Thom Yorke says Tony Blair's advisers tried to blackmail him

Thom Yorke says Tony Blair's advisers tried to blackmail him when he was the spokesman for the Big Ask, the Friends of the Earth campaign for legally binding cuts in Britain's carbon emissions year on year. The Iraq war was under way, the campaign was going well, and Blair wanted to meet him. His advisers warned that if Yorke refused, Friends of the Earth would be shut out from the prime minister altogether. Because of the war, Yorke did not want to do it. I felt it was morally unacceptable for me to be photographed with Blair.¹

He tells the story to George Monbiot, whom he calls the most coherent political writer in Britain, in a conversation for the French magazine Telerama ahead of the Paris climate summit. Telerama's Yohav Oremiatzki took Yorke away from the sessions for Radiohead's ninth album for an afternoon in Oxford. It is the first time the two men have debated in the press. Yorke plays Pathway to Paris at Le Trianon on 4 December, the first of two nights of concerts and debates beside the summit.

In the 1960s, Yorke says, a song could be a call to arms and it worked. If I was going to write a protest song about climate change in 2015, it would be shit.¹ Change, he says, comes gradually, and then it snowballs.

Yorke got into the Copenhagen summit in 2009 by pretending to be a journalist, and watched it fall apart as America and China walked out of the meeting. Monbiot says everyone should already be preparing for the Paris summit to fail, and he is not going.