Andrew Mueller's 2003 tour-bus day with Radiohead is published

Andrew Mueller's account of riding from London to Paris with Radiohead in early July 2003, cut from his book I Wouldn't Start From Here when the draft ran long, is out at last in The Quietus. It was around the release of Hail to the Thief, and on the band's new black tour bus Thom Yorke talked to him about Iraq, the album's title and his place as the band's voice of doom. The site ran it in a series on this year's Mercury nominees, since In Rainbows made the shortlist on Tuesday.

Yorke admits he believed the case for the war. I bought it. I thought, okay, if he has these weapons, they should be taken off him. You'd think I'd know better.¹ Hail to the Thief was never meant to bait America, he says; the phrase kept coming at him from different directions, and he worried about personal attacks and threats over it. The title that lost, The Gloaming, he found far too solemn. Of the second titles the songs carry, he thinks “No No No No No No No”, the other name of “A Punchup At A Wedding”, would have made a good album title, and “Little Man Being Erased”, which is “Go To Sleep”, is his favourite.

Ed O'Brien and Nigel Godrich were on the bus too. O'Brien, six and a half feet tall, asked for the back room with the double bed because he does not fit the bunks. He and Yorke wrote the setlists for the festivals and for the television recording Yorke and Jonny Greenwood were to make at Le Réservoir on 3 July, and Mueller believes his lobbying got “Exit Music” onto a festival set. Yorke calls the Hôtel Costes, where the rest of the band were to meet them, Unbelievably expensive, full of the most awful wankers, and decorated like a brothel.¹ He follows it with We always stay there. It's brilliant.¹ That night Neil Tennant stopped at the table, and Colin Greenwood turned up sorry to have missed Yves Saint Laurent.

The most exciting thing Yorke ever joined, he says, was the Jubilee 2000 debt campaign, and it came to nothing, passed between the G8, the IMF and the World Bank. The album is his answer to that, sharpened by becoming a father. “Sail To The Moon” was not written for his son Noah, but it became his song.

His worst time was the OK Computer tour, when the band agreed to six more months on the road that they should have turned down. Asked whether money makes it harder to sing about powerlessness, he says it makes it easier, with more time to listen to Radio 4 and worry, and that raising the alarm is his job. Somebody has to put the jester's hat on and make a tit of himself.²

Hail to the Thief's second titles