Author: joseph

An excerpt from the August 2, 2001 issue of Rolling Stone:

Amnesiac‘s “Like Spinning Plates” is the track from another, unreleased song, “I Will,” run in reverse. “Thom learned to sing the backward melody forward,” says Colin. “You can hear what the words are, but they sound like they’re backward.”

In a related quote, Slavoj Zizek writes in On Belief (Routledge 2001):

In “The Curves of the Needle,” a short essay on the gramophone from 1928, Adorno notes the fundamental paradox of recording: the more the machine makes its presence known (through obtrusive noises, its clumsiness and interruptions), the stronger the experience of the actual presence of the singer–or, to put it the other way round, the more perfect the recording, the more faithfully the machine reproduces a human voice, the more humanity is removed, the stronger the effect that we are dealing with something “inauthentic” (44).

Following Adorno’s thesis above, and given the amount of technological intrusion between Thom Yorke’s actual voice and its final representation, the song “Like Spinning Plates” would be considered more authentic. Put another way, the song is more true to the unmediated human voice by acknowledging and foregrounding its unavoidable mediation in the recording process.

Partial lyrics from “A Wolf at the Door,” the last song on Hail to the Thief read:

get the flan in the face
the flan in the face
the flan in the face
dance you fucker dance you fucker
don’t you dare
don’t you dare
don’t you flan in the face

In an interview Q Magazine, (transcript available at At Ease), Thom Yorke mentions that “a friend of his threw a flan in cabinet minister Clare Short’s face.” The interviewer adds that “Clare Short was hit by a custard pie at Bangor University in March 2001.” The Guardian has biographical and contact information for Clare Short, as well as a brief profile. A photo of the flan in the face incident is available here. A description of the incident is given in this digest (you will need to scroll down to the entry titled “British Minister Gets Her Just Desserts”:

Just Desserts, or Dim ond Cwstard in Welsh, pied her when she visited Bangor in north-west Wales this evening. She was delivering a lecture on globalization at the University of Wales, when three local patisseristas presented her with custard pies in Short-crust pastry, made with fair-trade bananas and local organic ingredients. Ms. Short is believed to be the first government minister on earth to have received a special Cabinet Pudding.

The Just Desserts group is associated with the Biotic Baking Brigade.

Professor Frank Fenner received the Australian Government’s Prime Minister’s Science Prize in 2002, in large part for work on the myxamo virus, or myxamatosis (a word also often spelled myxomatosis).

The following is an excerpt from an interview with Q Magazine, (transcript available at At Ease [link broken as of 02.28.10]:

One day last summer, during a six-month hiatus from Radiohead, Thom Yorke decided to lavish treats on his son Noah. He bought the two year old some children’s DVDs, among them Bagpuss, the 70s TV series featuring a ragged pink and white cat who lives in a shop with friends Prof Yaffle, a doll called Madeline, and a troupe of mice.

When presented with this archive classic, Noah got up and walked out of the room, but Thom found himself sitting through all 13 instalments. Episode 2 — The Owls of Athens — caught his eye and in particular, a song called the Bony King of Nowhere.

‘It’s about this pipe-cleaner king with a bony arse who moans about the hardness and coldness of his throne,’ says Yorke. ‘So the mice scurry about trying to make him a comfy one.’

Naturally, you bite your lip as Thom tells you the story. But don’t worry. He knows. In fact, the resonance with his own life was so strong he decided this would be the title of the new Radiohead album. What’s more, he got on the phone to Bagpuss creator Oliver Postgate and asked if he’d make the video to the new single ‘There There.’

Postgate is 78, retired, and therefore declined. In the end, the Bony King of Nowhere was deemed too ‘prog’ by the rest of the band and the more declamatory Hail to the Thief was preferred. Even so, the pre-eminent rock seer of his generation is undeterred.

I’m telling you, there’s a lot in there. You could do a lot worse than get yourself the DVD of Bagpuss.’

The home page for Bagpuss is here. There is also information available on Bagpuss at this BBC site.

As noted in Message 122, fan sites have been asked to remove their lyrics and tabs archives. This situation is mentioned in this article in Internet Magazine and this Metafilter thread.

Jonathan Percy at Green Plastic Radiohead and Adriaan Pels at At Ease were sent the following email:

We are writing to you on behalf of Warner Bros. Publications and Warner/Chappell Music.  We are the worldwide copyright administrators for Radiohead.  Rather than sending you an overblown “legal” letter filled with threatening language, we would simply like to ask you to remove the LYRICS & TABS archive from your website; as their distribution constitutes an infringement of our rights under U.S. Copyright Law.  More than that, the availability of these files have a direct impact on our ability to market and sell our musical arrangements and songbooks, and that adversely affects the royalties that we are able to generate and pay to the band.
May we count on your cooperation?
The foregoing is without prejudice to any right, remedy, action, claim or defense otherwise available to us under the circumstances, all of which are expressly reserved.
Sincerely,
WARNER/CHAPPELL MUSIC
& Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc.

Pulk-Pull* asks readers to sign the petition opposing Warner/Chappell Music’s request.

The same articles listed in Message 120 also mention that Charles Mingus was an influence for Kid A. For information on Mingus, there is an NPR profile and The Real Mingus Web. One Mingus album that Radiohead’s music alludes to is The Clown, specifically the climax of “National Anthem” mimics, if only obliquely, the climax of “Haitian Fight Song.”

A number of articles cite Alice Coltrane as an influence on Kid A, for example this Now Toronto article and this BBC profile. According to this December 7 2000 At Ease news post, Alice Coltrane’s “Blue Nile” introduced Radiohead’s live European shows. The song “Blue Nile” was originally included on the album Ptah The El Daoud recorded in 1970 (Ptah is the name of the Egyptian god of creation). Information on Coltrane is available at her Impulse! Records page. An excerpt:

“A child in Detroit, young Alice McLeod studied classical music and participated in the gospel band at church. But her brother, bassist Ernie Farrow, introduced her to jazz early on, and as a teen she became quite taken with bop and its offshoots. In Detroit she played piano on sessions with masters like guitarist Kenny Burrell and saxophonist Lucky Thompson. By the early 1960s she was sharing the bandstand with vibes player Terry Gibbs. It was on tour with Gibbs that she met saxophonist John Coltrane. Their 1966 wedding was the start of a musical union as well. When she replaced pianist McCoy Tyner in the classic Coltrane Quartet there was hubbub in the jazz world. But John Coltrane?s music was unfolding further with every passing month ? he had begun probing musical motifs from the East. Alice’s approach to the piano assisted in extending the music even further.
“When her husband died in 1967, Alice continued working with members of his last group, including Garrison, saxophonist Pharoah Sanders, and drummer Rashied Ali. She began playing the harp, utilizing sitar and tablas in the ensemble, and turning fully to Eastern cultures for inspiration; spiritual and colorful, her music morphed into the soundtrack for prayer. Her talents and trajectory spoke to others.”

In an interview with Dutch magazine OOR, Thom Yorke claimed in reference to the sound of Hail to the Thief:

“This is ‘OK Computer 2’. What we will do from now on, should not be anything like we’ve done before. We will not go further back, like everyone expects. There won’t be a second ‘The Bends’. There is not a single good reason for it. As a band, we have fully discussed this matter recently. Radiohead will be completely unrecognisable in two years. At least, I hope so. It’s the only perspective of the future that I can live with.”

Thom Yorke also said:

“We’re a pop band again for now, because it was necessary,” he said. “Just doing what we’re good at. But, no matter how good I feel about the new album and how much fun we’re having in what we do right now, we’ve been there already. We’re not moving.”

This information comes via NME.

Radiohead.tv is now sporting a new logo: