Thom Yorke tells Crack the band are going through Kid A again

Thom Yorke has been going through the Kid A and Amnesiac material with the rest of Radiohead, he tells Thomas Frost in a long interview for Crack, done at the Barbican in London. He has found a box file of the faxes he and Stanley Donwood swapped over the artwork, pages Yorke left strewn around the studios and Nigel Godrich picked up and kept. Yorke calls them hilarious. We're going to do something really cool with all that material.²

They were all a bit mad by the end of that time, he says. We went through the whole crazy OK Computer period and I became catatonic at the end of it.² He remembers the band ashen in a dressing room in the rain before one of the first tent shows, and himself spoiling for the fight. There was a sense of a fight to convince people, which was actually really exciting.²

His solo album, still without a name, was written a new way. After watching Flying Lotus improvise with loops on tour, Yorke sent Godrich long unfinished tracks; Godrich cut the best fragments into samples and loops and sent them back for Yorke to sing over. The record is about anxiety more than dystopia, he says, and a dystopian setting was a good way to get at it. After a flight to Tokyo, jet lag gave him dreams in which humans and rats had changed places.

The piano pieces he wrote for Katia and Marielle Labèque, who played a concert with him at the Barbican about ten days before the interview, began as a joke, since he cannot read music. On stage he dances because the music is so dark. The thing I've always loved about watching John Lydon is the way he would revel in those moments where you're like, 'Fuck.'¹

He blames his own generation, raised under Thatcher and Blair, for writing politicians off and leaving losers in charge, and is glad that younger people, his son included, take politics seriously.

Most of Radiohead are 50 now and nothing is booked; it has to feel right, he says. But he misses the shows, and felt the band had got somewhere good at Glastonbury and in South America.