Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich tell how Atoms for Peace made Amok

Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich have told Tom Lea of Fact how Amok, the Atoms for Peace album due on XL on 25 February, was made. The drummer Joey Waronker joins them in a talk with Bob Boilen for NPR's All Songs Considered, recorded last summer and put up today.

Lea pointed out that one of the album's songs, “Judge, Jury and Executioner”, repeats the subtitle Yorke gave “Myxomatosis” on Hail to the Thief, just as the band's name repeats a song title from The Eraser. Yorke had genuinely forgotten. That was a mistake. I forgot I'd already used that! I've only got a limited wardrobe.¹

The band began as a way to play The Eraser, Yorke's 2006 solo album, on stage. Godrich says Yorke rang him a couple of years after it wanting to play the record with Latin percussion, so that the electronic parts became real. Yorke traces it to a solo booking at Latitude in 2009, which made him work out how the songs could go on piano or bass. The rule from the start, he says, was Not using any sequencers or nuffinck.¹ He emailed Waronker and Flea, had answers from both within an hour, then found the percussionist Mauro Refosco, and the band played their first show at the Echoplex in Los Angeles in October 2009. They still never play to a sequencer running behind them on stage, he tells Boilen; for him the point is the tension between the machines and the players answering them.

Played together, the songs came out far more Afrobeat than anyone had meant. We went to Flea's house and played pool all night and listened to Fela Kuti and it was like, this is good.²

Amok grew out of three days of nonstop playing in the studio at the end of the band's 2010 tour, after a couple of weeks on the road, with almost nothing prepared beyond a few laptop sketches. Godrich likens it to Miles Davis's free-form sessions. He and Yorke took what they had back to England and cut it down, then worked on it again with the others at Waronker's house in Los Angeles, where the rest of the band live. The words, Yorke says, were the hard part, as usual.

Well [Radiohead]'s on a break, and having some quality time to myself with all these unfinished ideas is really great.

Thom Yorke¹