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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:

“Melatonin” is the title of song 6 on the Airbag / How Am I Driving? mini-album aimed at the USA (as the cover claims). Melatonin is a sleep-regulating hormone produced by the pineal gland. This article looks at its use to treat various health conditions, including jet lag.

A line of “A Punch-Up at a Wedding,” the eleventh song on Hail to the Thief, is:

a bully in a china shop

The common use of this phrase often substitutes “bull” for “bully.” The phrase’s entry in Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable reads: “A maladroit hand interfering with a delicate business; one who produces reckless destruction.”

There is now an audio and visual player available for Hail to the Thief. You can listen to songs from the new album. Using the + and – signs and the ?, users can apply and mix words to the blank album cover, in a manner resembling Thom Yorke’s lyric composition method described in message 114.

In an interview with NME (3 May 2003, page 27) Thom Yorke explains how he composed the lyrics for Hail to the Thief:

“From the album title … it’s possible to get a first impression of ‘Hail To The Thief’ as an overtly political album. It is, says Thom, not quite as cut and dried as that.
‘The point, which you chaps have failed to grasp, perhaps understandably,’ he says, ‘is that I was cutting these things out, and deliberately taking them out of context, so they’re like wallpaper.
‘Then, when I needed words for songs I’d be taking them out of this wallpaper, and they were out of any political context at all.'”

This method of composition mirrors that of dadaist poet Tristan Tzara. Not surprisingly, the following image explaining how to make a dadaist poem was culled from one of Radiohead.com’s previous incarnations:

You can read an essay on dadism by Tzara.

Today MTV2 played the video for “There There” at the top of every hour. Chris Hopewell is listed as the video’s director. A BBC interview with Hopewell is online and you can watch his short animated feature The Day of the Subgenius. Chris Hopewell has worked for the Bolex Brothers and Collision Films.