Radiohead put their stolen MiniDisc archive on sale for Extinction Rebellion

Radiohead have put MINIDISCS [HACKED] on their Bandcamp page, about 18 hours of recordings from Thom Yorke's MiniDisc archive, made between 1995 and 1998, around the time of OK Computer. It costs £18 to download and is on sale for 18 days only, and every penny goes to Extinction Rebellion, the climate protest movement.

Jonny Greenwood says in a statement that someone stole Thom's archive last week and reportedly demanded $150,000 not to release it. So instead of complaining - much - or ignoring it, we're releasing all 18 hours on Bandcamp in aid of Extinction Rebellion.¹ So for £18 you can find out if we should have paid that ransom.¹

The 18 files carry no song titles, only the disc numbers MD111 to MD128, and most run about an hour. The first opens on an “Exit Music (For a Film)” with different words; one line, about living in a glass house, turned up later in “Life in a Glasshouse” on Amnesiac. There is a full-band “True Love Waits”, the song the band only recorded at last as a piano piece on A Moon Shaped Pool in 2016, and disc three holds an 11-minute “Paranoid Android”.

Extinction Rebellion thanked the band the same day for what it called unprecedented support; Radiohead have also let it use “Idioteque” in a new promotional video.

Thom's note on the release page calls the collection not very interesting and warns that there is a lot of it, 1.8 gigabytes in all. as it's out there it may as well be out there until we all get bored and move on.¹