Mark Pritchard reads Radiohead's 2024 rehearsal as a good sign

Mark Pritchard says Thom Yorke tells him nothing about Radiohead's plans, but the band's get-together last year tells him nobody has fallen out. Brian Hiatt asked him, on Rolling Stone's Music Now podcast, whether Yorke talks about Radiohead as a going concern.

He definitely does not talk about it to me, because I guess they have to keep it on lockdown.

Mark Pritchard¹

All five got together to rehearse and play in 2024. If they'd all fallen out or anything, that wouldn't have happened.¹ A new record will come, he thinks, if and when they feel the time is right. He told Andy Price of MusicRadar much the same in April, adding that artists should be left to do what they need to do.

Yorke is doing no interviews for Tall Tales, so Pritchard has spent the spring explaining it. It began in Sydney in November 2012, when Clive Deamer, Radiohead's second drummer and an old friend of Pritchard's, brought the band on their Saturday night off to see him play with Steve Spacek as Africa HiTech. The next night Pritchard had dinner with all five, asked Yorke to sing on something, and Yorke said yes. The first result was “Beautiful People”, on Pritchard's 2016 album Under the Sun.

The album proper started in the 2020 lockdown, when Yorke emailed asking for music. Pritchard sent a folder of about 20 ideas; Yorke wanted one that night (“Happy Days”) and a few days later asked to try 14. That August or September, while Yorke was also making the first Smile album, he sent two or three vocal sketches a day for a week, “The Men Who Dance in Stags' Heads” and “A Fake in a Faker's World” among the first. They never worked in the same room. Pritchard lives in Australia, and email gave way to Sunday Zoom calls. Jonathan Zawada, who made the album's film, posted his work beside theirs on a shared Miro board, and Warp set no deadlines.

On “The Men Who Dance in Stags' Heads” Yorke sings low, in a Dylan-like register Pritchard had never heard from him; vari-speeding the audio, Yorke said, got him into character. For “The Spirit” he sent Janet Kay's 1979 hit “Silly Games” as the mood to keep, and when Pritchard tried fancier chords, Yorke told him to get rid of them.

Pritchard joined Yorke on stage at the Sydney Opera House last November for “Back in the Game”, and says he would be up for playing the Tall Tales songs live, though Yorke thinks the album would be hard to do. Asked by Eamonn Forde of the Big Issue about the scrutiny fan sites and forums give everything Yorke does, he said it needed talking about. It takes unbelievable strength of character to handle that.³