In a Radiohead Special put out on Japanese TV on 17 March, there was some excellent footage from one of the London tent concerts, which looks likely to come out on
video/DVD. There was also a selection of blips, and an interview with Colin and Ed, recorded late last year. They were wearing their Radiohead uniforms. Colin looked dazed, and Ed looked tired. They talked mostly about Kid A, and the Tent Tour. Here are some extracts.
Ed: One of the great things about going on stage live, unlike on previous albums, the version we do live is different from the version on the record. One of the things we've really enjoyed is 'reclaiming' the songs.
For instance Everything In Its Right Place was just Thom and Nigel working on that, just keyboard and voice. But we've done a completely different thing live, with the five of us. There's something nice about the discipline about doing something live. The album is somehow flatter, but it's not convincing enough. You need the crescendos, you need something more when you play live.
Colin: we've been capturing the live output from the the six cameras around the stage, during the second half of the tour, onto six video recorders, and have edited the footage together.
Colin: Stanley Donwood does the artwork for the album. The combination of two things. One of his children did some drawings of the bear monster, and also he was looking at top down views from technical drawings of
screw heads from design manuals for machine parts
Ed: There are certain things that each of us believes in. Some people like to preach about their beliefs. I hope we don't do that but we do want people to be aware of these things, and the website seems like a good place to do
that. We have links to various sites, and various beliefs and various causes. It's part of the luxury of what we do, we can make people aware of what we're aware of. We're saying 'here are some places worth visiting, and go ahead and visit them if you like'
Colin: We hope the album is a piece a work that works from beginning to end, reflects the music we were listening to, and how we were working together during the recording process.
Ed: One of the things that we've been genuininely surprised about is how much people have liked it. For example, it went to number one in America, which astonished us. We thought we were saying goodbye to the commercial success we had with OK Computer. But, one of the astonishing things is that people have got it, and understood it, and when you've made an album like this, that's enormously satisfying.
Colin: It's like a document of a point of time. It's not a retrospective thing, like a compilation of B-sides or singles.
Ed and Colin: A lot more time, the same effort, over a longer period of time, and in more different places: Paris, Copenhagen, our own studio, and the Cotswolds.
Ed: The nature of people working, you have some good days and some bad days. Around the beginning of the year, we just couldn't face finishing any of the tracks, and we didn't want to start anything else so Nigel just split us into groups, and suggested we play studio for a couple of
weeks to work on stuff, and not play any of our instruments. In retrospect, I don't think anything much came of it, but at the time it was the right thing to do. The prospect of finishing tracks at that time time. We had to defer doing that, and ease back into it.
When you spend eighteen months recording, you're going to record more than just 11 or 12
songs. We ended up finishing about 22- 23 songs by April. One of the things we
discussed about was a double album, but none of us found the double album
concept convincing. We wanted these songs to be heard and digested, and you're not going to do that with 22
songs, you end up diluting a lot of the songs. We thought ten or eleven songs
was about right. We've got all these songs left, and we're going to tracklist
these songs for another record.