Thom Yorke writes to Japanese fans after the earthquake

Thom Yorke wrote to Radiohead's fans in Japan on Dead Air Space, the band's blog, at the start of April, three weeks after the earthquake and tsunami of 11 March. He is very fond of the country, he wrote, and felt awful seeing what had happened there. Friends in Tokyo had told him of big power cuts; the city was still working, but people there were rethinking a great deal. Tokyo the temple to light and power is something different now.¹

He found it shocking that so fast a city could be brought to its knees, even before the fears of radiation from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant, and he hoped the Japanese people the band have met over the years were not panicking. I like to think the way japan comes out of this will be an inspiration to us all.¹

Today Colin Greenwood put up the flyer for Stand UP for Japan, a charity evening at XOYO in London on Sunday 1 May, with three words, see you there². Tickets are £17, and the ticket money and all the profits go to Civic Force, a Japanese disaster-relief charity. The bill includes 2manydjs, Andrew Weatherall, Caribou with a DJ set and Damo Suzuki, once of Can, and there is an auction. The flyer's headline, in Japanese, means roughly “Japan, rise again”.