Radiohead have released a new track, I Promise. The track was written and recorded back around the OK Computer recording sessions in 1997, but never made the final cut.
The track has been shared ahead of OKNOTOK, an upcoming reissue of the seminal album, in celebration of its 20th anniversary. It was premiered on BBC Radio 6 by host Steve Lamacq. Though the track was occasionally performed live back in 1996, it was never properly released – until today.
The reissue will include a fully remastered version of the album, as well as eight B-sides and three tracks: I Promise, Man of War and Lift.
The reissue follows on from Radiohead’s ninth album, A Moon Shaped Pool, released last year. Read our album review here and our interview with the London Contemporary Orchestra, who feature a great deal throughout the album, right here.
Dr Rachel Owen, former partner of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, has passed away from cancer. She was 48 years old.
Yorke and Owen spent 23 years together, during which they had one son and one daughter, Noah and Agnes. Last August it was announced that the pair had split. An official statement from Yorke read,“Rachel and I have separated. After 23 highly creative and happy years, for various reasons we have gone our separate ways. It’s perfectly amicable and has been common knowledge for some time.”
Their relationship was heavily referenced in their intimate, inwards-looking 2016 album A Moon Shaped Pool.
Undoubtedly, the album’s themes of lost love and change will take on new meaning, now that its thematic basis has changed; think back to how you perceived Bowie’s Blackstar before and after his passing.
According to an obituary posted to the website of Pembroke College, University of Oxford, where was a Retained Lecturer in Italian, Owen passed away this Sunday.
Her obituary reads as follows:
It is with great sadness that the College marks the death of Dr Rachel Owen, who was a Retained Lecturer in Italian here at Pembroke.
Dr Owen was an internationally renowned artist – mixing photography and printmaking – and at the same time a scholar in medieval Italian literature. As Retained Lecturer, she used to teach Dante’s Divine Comedy to Pembroke’s finalists in Italian.
Dr Owen’s parallel passion for art and literature was already established in her university years at Exeter, where she studied Italian and Fine Art. She then moved to Royal Holloway, London, where she completed a PhD on the illustrations of the early manuscripts of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Each year, her Pembroke students enjoyed the pleasure and the privilege of a guided tour through the manuscripts of the Divine Comedy held at the Bodleian Library.
Despite her declining health from cancer in the last year, she asked to continue to teach, which she did right until the end of last Michaelmas term. She was 48 years old and leaves behind a son, Noah, and a daughter, Agnes, aged 15 and 12.
One of her latest artistic productions was a series of prints inspired by the Cantos of Dante’s first book of the Divine Comedy. The prints will be exhibited at Pembroke’s JCR Art Gallery during Trinity term.
Rachel Owen, died on Sunday 18th December.
Our thoughts are with Owen’s family, Yorke, Noah and Agnes.
Image: Consequence of Sound
“I had this thing for a while where I was falling through trap doors all the time into oblivion… It was happening towards the end of OK Computer. I was a complete fucking mess when that cycle had finished,” Thom Yorke told the NME back in 2000.
On the eve of releasing their fourth album Kid A, Yorke and the rest of his Radiohead bandmates were still partially lost within the processes of dealing with its predecessor’s incredible success. Released three years prior, OK Computer had catapulted the five friends to the pinnacle of rock music stardom. But what they encountered when there, from their commercial and critical high point, wasn’t necessarily understood or even enjoyed.
The result was a follow-up album full of shadowed sketches that were transfixed with this notion. That while success had been attained, it had failed to quell all manners of self-doubt and insecurities that had previously existed. In many ways the fame and fortune the band achieved only served to heighten this isolation and deepening sense of detachment.
“The thing is you’re always developing and expanding. It’s a protean thing. And a public image can’t keep pace with it,” bassist Colin Greenwood told The Guardian. “So it – the process of success – is like this slow-drying glue that sets around you. It slows you down and gums you up.”
Everything In Its Right Place was the first song on the record and the first anyone actually heard of a completed album track. It was a response in sorts to OK Computer – the title said firmly with tongue dug into cheek.
“Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon,” Yorke mutters as whirls of piano echo all around him.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvMql9XgIg0
Recorded in four different studios, in three countries, across a fractious period, Kid A began in Paris in January 1999. Setting up at the Guillaume Tell studio and tasking themselves with effectively forgetting all that had come before in favour of creating something new, it yielded no real results.
“Basically it was all frustration,” Yorke explained about why the band sought to change their sound. “I wasn’t getting off on anything that we’d normally do. So it was just ‘we have to do something else.’”
However three months later and with no significant headway having been made, the band decamped to Copenhagen. Their stay in Denmark wasn’t a long one though. Just over a month later they were back on English shores, taking up residence in a Gloucestershire studio.
Yet despite the constant moving around which may have hinted at signs of unproductivity, the band had actually began to hit their stride. In fact, by the time they arrived back home they had recorded an incredible amount of incomplete material.
“It was a difficult process to get going. But once we were up and running, it started going too well,” guitarist Jonny Greenwood said. “We started recording good song after good song and it became difficult to stop.”
Approaching the album like it was a blank canvas, the band pieced it together one little component at a time, in order to create a collage. Delicate squiggles were favoured over broad, heavy strokes as they claimed it was more a process of reworking than recording once they started to click into gear.
“A lot of the songwriting now isn’t really about song writing at all. It’s about editing, building up a lot of material, then piecing it together like a painter,” Yorke told Select.
Each day Yorke would enter into the studio faced with a large whiteboard of sorts. The possibility of working on any number of things faced the band, as at times around 50 different snippets of music were worked on by various members. The process was an overwhelming but ultimately liberating one. Instead of walking into the studio and setting up to play through a song each day, the band set to work on a scattering of different parts.
The separation in working situations also resulted in a fragmented album as a whole. But this was something which Yorke, as band leader, actively encouraged. It was the sound of struggling both outside of the music and also within it. Unable to translate the sounds in his head onto record and recovering from his breakdown of sorts, Kid A offered a perfect representation of these factors.
However, with its standing as a classic album nowadays, it is easy to forget that upon its release it wasn’t always met with such adulation. It debuted at number one, but it seemed ill at ease in such a high chart position, while critics constantly questioned its legitimacy.
“What do they want for sounding like Aphex Twin circa 1993, a medal?” one magazine wrote.
Meanwhile, the NME was only slightly less cutting about the bands evolution away from guitars in favour of synthesizers and electronics.
“Making experimental music is the easy way out,” they wrote. “Time will judge it. But right now, Kid A has the ring of a lengthy, over-analysed mistake.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jX-fDKWGbRs
The fact that the album is almost painfully insular left it open to being criticised as overthought and overanalysed, but Yorke argued that it actually represented the opposite of this. Tracks meander in fragmented pieces to create a whole, which is indicative of a constant pursuit. Nothing really remains for long enough so as to become comfortable with it. Instead it proves to be disorientating but invigorating as the listener is invited into a strange new world.
The distortions hide Yorke’s vocals to the point where at times they are indecipherable. But the unemotional delivery, coupled with a seeming aversion to melodies, meant that his voice acts more as an instrument in the mix. His cut up lyrical style, aping the work of the likes of William Burroughs, working perfectly within the music of programmed beats and restrained riffs.
“You’re not supposed to think about the words. That’s the whole point all through the record,” Yorke explained. “The lyrics are over before you have time to talk and worry about it. That’s how it works.”
The hidden nature of his vocals and the glacial instrumentations meant that not much initially makes a connection. It’s the equivalent of walking around in an unfamiliar city. The basics are all there; big concrete buildings, expansive skylines, and the cold grey pavement under foot. But it is only once you know where you’re going that hidden alleyways begin to reveal themselves and hidden treasures can be found.
At the inception of the record, Yorke wanted to address numerous political topics, but as both himself and the band fell further and further into the process of recording this idea faded away. Existential fears instead started to plague the album that was being crafted together.
When they were making, it all members were either approaching or past the age of 30. The realisation that time is always slipping away and no one can escape the inevitability of death weighed heavily, especially on Yorke’s shoulders.
“It’s about the fear of dying,” he revealed once in a rare unguarded moment.
On the string-laden How To Disappear Completely Yorke sings, “I’m not here, this isn’t happening.” It’s almost as if he is lost within a waking nightmare and is trying to convince himself that it isn’t all as bad as he thinks it is. Yet on Idioteque he addresses the Ice Age as a very real threat to humanity, while the title track strings together some of his most “brutal and horrible” words of his career. “We got heads on sticks, you got ventriloquists,” he sings.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IlNAF1bDXkk
With a plethora of finished material, by April 2000 the album was complete. The only thing left to do was organise the track-listing after deciding on what songs to actually include. The fact that every band member had differing opinions on what to put on and what to leave off meant this stage took a particularly long time though.
“’We operate like the UN,’ Yorke once told an interviewer. “But I’m America.”
In the end the result was an album that offered not just a peek inside a clouded mind as it attempted to function, but a full immersion. Fears and anxieties were wrapped around a skeletal electronic structure, which helped Radiohead escape from the constraints of what a rock band should be.
Disillusioned with a seeming lack of possibilities and struck by a severe case of writers block, the band stumbled upon the endless possibilities of what a rock band could be.
Image: Radiohead
2016 has been a big year for Radiohead, what with the release of a new album, an overhaul of their digital identity, and incredible live performances. Even after all this time, the band knows how to craft beautiful and lasting music, as detailed on their lush, remarkably intimate new album A Moon Shaped Pool.
But music isn’t all they know how to do. Radiohead know how to create puzzles, and in turn, how to delight their fans by doing so. They play the long game. In fact, they played the long game so well that it took them about ten years to complete an easter-egg that links two of their most celebrated albums: OK Computer and In Rainbows.
The theory (which has been all-but-confirmed by the band) goes like this: Radiohead’s third and seventh albums (released ten years apart) are directly linked, and were in fact designed to fit together. Sounds pretty crazy, right? Who could pull off such a cryptic, longwinded, laborious stunt?
This super-album of sorts, the product of the Ones and Zeroes theory, sounds pretty special. And if you think it’s too good to be true, just take a look at some of the evidence that the theory puts forward. Puddlegum looked at the theory in great depth, and I encourage you to read the full investigation here, but in a nutshell, it’s all tens. Or rather, it’s all in the computers.
The foundation for the connection is the number ten, and how there were way too many occurrences of the number to be simple coincidence. The albums were released ten years apart. Radiohead announced In Rainbows ten days before release. In Rainbows only has ten tracks. Both album names contain ten characters. OK Computer and In Rainbows are Radiohead’s third and seventh albums: 3+7=10. #illuminati.
For the release of In Rainbows, the band allowed fans to name their own price and download the album from ten servers (allegedly). They released nine different cryptic messages that all laid strong emphasis on “X,” the Roman numeral for ten. They then released a tenth message… on the 10th of October (10/10).
Lots of tens.
Now here’s the cool part.
The music on each album fits together really well. Scarily well. If you interlock the songs from each album, starting with Airbag then going to 15 Steps and so on, there’s a freaky cohesion. The beats at the end of Airbag set the tempo for 15 Steps. The reverb sounds at the end of Subterranean Homesick Alien and the start of Nude are incredibly similar (indeed, Nude was written in the same sessions as OK Computer). There’s a connection between the flurry of distortion at the end of Paranoid Android and the start of Bodysnatchers. Electioneering and Reckoner both share similar tambourine parts. The 22 track album is divided into two sets of ten tracks, with Karma Police and Fitter Happier forming what could be considered an intermission of sorts.
Want proof? Listen below. Just make sure to set the crossfade to 10 seconds to get the most out of it.
Image: The Upcoming
Earlier this year, Radiohead released their ninth album, A Moon Shaped Pool. Their unique release and marketing methods kept the five-piece in the news for weeks before and afterwards. While it looks like they’ve gone against the grain in terms of promotional tactics, what with deleting their entire social media presence and sending out actual paper flyers to fans, the truth it that they’re just as savvy as the Kanyes and Beyoncés of the world. The difference is simply that Radiohead has their own audience. Luckily, they know how to speak to them.
As such, Radiohead fans have been blessed with an amazingly fruitful year of new music, new visuals and incredible live performances, many of which have resurrected songs that they haven’t played in years. They also released an unnecessarily elaborate video unpacking the vinyl album, shared a beautiful series of song-inspired vignettes on Instagram, only to later share even more beautiful song-inspired vignettes.
Considering the sheer amount of output, we’ve rounded up all your Radiohead news in one convenient spot to enjoy.
New song: Ill Wind
The vinyl release of A Moon Shaped Pool received as much, if not more fanfare than the release itself. It was preceded by listening parties in select record stores across the globe, and when it finally was released to fans, it came with a very special surprise: a brand new song.
An extra CD was sent out along with the special edition vinyl release, featuring two tracks: Spectre, the track originally created as a potential James Bond theme song and released last Christmas, and brand new, unannounced track, Ill Wind.
It’s very beautiful. Check it out over here.
New visuals: The Numbers
The first two tracks to be released from the album were Burn The Witch and Daydreaming, both of which were released as videos, following brief, then-cryptic snippets shared on social media.
The band went on to release aforementioned vignettes for every track. Now, they have released the full video for The Numbers, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, who also created the heart-wrenching Daydreaming clip and a stripped back one for Present Tense. The simple video clip sees Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood performing the track in the idyllic Tarzana, California. This obviously isn’t the album version of the song, but a new, live one, created using nothing but two guitars and a Roland CR-78 drum machine.
https://youtu.be/Ti6qhk3tX2s
A superfan got to jam with Thom in Texas
One lucky superfan had the experience of a lifetime in Austin, Texas last week, and thankfully the story was shared to Reddit for the world to enjoy. Reddit user LetTheDeedShaw drove for ten hours to attend Austin City Limits, where Radiohead played. While in town he visited synth store Switched On, where Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood just so happened to be shopping.
He tried playing it cool despite wearing a Radiohead shirt. “I was determined not to make this a fan moment, because I knew the most valuable thing I could give him was a normal moment in a synth shop.” Thom had other plans though, and in fact walked up to the guy to start discussing synths, eventually actually playing together. “It was all like a dream. We jammed a little more… It was really beautiful and validating seeing my absolute hero geeking out over the same convoluted hobby that I do. We didn’t discuss who they were, we didn’t discuss the show, and we didn’t discuss how I was about to pass out from joy.”
Read the incredible story here.
Australia: Daydreaming is coming
Radiohead haven’t announced any Australian tour dates yet, but they’re still bringing us some love in the form of a video.
An extended 35mm print video of Daydreaming, second track and single from AMSP, will be screened for the very first time in Australia at this year’s CLIPPED Music Video Festival. Fans can head to the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia in Canberra on September 30 – you can get tickets here via NFSA.
While millions of fans viewed the clip on Youtube after its release, the band sent 35mm print versions to cinemas across the USA and beyond – so we’re stoked that its finally coming to Australia.
The Bends is back
Finally, watch Radiohead performing Fake Plastic Trees and The Bends for the first time since their new tour began. This marks the first time these tracks have been performed live in six years.
https://youtu.be/-xJJPdncMgA
https://youtu.be/JTK2c8PfCao
Read our review of A Moon Shaped Pool
Image: Pitchfork
Frank Zappa once said “So many books, so little time.” The same could be said about music, although some people seem to be able to consume both at the same time, which must be helpful. But Zappa is not the only musician looking to the literary world; books have inspired some of the greatest songs we know. Many people would compare lyrics to poetry, but in this case we’re looking at the prose that sparks creativity in artists. From classic hits through to the less likely references, we’ve put together some of the best literary adaptations in music…
Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush
Perhaps one of the best known literary adaptations in music, Kate Bush’s dramatic (and shrill) classic is brimful with the tragedy of Emily Brontë’s only novel. First published in 1847 under the pseudonym “Ellis Bell”, the doomed love of Cathy and Heathcliff has been a schoolroom staple of English Lit classes for decades. A prime favourite for TV adaptations, Bush’s version is perhaps the best known song to be inspired by Wuthering Heights.
Recorded in 1978, the lyrics were actually written by Bush aged just 18. Inspired by just ten minutes of a BBC mini-adaptation that aired on 1967 television, she also discovered that she shared her birthday with Emily Brontë (July 30). Singing as the ghost of Cathy, calling to Heathcliff from the bleak moors – and from beyond the grave – the track stayed at number one in the British charts for four weeks.
Bush actually fought hard with record label EMI to have Wuthering Heights released as the lead single for her album, The Kick Inside. A rare victory for a young artist, who was definitely more savvy than her floaty dresses and mystical demeanour might have indicated to unsuspecting label execs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fk-4lXLM34g&w=560&h=315
Scentless Apprentice by Nirvana
Nirvana’s final studio album, In Utero, was released in 1993 amid all the usual promotion and press coverage. Alongside the barrage of standard questions from music journos, Canadian reporter Erica Ehm asked Kurt Cobain if his music was inspired by literature. The answer was yes, and that his favourite book was Perfume by Patrick Suskind and he “as a matter a fact…used that very story in Scentless Apprentice.”
“I read Perfume by Patrick Suskind about 10 times in my life, and I can’t stop reading it. It’s like something that’s just stationary in my pocket all the time. It just doesn’t leave me,” Cobain told Ehm during the interview. “Cause I’m a hypochondriac it just affects me – makes me want to cut off my nose.”
Originally written in German and published in 1985, Perfume is a dark and disturbing historical narrative that explores the relationship between smell and emotions. The protagonist, Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is an unloved orphan with an exceptional sense of smell, but no scent to his body. The opening lyrics to Scentless Apprentice follow Suskind’s writing; “Like most babies smell like butter / His smell smelled like no other.”
In the novel, Grenouille’s lack of scent disturbs his wet nurse who claims that normal babies smell like butter. The chorus refrain of “Go away” is a pretty stark reference to Grenouille’s realisation that he is in fact a misanthrope. The novel is also widely seen as an allegory for Hitler’s rise to power.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyxoQIQaogE&w=560&h=315
Killing An Arab by The Cure
Robert Smith has made a number of nods towards the high-brow literary world throughout his career with The Cure. Starting as they meant to continue, the very first intended single written by The Cure was directly inspired by the French philosophical novelist Albert Camus. Killing An Arab was recorded at the same time as the band’s debut LP, Three Imaginary Boys, but wasn’t released until 1980 when it featured on their next album, Boys Don’t Cry.
Viewed as controversial and offensive since its release, Killing An Arab was actually “a short poetic attempt at condensing my impression of the key moments in L’Étranger (The Stranger)” by Smith. The book tells the story of Meursault, a French Algerian lacking in empathy, who shoots an Arab man during an altercation on a beach. The lyrics tell the story from Meursault’s perspective, briefly examining his position as ‘the stranger’ who cannot connect with himself or the world around him.
Smith has often regretted how Killing An Arab has been so misinterpreted and how it has been viewed as racist and inciting of violence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdbLqOXmJ04&w=560&h=315
Lotion by Greenskeeper
Most people are familiar with Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster in the blockbuster version of The Silence Of The Lambs, but like many movie classics, the film was first a book. Published under the same title by Thomas Harris in 1988, the serial killer Buffalo Bill and his penchant for human skin were invented by Harris.
Chicago band Greenskeeper were inspired by the fictional psychopath to write their hit Lotion, included in the track listing on their 2004 album Pleetch. A sparse yet addictive piece of indie, the song follows the musings of Buffalo Bill as he goes about his daily life of imprisoning captives in the deep hole in his basement, walking his little dog and making sure everyone moisturises properly.
Always returning to his famous insistence that “It puts the lotion in the basket”, there is also a dark humour to the sordid subject matter. A particular favourite moment of mine from James Curd’s lyrics; “The night is very cold / I’m feeling kind of weak / I think I’ll make myself a cap from your right buttocks cheek”
https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/12604140
Ramble On by Led Zeppelin
The 1960s and 70s found many artists fascinated by fantasy and philosophy, particularly with the arrival of mind-expanding psychedelia and “intellectual” prog rock. Even one the era’s most famous bands, Led Zeppelin were not averse to delving into fiction for inspiration. References to J.R.R. Tolkien’s iconic fantasy opus, The Lord Of The Rings, are rife throughout Zeppelin’s writing.
Perhaps the most famous example is Ramble On, taken from their 1969 album Led Zeppelin II. Co-written by Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, the highly descriptive lyrics parallel Frodo and Sam’s fictional journey. From the opening line “Leaves are falling all around” (which is likely to have been lifted from Tolkien’s poem Namárië), through to mention of Mordor and Gollum. Even the lyric “Got no time to for spreading roots” references the hobbits’ stint with the animated tree race of the “Ents”.
Led Zeppelin continued to reference LOTR across other songs well. Led Zeppelin IV in particular featured songs like Misty Mountain Hop and The Battle Of Evermore. Anyone familiar with the novel will recognise references to “ring wraiths” and magic runes. Misty Mountain Hop probably takes its title from the mountains of Middle Earth, but the song places Tolkien’s writings as a totem for the peace movement of the ’60s instead of taking inspiration from the story itself.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S0NFaQcTJsg&w=560&h=315
2+2=5 by Radiohead
Radiohead are well known for the intelligent commentary that is often inherent in their music. Born out in the Oxford countryside during the 1980s, like so many Britpop era bands they were the product of traditional English education. Giving them both an eclectic knowledge of music, and a creative dislike of the school system.
It seems unsurprising that Radiohead would look to the literary world for inspiration, and even less so that they would find it in George Orwell’s prophetic, dystopian novel 1984. 2+2=5 (The Lukewarm) was the third single from Radiohead’s 2003 album Hail To The Thief. The title matches the “symbol of unreality” used by Orwell to illustrate the concept of an imposed falsity. In Orwell’s imagined authoritarian world, inhabitants are subjects to “doublethinking” where their on beliefs are replaced by political propaganda.
The song features the familiar low-key menace of Radiohead, mixing alt-rock with electronic elements. Thom Yorke once said of the album that he “desperately tried not to write anything political … But it’s just fucking there.” The alternative title for 2+2=5 of The Lukewarm is also apparently inspired by the works of Dante who described “the lukewarm” as those inhabiting just the edges of the inferno.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lstDdzedgcE&spfreload=10
Image: Broadsheet
Radiohead’s A Moon Shaped Pool, their ninth studio album and their first since 2011’s The King Of Limbs, has been one of the best records in a 2016 absolutely full of amazing records. The promotion behind it went to utterly enormous lengths to provide fans with not just another album, but a true experience both sonically and visually. To that end, the music video for Daydreaming, one of the standout tracks from that album, will be screened for the very first time in Australia at this year’s CLIPPED Music Video Festival.
The video for Daydreaming was directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, a man for whom Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood has scored several films including There Will Be Blood and Inherent Vice, stars frontman Thom Yorke and is simply breathtaking. The CLIPPED screening will be in glorious 35mm print for maximum visual stimulation. Watch the original (in comparatively crummy but still fantastic YouTube quality) below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTAU7lLDZYU
The festival, the only dedicated music video festival in Australia, will be held at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia in Canberra on September 30, along with plenty more music videos, VJs, DJs and guest speakers there for discussion. The festival will also be headlined by a secret artist, to be confirmed in the future and headlining via what CLIPPED are calling a ‘real-time electronic video collaboration’.
Fans of Radiohead and fans of music in cinematic form will not want to miss out on a festival like CLIPPED. Tickets are on sale now via the NFSA.
Read more: Our review of A Moon Shaped Pool.
Watch: All nine vignettes for the tracks on A Moon Shaped Pool
Image
The face of Radiohead‘s Thom Yorke has been popping up in some odd places of late. His image has not only appeared on the cover of an Iranian book concerning marital intimacy, but was also being used to advertise medication in Russia. Now it seems that religious group the New Generation of God has jumped on the bandwagon, using the same image for an anti-Satanist Twitter post.
8 things that satan uses to enslave you and destroy you: pic.twitter.com/qZGIXVYlLe
— Generation for God (@GenerationFGod) July 24, 2016
The group, who have purposed themselves with returning “the supernatural power of God to the streets,” have appropriated the image of Yorke to warn against “8 things that satan uses to enslave you and destroy you.” To press home, the group have even taken the liberty of adding a few stitched-up scars to weather Yorke’s features for a more menacing effect.
The post attributes Yorke with eight heretical vices, which include pornography, avarice, atheism, idolatry, disobedience to God’s law, drugs, idolatry as well as witchcraft and tarot. While the well read Yorke has no doubt touched on a few of these topics in passing, the Oxford native is far from an outspoken advocate of any of the eight.
It’s unclear how or why the iconic frontman’s profile shot has seen this universal application. Whether the image has outlived its intended use as a promotional shot and will continue cropping up in poorly photoshopped adverts is unknown.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yI2oS2hoL0k
Image: Twitter
Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke wants you to Go To Sleep – and he’s here to help even the most stubborn insomniacs. This week, Yorke released a special half hour Bedtime Mix as part of radio presenter Phil Taggart’s three hour Sunday night program on BBC Radio 1.
The Bedtime Mix begins with kind of robotic sounding voice, not unlike Fitter Happier from OK Computer. It then travels through a series of slow moving ambient and electronic tunes, the perfect tones and tempos needed to lull you into a deep, warm slumber. The middle of the mix features a beautiful version of Bloom recorded when Yorke performed a solo set at a Pathway to Paris concert last year.
In related news, Radiohead have announced that a selection of recordings from Pathway to Paris – a charity concert to fight climate change – will be released this Wednesday, July 27. As well as Yorke, it will include recorded performances from Patti Smith, Flea, Warren Ellis and many more – order it here.
Thom Yorke Bedtime Mix:
Charlemagne Palestine & Robert Feldmen, Electronic and Flute
Luke Abott, Dumb
Thom Yorke, Bloom (live at Le Trianon, Paris)
James Holden, Triangle Folds Inside Out
Laurie Spiegel, The Unquestioned Answer
Radiohead released their long awaited ninth album A Moon Shaped Pool earlier this year – read our review here.
Image: Twitter
After releasing their ninth studio album A Moon Shaped Pool earlier in the year Radiohead have spent the past few months sharing beautiful artist-created vignettes, visual interpretations of their songs via their Instagram each week. Working with a number of successful directors such as Richard Ayoade, Yorgos Lanthimos and Adam Buxton, the result is now an amazing array of artistic styles, blended together by Radiohead’s signature sound and creating an entirely new way to experience A Moon Shaped Pool
As it stands though, not every track on the record has received its own unique vignette quite yet, so today the English rockers are asking for your help in finishing the job! On the search for a creator to finish the project, the last song standing is their single Daydreaming. Interestingly enough, the version that the group has provided boasts an amazingly powerful and prominent string line, something unheard in the original track. You can download the minute long audio track here.
Entries should be tagged as #RHVignette on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook and the band will choose the winner themselves. The competition closes on July 30th, so get creating and who knows, your dreams of collaborating with Thom Yorke and Radiohead might very well come true.
Watch the original video for Daydreaming below, and for inspiration check out out the rest of the vignette series here!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTAU7lLDZYU
Image: Instagram