Thom Yorke shrugs off the talk about Radiohead's future

Thom Yorke has no time for the idea that The Smile's busy year puts Radiohead's future in question. I am not aware of it and don't really give a flying f**k¹, he told Al Newstead of Double J, the ABC's music station, in an interview published two days before his solo tour opens in Christchurch.

He thanks people for caring all the same, and calls it a non-problem. He feels no need to live up to anything; they are privileged to be making music still, because of Radiohead, and he has no complaints. I think we've earned the right to do what makes sense to us without having to explain ourselves¹, he says, or to answer to anyone's historical idea of what the band should be doing.

The Smile only look prolific, he says. Much of what is coming out now he has been working on for a long time, and it happens to be landing at once. The band are on a pause while Jonny Greenwood recovers from the illness that cancelled their European dates this summer, and touring is not being discussed.

His own show has been a long time in the making with the producer Sam Petts-Davies, and on stage it is some machines, a guitar, a piano and himself. The Melbourne and Sydney nights will be his first in Australia since Radiohead toured there in 2012.

Newstead also asked whether the rehearsal Colin Greenwood first mentioned in September, after years of everyone following their own muses, had changed the way the five work together.

Yeeessss. I don't think I have anything to add to that. Is Muses the plural of muse? The mind boggles.

Thom Yorke¹

Colin told NME more the same day. The five met for a couple of days in the summer at The Church in Crouch End, north London, the studio where they finished OK Computer, and ran through all the songs, picking up where they had left off in 2018. Colin had last been in the building in 1996, recording the bass for “Airbag”.

We were going to do three or four days but knocked it on the head after two because it was fine and we could still do it.

Colin Greenwood¹⁰

His brother reckons a couple of weeks' rehearsal would be enough to go back on the road, but Colin says none of this means a tour is imminent. He is sure the five will get together and make plans; he does not know for what.