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Colin Greenwood says Radiohead are working on new music
Colin Greenwood came to his interview with Gareth Grundy of the Observer Music Monthly straight from work on what the magazine says may become a new Radiohead album. We're working on music that I think we would want to release all together but we don't know when or how it will come out as yet.
1 Putting songs out online has been in the air since Thom Yorke's interview in August. Asked whether it will pull the band away from albums, he says no, because twelve-inches, downloads and albums are all valid.
With Harry Patch, we finished the strings the week before he died. We thought, “Wouldn't it be great to release this now?”
Colin Greenwood1
Patch, the last surviving British soldier of the First World War trenches, died on 25 July. The band put out “Harry Patch (In Memory Of)” with the support of his estate, a decision Colin is proud of. We're not signed to a record company, we don't have to wait.
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The pay-what-you-like idea for In Rainbows came from a friend of the band's manager, he says, and it was never about music being free; the band do not condone peer-to-peer file-sharing.
Colin remembers the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions as very cold, recorded in winter in Copenhagen and Paris. The band thought they had got little done in Copenhagen until they played the tapes back. there's a slightly glacial, slow-flowing river quality to those records, especially Kid A.
1 The talk of the band nearly splitting during Kid A and In Rainbows he puts down to the ordinary frustration of making an album. The difference from 1998, he says, is that there is no fear or insecurity now.
At the warm-up shows before Reading and Leeds the band went back to playing each other their iPods in the evenings. Ed O'Brien put on Funkadelic's Maggot Brain, and Colin names Four Tet's new single and Fuck Buttons. Q-Tip also came round over the summer to swap disco records. Colin's four-year-old started breakdancing in front of him, which Colin calls the best thing to happen to him in ten years.