Thom Yorke sees no Radiohead recording on the cards

Thom Yorke has no idea when Radiohead will next be in a recording studio. Asked by Craig McLean in a joint interview with Stanley Donwood for Wallpaper, published on 22 August, he said I have no idea. Not on the cards from where I'm sitting.¹ The question comes with tour talk in the air since OndaRock reported that the five had registered a company, Rheuk25 LLP, though nothing has been announced. Asked what the sleeve of the next Radiohead album might look like, Yorke laughed and said Moving on!¹

Donwood's first idea for the Hail to the Thief sleeve was enormous topiary phalluses, dropped digitally into National Trust gardens. He pitched it as soon as he arrived at the band's studio in Los Angeles, having joined the National Trust for the job. Yorke admits to five minutes of panic, and his first question was whether they would need three or four years to grow them. Well, it was all gonna be about chicken wire and astroturf. I was gonna cheat.¹ The exhibition's caption under the Hail to the Thief artwork tells the story too, ending with Yorke unconvinced, and when McLean read it back to him he burst out laughing.

The two met as art students at the University of Exeter and have made Radiohead's sleeves since the My Iron Lung EP of 1994. This Is What You Get, at the Ashmolean Museum until 11 January, began as a Kid A installation for the album's 20th anniversary that Covid stopped. Paul Thomas Anderson warned Yorke that looking backwards hurts; Yorke found the archive weirdly fascinating.

For Kid A they rented a freezing warehouse and made huge brushstrokes on six-foot-square canvases, though Donwood always knew the result would end up 12cm square on a CD. When the unfinished canvases were hung in the band's studio, Yorke says, the first songs and arrangements started coming together.

Going through the live archive for Hail to the Thief (Live Recordings 2003-2009), out this month, and for the RSC's Hamlet Hail to the Thief, Yorke found more of the frantic, troubled energy he needed in the live tapes than in the studio record. It helped him tell the stage show's musicians what the songs were about.

He was asked for a 15-second cut of a video for TikTok after all the work that went into it, and says he will just carry on making the work. Streaming, he says, is radio in the background, and the fact that you just get a thumbnail of the image, it seems to be designed to make you not give a fuck.¹