Radiohead are back in the studio working on their new album.

The band spent some time last month working on songs for the follow-up to 'Hail To The Thief', and recently contributed a brand new track, 'I Want None Of It' to the War Child compilation 'Help: A Day In The Life'.

Writing to fans online, guitarist Jonny Greenwood said the band are working on tracks and everything is fun and well.

He continued: Stanley (Donwood)'s here too, or at least in the shed out back, painting again. The rats have got in and eaten all his blue paint, and there's blue rat shit everywhere: but at least he's got a good dub cd to listen to while he's working.

Greenwood said he's spent the last six months listening to just dub reggae. He wrote: Six solid months of nothing but Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Ken Boothe, Junior Byles, Marcia Aitkin and hundreds of others. It's to make a compilation which may or may not ever be completed - I hope I'm not just proving a point to myself - but either way, there's been nothing else on my iPod since April.

NEW YORK: Two years after he released a Radiohead tribute album to much acclaim, classical pianist Christopher O'Riley has mined the British rock band's catalogue for a sequel, and he plans to release a similar tribute to the late Elliot Smith next spring.

I play a lot of different repertoire, mostly classical, and I realised that in my off hours, I was listening mostly to Radiohead and a lot to Elliot Smith, O'Riley told Billboard.com. So I started making my arrangements.

In addition to the tributes, O'Riley also issues his own albums or original works by himself and with others. Additionally, he hosts a syndicated classical music radio show (From the Top), and has toured or performed as part of Academy of St. Martin in the Fields Chamber Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Minnesota Orchestra and the Pittsburgh Symphony.

He won attention with his 2003 Radiohead album, True Love Waits (Sony Classical), which has now yielded the follow-up, Hold Me To This. The Smith album will be called Home to Oblivion.

Despite being such an accomplished musician and arranger, O'Riley admitted experiencing some challenges while reworking rock artists' material for piano.

There have been Elliot Smith songs that I've done in a day, there are some – Coast to Coast, from Elliot's last record (2004's From a Basement on the Hill) – took me a couple of weeks to get even a first draft done, he said.

I won't do a song unless I can make a version that excites me as much as listening to my favourite live version of the band doing it. One of the first songs I heard of Elliot Smith was 'Speed Trials,' so I was working on three or four songs, got back to revising a couple of them, and said, 'This really sucks – I really can't do this.' It was a couple of months later I went back to it, and found something that I was happy with.