Radiohead's first album to miss gold in America may be their most profitable

The King of Limbs has sold 307,000 copies in the United States, which makes it the first Radiohead album not to go gold there. Chris Hufford, one of the band's two managers, tells David Fricke's cover story in Rolling Stone that most of the record's sales went straight from band to fan, money a label would have taken under a traditional deal. Financially, it was probably the most successful record they've ever made, or pretty close.¹

The other manager, Bryce Edge, says the American figure leaves out the 300,000 to 400,000 downloads estimated to have been sold through the band's website, and that many people who would have bought it never knew a record was out. It arrived as a download with a week's notice and no promotion from the band, and the CD followed a month later. Thom Yorke found it exciting at the time, but afterwards the album hardly seemed to exist; months on, a friend who had worked at Capitol told him it was already gone. He calls that the price of the band's own choice. I can see why it's alienated people. I didn't realize it was its own planet.¹

Stereogum counts Fricke's story as the band's second Rolling Stone cover as a full group. Fricke talked to them over a year, in Oxford, London, New York and finally backstage at Miami's American Airlines Arena, on the day of the last rehearsal before the tour opened on 27 February.

The record was made in bursts between May 2009 and January 2011. The members played drum, bass and guitar parts that were sampled, looped and layered with software Jonny Greenwood wrote. Jonny says the sessions kept stalling on songs they knew were nearly there. “Bloom” was one, until a bass line from Colin Greenwood and Yorke's vocal made it far better.

On the road they are six. Clive Deamer, 51, who has drummed for Portishead and Robert Plant, is the second drummer, and he and Phil Selway began working out the parts together in early 2011; Yorke credits him with renewing the band live. More than 75 songs have been worked up for 58 shows over ten months, played in legs of about three weeks with long breaks between, partly for the sake of their families.

Two new songs, “Identikit” and “Cut a Hole”, were rehearsed in Miami. Yorke calls “Identikit” joyful and slow, with a wonky hip-hop beat, and Colin picks out the falsetto in another new one, “Full Stop”. Yorke says “Lotus Flower” has changed most of all, turning nasty with two drummers behind it, and Ed O'Brien says the title track of Kid A, once an anti-song, has grown much warmer. Nigel Godrich says they tried “True Love Waits” in the studio more times than he can count, and it never worked.

Over breakfast in London last July, before a meeting about this tour, Yorke admitted that the size of the touring machine unsettles him. We never wanted to be big. I don't want to be loved in that way.¹