Apologies - The internet is slightly broken at the moment - a large-scale attack has brought down a load of internet servers, some of which are unfortunately ours. So this website might not work very well, if at all. It should all be back to normal soon when these people get bored of attacking servers, so why not go and do something else for a while?

There There
(Nice Dream)
No Surprises
Polyethylene Part II.
How I Made My Millions
Like Spinning Plates
Sail To The Moon
The Tourist
Cuttooth
2+2=5
Talk Show Host
Gagging Order
Paranoid Android
Street Spirit (fade out)

Forget manufactured pop - after suffering a surfeit of Reality TV shows that propelled instantly forgettable stars into the charts, music fans have had enough. And so has the record industry.

Durability is the new buzzword as the music business hands out its annual awards after a buoyant year.

There is a massive appetite for artistic bands like Radiohead, Coldplay and Franz Ferdinand that the industry has spent time investing in, said Matt Phillips of the British Phonographic Industry umbrella group.

We have a solid base of bands coming through that have durability, he added.

That is reflected in the shortlist for Wednesday's Brit Awards -- Scottish rockers Franz Ferdinand are leading the field with five nominations for the industry's premier prizes.

Pony-tailed record executives are masters of hype, talking up every new band as the new Beatles. But the latest sales figures show there are grounds for optimism in the world's third largest music market after the United States and Japan.

The British are the world's biggest music consumers per capita and album sales rose 2.3 percent in 2004.

That is the highest ever total for album sales which provide 95 percent of revenue. The industry is in good health, Phillips said.

039: Radiohead - Hail To The Thief (Capitol; 2003)

Old habits die hard-- having left the grand spotlight-sweeping gestures of "Creep" and The Bends far behind, Radiohead still can't help but sloganeer disenfranchisement. "The raindrops." "This is the gloaming." "Little babies' eyes." "We want young blood." "Just because you feel it doesn't mean it's there." This isn't subtle stuff, even if Thom Yorke spends a good amount of time singing (mewling, wailing) in a near-whisper. These fragments repeat endlessly, transforming into funereal rallying cries, the perfect chants to accompany these resolute dirges. So damned serious and earnest, these guys. And, of course, there's title of the album, utilizing a horrifically awkward pun to announce itself and its intentions. Yet where the words and their purported import might be cumbersome, the music is sublime--electrostatic shocks mingle with three-penny operatics and Sophoclean choral uprisings as if they're long-lost friends kicking back a few cocktails. Even the Horsemen of the Apocalypse need some down time, y'know? Yes, this is An Important Album, all of it, every scratch and breath, every tic and squeal. But don't let that nonsense stop you from enjoying it.

- David Raposa

021: Radiohead - Amnesiac (Capitol; 2001)

On what may be Radiohead's classiest and most restrained collection of songs, Thom Yorke ran endurance tests on his repertoire, having cast himself in a guitarless role that might be billed as a fight between his piano man, his personal jesus, and his paranoid android. Oddly pretty, the album's cynical showtunes slithered through pop history, flinched with futurism, drank dyspepsia, chewed troublegum, shriveled Big Brother, and inflated Chicken Little. Amnesiac crouched in its own deprivation chamber so elegantly that its initial misdiagnosis of being "10 songs in search of an album" would be forgotten if not for the reprise of Kid A's "Morning Bell". But even that echo was recast from a warm distant place, like a clone baby singing itself to sleep in a makeshift womb, its lullabies dreading much more than prequel-envy.

- William Bowers

001: Radiohead - Kid A (Capitol; 2000)

Exactly how and why Radiohead's Kid A has come to stand as the definitive artistic statement for rock consumers born after 1975 is almost ridiculously difficult to discern. People believed (and continue to believe) in the metaphysical heft of Kid A: in its aesthetic worth, its innovation, its meaning. In 2000, Kid A felt true and inscrutable; five years later, it somehow still does: From its chilling opening organ figure to its closing silence, Kid A is enormous-- a huge, sweeping testament to Radiohead's ever-swelling worldview.

Kid A was an obvious departure from its predecessor, the guitar-swollen OK Computer, and it alternately challenged and confounded Radiohead's core audience. Regardless, the record's supposed difficulty also lent it a certain sense of gravity: Kid A is confrontational and insistent, mysteriously capable of convincing some of the most stridently anti-electro guitarheads that inorganic flourishes can feel bloody and real. Consequently, in the months following its release, Kid A transformed into an intellectual symbol of sorts, a surprisingly ubiquitous signifier of self. Owning it became "getting it"; getting it became "annointing it." The record's significance as a litmus test was stupid and instant and undeniable: In certain circles, you were only as credible as your relationship to this album. And that kind of intense, unilateral, with-us-or-against-us fandom felt oddly, uncomfortably apropos in the face of all that sound.

It is in this weird sense that Kid A was (and continues to be) the perfect record for its time: Ominous, surreal, and impossibly millennial, its revolutionary tangle of yelpy, apocalyptic vocals, glitchy synths, and beautiful drones is uncertain about both its past and present-- and, accordingly, timeless.

- Amanda Petrusich

Karma In The Life
Radiohead / The Beatles Karma Police / A Day In The Life

Taken from the Beatleg Bootles set and made available in isolation after many requests. Was the last track that I played at Bastard in December to a crowd of dropped jaws. Nice feeling. November 2003.

- download it here

Independent Creep
Destiny's Child / Radiohead Independent Women / Creep

Never know what to make of this. Funnily enough a lot of folks like it. The verses work pretty well and then you get to the chorus and there's no getting rid of Thom doing his thang. If there was an instrumental of Creep available I might have pulled it off a bit better. It was around this stage that I was putting out 2 tracks a week and it shows. July 2002.

- download it here

Sexual High
Marvin Gaye / Radiohead Sexual Healing / High And Dry

A demo for this pairing was on my hardrive since 'Oasis are Gaye' but I ended up putting out that one. Played it to Tone who said it had no right to be hidden away and I should put it out. Decided to totally re-record the whole thing from scratch. Worked on a punchier break using the Radiohead kit and a sample. Layered in a string section and released it on valentines day. Gott a big reaction from a lot of people. Another turning point I suppose. Played on John Kennedy's Exposure a few times. The BBC were in touch too. February 2003.

- download it here

JJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJJe just to let you know the site 'scrapbook' section is being added to regularly now as well.. contrary to what the news sites are saying....
it randomizes contents and those contents will continue to expand, it is for us to look at as much as you, i hope you understand it is not supposed to be coherent..

its kind of funny the moaning about it i think.

well anyway, please dont flood because im jumping back out of the river now.....

luv thom

p.s. whats will all the anal retentive?

Just a quickie to say a big thank you to Yasuko who has helped us translate the shop into Japanese recently - please see www.waste.uk.com.

In the same way I'd like to say a huge thanks to all the fansites around the world for helping us in this way too. Big Up to you all.

Thanks and have a great weekend.

Mel x

It wasn't astrophysicist Stephen William Hawking's amazing u-turn after almost 30 years of arguing that a black hole swallows up everything that falls into it, no it was his historic live acoustic version of Radiohead's Fitter Happier that really turned the crowd on at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation in Dublin, Ireland, on July 21.

After initially taking every conceivable insult possible on the chin, including a claim that he had "back-pedalled" (surely a scientific impossibility), he launched into an extravagant mind-numbing rendition of his favourite song. It really brought a tear to the eye as the crowd joined in on the final words "...a pig in a cage, on anti-biotics..".

Eager not to let concert plans dissappear down a black hole, Radiohead's lead singer Thom Yorke confirmed that the band will proceed with a live collaboration with Hawking from their headquarters in Oxford, England via satellite link up. Something that Stephen describes as "a Nobel Prize for the dedicated fan".

En route towards Phoenix, thousands of miles in the air, I stared out the window of an airplane, Blue sky above, desert canyons below and a stream of billowy white clouds off in the horizon. A far cry from the driving snowstorm we had escaped from.

It’s at this point that the pure randomness of my iPod played the title track of Radiohead’s ‘Kid A’, the most unusual track from a wildly experimental album by a band that I like a lot. Ordinarily, I would just skip past this song if it ever came up. But at this moment it was the perfect soundtrack, a piano being struck slowly, one key at a time with a haunting synthesizer in the background.

I removed the random setting from the iPod and dialed up the album. I wanted to hear it from the beginning. Let the music redefine itself for me while I lose myself in the most amazing scenery. As I heard the first notes of the first song, I remembered the song’s title and it jolted me, another amazing coincidence, ‘Everything In It’s Right Place’. I’m floating as Thom Yorke’s voice drones on, repeating the song’s title over and over. It’s as if the music had been written specifically for the moment. For the rest of my life, listening to it will bring me back to that place.