XL on 10 July, dedicated to his daughter Agnes, who is 18 months old, and Stanley Donwood's sleeve shows a King Canute figure holding back a giant wave. It began when Radiohead stopped after the Hail to the Thief tour in 2004, on which, flying the wrong way round the world, nobody slept for three or four weeks. It felt like everyone was under obligation to do it rather than because we wanted to do it.¹

Putting a record made with the doors shut out through EMI didn't feel right, Yorke says. The band have completed their EMI contract, and he would rather give a finished record to someone who can do it justice than sign a deal in the usual way. Will we re-sign to EMI? I don't know. I don't think we'd sign sign to anybody.¹

May's six indoor dates in Britain were partly to road-test songs and partly to win back confidence lost in the Hail to the Thief years; the band played 11 new songs, plus their War Child song “I Want None of This”. At Wolverhampton Yorke said he thought they had finally nailed “Nude”, a song they have never managed to record, then added that this was under debate too. The seventh album has no producer yet. The band have produced themselves, worked with Mark “Spike” Stent and talked to Godrich and others, and Yorke says that with the songs sitting around, to just have to wait for another six months, eight months, seems nuts.¹

Yorke, an ambassador for Friends of the Earth, turned down a meeting with Tony Blair last September because Downing Street wanted pre-meetings and assurances, and the charity risked losing access if he said the wrong thing afterwards, which he calls blackmail. He did meet David Cameron, after the Big Ask benefit at KOKO on 1 May, where he and Jonny Greenwood played their first show in two years, but says Cameron is no politician he can do business with. It is not his job, he says, to do business with any of them.