Thom Yorke open to Radiohead recording live in a room again

Thom Yorke says he would now consider Radiohead recording together live in a room, which they have not done since OK Computer. He has always fought against the band being drums, guitar and bass, he told Andy Greene for Rolling Stone's cover story on the album's twentieth anniversary, and letting go of that is not easy. I'm too old to be standing there with a hammer and saying, 'We must do this, we must do that!' I would like everyone to feel free.¹

Colin Greenwood would welcome it. He wishes they played more shows and spent more time in a room working on things together. What follows the tour, which ends in Tel Aviv on 19 July, is open.

Radiohead gave no interviews when A Moon Shaped Pool came out in May 2016, and Ed O'Brien now says why. We didn't want to talk about it being quite hard to make. We were quite fragile, and we needed to find our feet.¹ He would rather leave it there, because the dust has not settled. There was no rehearsal; they went straight into recording songs, many of them old, and the sound came as they went. Yorke calls it a miracle the record got made at all, given how hard a time it was for them as people.

Rachel Owen, Yorke's ex-wife and the mother of his two teenage children, died of cancer in December after a long illness. They had separated the year before, after 23 years together, and few outside a close circle knew she was ill.

For OKNOTOK 1997 2017, the reissue due on 23 June, Yorke has been through his notebooks, sketchbooks and demos from the OK Computer years, where lyrics on hotel stationery sit beside instructions for using an inhaler. The travelling was what filled his head. The paranoia I felt at the time was much more related to how people related to each other. But I was using the terminology of technology to express it.¹

The band spent six weeks living and recording at St Catherine's Court, a house near Bath said to be haunted. After a night of hearing voices, Yorke tried to cut his own hair with penknife scissors, cut himself, and Phil Selway took him aside and shaved the lot off. Over a pint, Yorke told Nigel Godrich he disliked the second half of “Karma Police”, and the two of them rebuilt it from samples and loops with none of the others there, the first time, Godrich says, they had worked that way.

Yorke's advice to his younger self is Lighten the fuck up.¹