Thom Yorke would sue David Cameron for using Radiohead's music in a campaign

Thom Yorke says he would take David Cameron to court if the Prime Minister ever used Radiohead's music in an election campaign. Tim Noakes, interviewing him for the February issue of Dazed & Confused, asked whether it bothers him that the band are liked by everyone from teenagers to bankers and prime ministers. As long as he doesn't use it for his election campaigns, I don't care. I'd sue the living shit out of him if he did.¹ He doubts Cameron would like The King of Limbs much anyway. In the same answer he tells of an 18-year-old girl who asked him to sign something for her mother, the one who got her into his music when she was small. He has two generations of fans now.

It is his first Dazed cover since 1996, when at 27 he interviewed himself, alone with a dictaphone and a couple of bottles of wine. Now 44, he talked to Noakes in a hotel lobby north of central Oxford, three days after flying home from the end of Radiohead's The King of Limbs tour in Australia.

Amok, Yorke's album with Atoms for Peace, is out on XL on 25 February. The band first got together in 2009, with Nigel Godrich and Flea in it, to play The Eraser in America. The first rehearsal, the first time since he was about 16 that he had properly played with another band, left Yorke buzzing for weeks.

He says the record is nothing like The Eraser, and not a band album either, because it doesn't sound like a band playing. If it were up to me, every track would be ten minutes long.¹ Godrich is the one with no patience for that. The two of them, Yorke says, fight like brothers, sometimes for days, and it always comes out fine.

Radiohead stopped imitating other people, he says, on The Bends, two months on 12 songs with John Leckie, and when A&R and management turned up asking where the hits were, they shut them out. There was a half-hour period following that where everyone wobbled and then we were like, 'Fuck you! You're banned!' and we pulled out all the phones.¹

After OK Computer he was handed a gold disc and could not cope. He went to Cornwall and drew on the cliffs every day. I remember having nothing in the house, except a Yamaha grand piano. Classic. And the first thing I wrote was 'Everything in Its Right Place'.¹