Adam Thorpe takes the TLS inside the A Moon Shaped Pool sessions

Adam Thorpe, an author and poet and a friend of Colin Greenwood, has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the TLS, about his days with Radiohead at La Fabrique, the old mill near Saint-Rémy-de-Provence where A Moon Shaped Pool was made. Pitchfork calls it the band's first interview published since the album came out. Colin, asked whether he is pleased with the record, gives little away.

I can’t talk about it much, as Nigel [Godrich] is really secretive about our ways.

Colin Greenwood¹

He likes a lot of it, he says, and finds it lyrical in places. There’s one with a straight chord sequence, so that can go next to the cold spy one. The fluffy puppy next to the warthog!¹ The band can't be perfectionists, he adds, or they would never release anything.

Thorpe also watched Jonny Greenwood beat out a rhythm, part calypso and part reggae, on yoghurt cartons, tubs, bells and a small tambourine. Sounds a bit like Marvin Gaye¹, said Ed O'Brien.

In one of the barns, Stanley Donwood was surrounded by canvases of abstract colour. The barn's speakers were wired to the studio, and he painted in acrylic in answer to what he heard; the paintings were then worked over on computer for the cover.

Entertainment Weekly picked out a whiteboard running order in the piece that began with “Daydreaming” and ended with “Burn the Witch”, with “Spectre”, the song turned down as a Bond theme and released last December, set a little apart.

Thom Yorke barely appears. Thorpe remembers a dinner in Arles 13 years ago at which Yorke said he would give up rock music at 40 rather than end up a Mick Jagger. Now nearing 50, he crosses a lawn in a dressing gown, a towel wound round his head and mirrored shades on, and could pass for 20 but for the grey in his stubble.