Thom Yorke tells Zane Lowe how a Radiohead song takes shape

Thom Yorke talked to Zane Lowe on camera for Apple Music's Beats 1, in an interview broadcast on Tuesday 25 June, two days before ANIMA, his third solo album, comes out with a short film by Paul Thomas Anderson. Some of the best of it is about Radiohead.

A Radiohead song, Yorke said, used to start with him playing a bunch of chords, mumbling over the top and sending them round to the others, who found things in them; only then did he feel free to pick up the microphone. Rooting around for ideas, he said, it's like a child playing with Lego. I'm just making stuff.⁶ Writing with the band is a safe space, and his job, in Radiohead or on his own, is to build a space safe enough to experiment in.

The ANIMA songs had been finished for ages, so he and Nigel Godrich recorded them fast. We set up as we do the live shows for most of it, and knocked it out.¹ “Dawn Chorus”, a song Radiohead had worked on for years, he told Lowe he reworked endlessly in search of the coldest sound he could find, and he all but dropped its vocal melody. The reason it ended up being called ANIMA was partly because I'm obsessed with this whole dream thing. It comes from this concept that Jung had.²

On politics, Yorke argued that people now copy what their devices tell them about themselves, which is why an audience can watch Boris Johnson lie without connecting to it. Johnson becomes an avatar and the consequences seem unreal. He called politics in Britain and America a Punch and Judy show, and named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as the kind of politician who will be ready when it breaks. And when it breaks, the likes of Ocasio-Cortez will walk in and go, “Right. Shall we get started?”¹

He also went back to the block that followed OK Computer, after years of playing the same songs and finding myself in increasingly large venues and not feeling mentally able to fill them for everybody⁶. He felt himself shrinking, mentally and physically.

the full Zane Lowe interview, as XL Recordings put it up· XL Recordingswatch on youtube →