When the Hutton report arrived this week, I expected Geoff Hoon to have to resign. I expected, at the very least, a grovelling apology from Tony Blair. I had been looking forward to this for months.
Instead, I have had to stomach the gloating and moralising of Blair, Hoon and Alastair Campbell as the establishment of this godforsaken country closes ranks to protect itself, its intelligence services and the oh so wonderful MoD.

Lord Hutton's damning report of the BBC is a whitewash. The result will create fear at the Today programme, where there should be pride. As so many times before, they were there with a story that nobody else would touch. And I still cannot see why Gavyn Davies and Greg Dyke have had to resign. It flies in the face of reality, ripping all evidence to shreds.

This is a theatre of the absurd. It has left everybody I know shaking their heads in disbelief and anger. Such a performance should make us all deeply nervous about the future of Britain. While Blair wishes to draw a line under the whole episode, I hope this doesn't happen. Sometimes a story will end up being told, no matter how many times they try to close the book.

I am staring at a photo of Campbell at the foot of some grand stairs, mewing and preaching about truth. An unelected, unanswerable force who was willing to destroy the integrity of others and make their lives unbearable to save his skin and that of his masters.

As Andrew Gilligan submitted to Hutton, why was the BBC singled out when other media reports questioned the intelligence as well? Why did Campbell suddenly give disproportionate attention to the Today programme's story, after weeks of hoping it would go away?

The shortlist for the NME Awards was announced yesterday. You'll no doubt be amazed to learn that Radiohead top the list with their customary thousand nominations. Is OTR alone in wondering, also for the thousandth time, just what it is about this group that has installed them as the noughties' sacred rock cows? Let's cut through the customary excuse that their "articulate" and "outspokenly politicised" stance makes everything they do worthwhile. (To OTR's disgust, even the Today programme fell for this, inviting Thom Yorke to be guest editor for a day between Christmas and New Year.)

Why does no one ever address the fact that their actual music is lumpen, ponderous and unlistenable? Like those leather-bound Shakespeare sets most people buy their CDs not to play but to leave on display to impress friends. (And before the peevish emails arrive - yes, I have the sensitivity of a rhinoceros, and wouldn't know a good song if I fell over it. Obviously.)

Radiohead Headlining Coachella
Enjoy this electronic fact. You have only 1 chance to see Radiohead in North America during 2004. Radiohead will be headlining Saturday, May 1 of the 2-day Coachella Music and Arts Festival in southern California.

Tickets for the festival go on sale February 14th, 2004 at Noon. Tickets are available through Ticketmaster charge-by-phone lines at (213) 480-3232, at all Ticketmaster retail ticket centers or via http://www.ticketmaster.com.

General admission tickets for each day are priced at $75.00 per day, with a limited amount of 2-day tickets available for $140.00 plus $1 per day for charity. In the Coachella festival tradition, there is free parking and the doors to the venue will open at noon on both days. Parking lots open at 9:00 AM. For info: http://www.coachella.com

In the meantime, Jonny's Score from Bodysong will be released February 24 on Capitol Records. Check http://www.capitolrecords.com/bodysong for signs of what is to come.


http://capitolrecords.com/radiohead
http://www.radiohead.com

1. 2+2=5
2. Myxomatosis (Cristian Vogel Mix)
3. Paperbag Writer
4. Scatterbrain (Four Tet Remix)
5. I Will (LA Version)
6. I am Citizen Insane
7. Fog (Again)
8. Where Bluebirds Fly
9. I am a Wicked Child
10. Gagging Order

The 1999 documentary "Meeting People Is Easy," which followed the band on its tour supporting "OK Computer", showed singer Thom Yorke pretty tweaked out from the pressures of making the greatest rock and roll album of his generation. Cynical of the music industry and wildly depressed, he led Radiohead down the dark road towards "Kid A," an experimental follow-up made almost entirely without guitars or record label support. Both that quasi-electronic album and its sister "Amnesiac" (which was put together from tracks recorded during the "Kid A" sessions) were received with tremendous excitement, and Radiohead was hailed as the second coming of the Beatles.

This year they released their sixth album, returning to the rock and roll of "OK Computer" and even 1995's "The Bends" without jeopardizing the evolution they have since undergone. There were (gasp!) even singles: the hypnotizing "Go to Sleep" and brilliant "There There," one of the best rock singles in years, not to mention highlights like the group clapping in "We Suck Young Blood" and synthesizer-distorted guitars in "2+2=5." Most importantly, Thom Yorke sounds, as he himself has said, better than he ever has; songs like the heartbreaking "I Will" (on which he is double tracked) and "Wolf at the Door" have melodies that rival the Beatles'. The album might not be as avant-garde as its two predecessors, but it nevertheless managed to surpass expectations by defying them.

After we had completed that video, we were suddenly music video directors. Eventually Shynola worked their way into the opportunity of a lifetime—when they directed the video for Radiohead’s Pyramid Song.

The Pyramid Song video pushed us to the limits of our abilities at the time, says Chris. We were just four kids in our bedrooms and we were making things up as we went along.

The video landed Shynola their first NME BRAT award in 2002 for Best Video and all members of Shynola feel strongly about the work they did.

From a personal, working point of view Pyramid Song stands out because we worked terrifically hard on something where we aimed beyond our abilities and actually came out with a very pleasing result, says Kenny. It was a very enjoyable time making that video and these days I find myself trying to recreate such enthusiasm in myself.

One of the best pop music experiences is hearing a song like OutKast's "Hey Ya!''—sort of the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations'' of its day—a song that makes you feel bulletproof for 3 minutes and 55 seconds, that makes you get up and dance every time or sing at the top of your lungs in the car.

But there's something better. It's finding an album that you hate at first, maybe for even more than a dozen plays, but that ends up changing your musical tastes and maybe your life.

I had one of those moments with Radiohead's "Hail to the Thief'' over the holidays, an album that a number of readers pointed out was surprisingly absent from my top 10 for the year.

I was in the Radiohead studio just a couple of hours ago, guitarist Jonny Greenwood told Billboard.com yesterday (Jan. 12). Phil was there drumming and recording and Thom has been in and out. We don't take time off very well. We're enjoying it still, so why just go home and do nothing? I guess we're just going to record and work, he said. We don't plan so far ahead anymore.

One piece of music that won't be hitting the marketplace is the live soundtrack Radiohead provided in October for the world premiere of Merce Cunningham's "Split Sides" at the Brooklyn (N.Y.) Academy of Music. The piece is not scheduled to be performed again in 2004.

It's just for the dancing and that's it, Greenwood says of the music. It was important to us and we took it seriously. It was a privilege. What a man! Cunningham is inspiring. We went to his apartment in New York and he was demonstrating how he used a laptop to do the choreography, and he's in his 80s. He sat there using a G4. Just to have not given up and keep changing is inspiring.

It was by no means a coincidence that Radiohead’s disappearance into avant-garde territory was followed by Britpop’s dying popularity (only vaguely resuscitated by Coldplay) and the resurgence of dinosaur mook rock. Once again, the art side of rock was back at the sidelines. It was by no means a coincidence that Radiohead’s disappearance into avant-garde territory was followed by Britpop’s dying popularity (only vaguely resuscitated by Coldplay) and the resurgence of dinosaur mook rock. Once again, the art side of rock was back at the sidelines. It was by no means a coincidence that Radiohead’s disappearance into avant-garde territory was followed by Britpop’s dying popularity (only vaguely resuscitated by Coldplay) and the resurgence of dinosaur mook rock. Once again, the art side of rock was back at the sidelines.

Critics couldn’t quite decide what to make of “Hail to the Thief” upon its release. It was definitely a return to more organic forms of rock music after the ice-cold blip fests of “Kid A” and “Amnesiac” caught everybody by surprise, but it wasn’t “OK Computer” Part 2 as fans had expected. Instead, the band that shakes up popular music like an Etch A Sketch let their instincts do the talking, melding the best parts of their catalogue into one cohesive album of impressive progressive rock. From the standout single “There There,” to the bass-heavy ballad “A Punchup at a Wedding,” Radiohead continues to reach beyond the boundaries that keep other bands corralled in mediocrity.

Admitting that you never really 'got' Radiohead is enough to get one killed in certain indie-rock circles, so let's just say that we have seen the light. Funny that our conversion would come with this seriously strange, dark, difficult, if you will, outing from the Oxford quintet. Still, it's difficult not to be slowly lured by this record-Thom Yorke's voice is as compelling as always, and the band builds layers and layers of creepy noise around it, underscoring the uneasy political theme at play here. While Yorke is far too clever to wear his ideas on his sleeve a la Coldplay's Chris Martin, he manages to shed some light on the dark days we find ourselves in.

A new documentary chronicling the band Radiohead on their OK Computer world tour will have two showings at 7:30 and 9 p.m. on Friday, Jan. 9, at the WOW Hall.

Meeting People Is Easy is a documentary multi-media scrapbook that follows Radiohead around the world during their 1997-98 OK Computer tour. The film presents the spectacle of rock stardom and shows the band dealing with fame and getting dazed by finding themselves a world renowned spectacle. The fame they experience is less than glamorous; being shuttled from one interview to the next, Japan to London to New York, provides little time for a real lifestyle. A routine sets in and the band is caught in a blurred whirlwind of interviews, performances, and hotel rooms. Each day blends into the next while fans continue their raving support.

Where most rock documentaries simply record concerts and the daily grind of the road, here filmmaker Grant Gee's lenses focus on an important though less well chronicled aspect of the big-time music business: the PR tour. With Super 8 and hand-held video cameras Gee followed the British band for an unsettling glimpse of countless photo sessions, vapid interviews and tedious press junkets. The San Francisco Examiner praised the film as Kubrickian in its atmospheric melancholy, foreboding disorientation and technical mischief.

Read in full here.

Radiohead were the best live band I saw, Cat Power put out my favourite record, Pearl Jam were the nicest band I met, Amoeba records is still the best shop I've ever been in, maybe City Lights. New York is still my favourite city, but challenged for mantle of favourite place by the North west highlands of Scotland. The best book I read was 'The sorrows of young werther'. I'm still wearing the same trousers. David Blaine should have won the Turner prize, a dangling question mark in the centre of London, annoying people because they couldn't understand what he was doing there, he wasn't doing anything, I thought it was great. Harmony Korine also, "Gummo" is a bona fide classic and his book wasn't bad either. The Shins are the band to put your hopes into, because they are great. When it comes out, the Modest Mouse record will be a rock monument I'm sure. All tomorrow's parties. I hope I'm free.

I honestly didn't have any decent offers. For example three major US labels said 'We want you, but not your band', so I turned them down. Another label said 'We want to sign you, but we'd like you to make an album with the musicians from Radiohead'…Absolutely bewildering. People don't know what I've been through.

Whether this means Morrissey feels the trouble he's been through in his life is comparable to recording an album with Radiohead is currently uncertain.

The greater part of the last hour of the show (as one must now call it) was devoted to "the world's best hangover cure" - the "corpse reviver". Yorke was announced as about to contribute to this piffle. There was a row off-mike and a mid-programme apology was issued. Yorke, the mystified audience was informed, dissociated himself from excessive drinking.

The item that the puritanical singer-editor had proposed for the programme came later. In it, the environmentalist George Monbiot was put up against a smooth-talking propagandist from the oil industry. Was the world, they debated, "running out of gas"?

The argument revolves around the "Hubbert" thesis. Marion King Hubbert, a mathematician employed by big oil, prophesied in 1956 that American dominance of his industry would soon end. Not because the stuff would run out, but because the rate of discovery of new sources was declining as demand rose.

Bankruptcy typically happens not when you lose all your money, but when you drop, marginally, below the threshold that enables you to service your debt. Hubbert forecast the "peak" in US domestic supplies of oil would occur in 1971. Which it did. The problem is now worldwide. There have been no new huge discoveries of easily accessible oil for decades. We are, globally, on the other side of Hubbert's peak. Thoughts of this kind, Yorke said (when James Naughtie let him get a word in) had been "rattling about in my head for a year". The impending oil crunch motivated the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. Hence Radiohead's 2003 album, Hail to the Thief. The thief of Baghdad, that is, and the president who stole the 2000 election. The ruthless rush for the world's diminishing store of oil has begun. Top gun takes all.

"Are you such a dreamer," sings Yorke, "to put the world to rights?" That is precisely what Radiohead dream. What is striking is that such groups, with their world-wide sales, have the political clout to back up their dreams. Arguably, Bono has done more to alert the west to crisis in Africa than the whole PR bureau of the UN.

The hottest group in the world currently is, one gathers, Coldplay. Chris Martin, its lead singer, insists that "fair trade" is brought up in interviews. The 10 million purchasers, worldwide, of A Rush of Blood to the Head are piously directed, having listened to politik, to activist websites. Many click as directed. Cynics see the political agitations of Yorke, Martin, Bono, and Damon Albarn of Blur ("We've got a File on You") as T-shirt and Diet Coke protest by "knobhead students" (as the earthily unstudious Liam Gallagher calls them) who feel bad about being rich.

It's more than that. The novelist (and sometime guest performer with U2) who most clearly apprehends the potential power of this constituency is Salman Rushdie. Rushdie calls the power of these musical evangelists "Orphic" - like Orpheus, their lyrics can change the world. Perhaps.

The politician who most clearly perceived the voting power of youthful music-lovers was Bill Clinton, who played the MTV audience as assiduously (and profitably) as he did middle America. Tony Blair is smart enough to do a Clinton when it suits him: eg, his assertion that "I used to like Oasis, now I'm more of a Coldplay guy". Blair is also smart enough to get behind the warmonger Bush when required. He's smart but is he, when push comes to shove (on fair trade, for example), really "a Coldplay sort of guy"?

"If there is hope", wrote Orwell in 1984, "it lies in the proles."

It's 2004, and if there's hope it lies, strange to say, in the "knob-head students".

Dream on, Radiohead."

The final twenty of loopholes have gone up on radiohead.com today - thank you very much to the hundreds and hundreds of people who entered tracks for the competition, we had a good laugh listening to them all, and also thanks to everyone who downloaded and listened someone else's track from the site, hopefully a few of them caught your ear. These last twenty will stay up for one month now, and then the Loophole site will be put to sleep. Thanks once again to everyone who put in so much hard work - the response was amazing.

Happy new year,
W.a.s.t.e.

It's official, w.a.s.t.e. has gone crazy.

We must be, as we are slashing prices for our outrageous winter sale.

Many of our popular t shirt designs are reduced from quite reasonable to just silly prices.... We must be bonkers!!

go to www.waste.uk.com go to the shop and hit the red sale button.

Oh and we have also added the UK NOT OK design to our store you can find it in the newest dept.

that is all.

w.a.s.t.e.

ps Happy New Year

Radiohead's fans are among the most disparaging and judgmental in all of rock fandom.

Christopher O'Riley should know. Not only is he one of the truly dedicated, the hardcore group that can only be described as The Devout, but he's also been the object of their judgment.

As the pianist behind the new Radiohead tribute, True Love Waits, O'Riley admires the band in a way most of The Devout will never realize themselves. Yes, he recognizes the band's musical genius. And he has a favorite album, Kid A. He knows why Morning Bell appears on both Kid A and Amnesiac.

But more importantly, he knows the band's entire catalog inside and out - even wacked-out song titles such as Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box. And he's all-too-familiar with the subtle minutiae of Radiohead - things like Jonny Greenwood's poignant glockenspiel in No Surprises.

Texture attracts me to any music, he said last week from his California home.

A European consumer watchdog is suing the world's largest music companies for selling copy-protected compact discs that won't play in car stereos and on computers, the Belgium-based organization said on Monday.

The group, known in Dutch as Test-Aankoop, said it has received more than 200 complaints from consumers who objected to a technology that prevents them from making a backup version on a blank disc and limits playback on certain devices.

Industry observers believe Test-Aankoop's suit is the biggest European legal challenge yet to the music industry's controversial campaign to release copy-protected discs to minimize the impact that digital piracy is having on sales.

Test-Aankoop cited more than a dozen top-selling releases including Shakira's Laundry Service and Radiohead's Hail to the Thief that could not be played on multiple devices.

EMI, Universal Music, Sony Music and BMG have been named in the suit, which is expected to be heard this week in a Belgian court.

Warner Music is the only one of the five major music labels not named.

The group said it wants the labels to end the practice of issuing protected discs and to reimburse customers.

We are trying to establish legal precedent in this matter. Then, we expect other consumer organizations will follow, said Mechels Ivo, a spokesman for the group.

"Don't expect music by Chopin or Beethoven when Christopher O'Riley appears in a piano recital at Gates Hall on Thursday. Not with a program offering the likes of Subterranean Homesick Alien, Fake Plastic Trees and Karma Police. Unless you're a fan of the English modern-rock band Radiohead, those titles won't mean much. But they mean the world to the American pianist."

Difficult, angular and challenging, Hail to the Thief is not the return to rock many had predicted. However, it is a great survey and a synthesis of the band's recent experiments in techno and art-rock. That unholy union could be an unlistenable mess in lesser artists' hands; in Radiohead's, it results in new classics like the hypnotic Where I End and You Begin and the subtly-melodic There There, the band's best single in years.