“Harrowdown Hill”
from the album The Eraser
2006
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Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke’s debut solo album The Eraser will be released in July via XL Recordings. The set was produced and arranged by longtime Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich. “Inevitably it is more beats and electronics, but it [is] songs,” Yorke says of the project in an email to members of Radiohead’s W.A.S.T.E. fan organization.
“The elements have been kicking round now for a few years and needed to be finished and I have been itching to do something like this for ages,” he continues. “It was fun and quick to do.” One track, “Black Swan,” will run over the end credits of director Richard Linklater’s upcoming film, A Scanner Darkly.
With Radiohead having just kicked off a tour and debuting a wealth of new material, Yorke insists his own musical ambitions have not outpaced the band’s.
“As you know the band are now touring and writing new stuff and getting to a good space so I want no crap about me being a traitor or whatever splitting up blah blah,” he writes. “This was all done with their blessing. And I don’t wanna hear that word solo. Doesn’t sound right.”
Rolling Stone senior editor David Fricke caught up with Thom Yorke at a hotel bar in the British seaside resort of Blackpool.
The new Radiohead songs in your live show are surprisingly straightforward. Some of them are almost like garage rock. Are you rediscovering the joys of simplicity?
We’re trying not to get too fussy, which is obviously our tendency. We don’t really listen to rock music. A lot of what we listen to is techno and dub. But essentially, it’s dance music, and that’s feeding back into us, in a crude way.
Looking back at Kid A and Amnesiac, it’s as if you had too many options in front of you and tried to use them all.
That’s always the problem. My favorite tune from that time is “How to Disappear Completely,” because we didn’t care how it could be seen as pretentious or anything. It just sounds glorious. What Jonny did to it is amazing.
But I like that Liars record that just came out [Drum’s Not Dead], because they’re using loops and stuff we’ve been making for ages. It’s cool that there’s someone besides us saying, “We’re a live band, but we also do this…”
Describe the beginning of The Eraser.
A lot of the basic ideas were kicking around when I got all of my software on my laptop. They weren’t things that would ever get to the band; they just worked in that isolated laptop space. There was no point in going to the others and saying, “Phil, do you want to try a beat on this?” Or, “Colin, do you want to play some bass?” Because the sounds and ideas were not from that sort of vibe.
What kind of vibe was it?
I would split up rhythm patterns and manipulate sounds to get to a brand new place. It was stuff that I do when I’m bored, really — something I’d do when I’d sit in front of the television or traveling around.
It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. I wanted to work on my own. It wasn’t casting aspersions on anybody. I just wanted to see what it would be like. Luckily, I happen to be in a band where nobody has a problem with that. In fact, I think there was some sense of relief, that finally I was going to do it. Rather than saying it and chickening out.
The biggest surprise on The Eraser is how clear and clean your voice is.
I kept begging Nigel to put more reverb on it. “No, I’m not doing reverb on this record.” Please hide my voice. “No.”
But I’m always looking for things that make me want to sing. They’re not necessarily chord progressions. It can be a rhythm, with one note on it. In the last song, “Cymbal Rush,” the first bit you hear is something I had for three years: one little note. I could hear the melody in there straightaway. But if you played it to anyone else without me singing it, you’d think, “What’s he on about?”
There were all these random electronic doodles, but being forced by Nigel to isolate down to the best bits made me realize these were the best bits. All I could see was how clever my programming was. Suddenly I was being forced to forget all that and be the singer again. And I wasn’t thinking about Radiohead. I never thought, “I should stop here. I should give this to the band.” Once I made the decision to do this record, that’s what I was writing for.
Were these songs written in a concentrated period?
Absolutely, except for “Cymbal Rush” — that riff that had been around for ages — and “The Eraser,” where the piano chords are Jonny’s. I recorded them on a dictaphone around his house one day. A year and a half later, I had to own up that I had sampled them, cut them into a different order and made them into a song [laughs]. “Is that alright? Sorry, Jonny.”
“Harrowdown Hill” was kicking around during Hail to the Thief, but there was no way that was going to work with the band. “And It Rained All Night” has this enormously shredded-up element of “The Gloaming” [from Hail to the Thief], not that you’d ever I remember doing that in New York. I couldn’t sleep one night, and it was one of those New York things, where the rain just chucks down. The rain was so loud.
“Black Swan” has this tiny, shredded segment of something that was one of the library samples we had. It was Ed and Phil doing this thing, and I sliced it into bits. The sample was 2000, but the song was 2005.
Your writing has always been intensely personal and conflicted, but because your voice is so up front on The Eraser, the words and images come through so vividly, as in “Analyse.”
[Sings] “Power cuts and blackouts/Sleeping like babies.” I used to live in central Oxford, on one of those historical streets, with all these houses built in the 1860s. I came home one night and for some reason, the street had a power cut. The houses were all dark, with candlelight in the windows, which is obviously how it would have been when they were built. It was beautiful.
I also like the lines in “Black Swan”: “You cannot kick-start a dead horse/You just cross yourself and walk away.”
[Laughs] As always, whatever psychic garbage you’ve got going on in your head, you end up using it. You should have seen the stuff I didn’t put in. That’s the shit you don’t want to know about.
Your album is the first you’ve put out since the end of Radiohead’s EMI contract. Is the XL deal for one album?
Yeah. We will only ever do that now.
Does that also go for the band’s future releases?
I don’t know. We haven’t talked about it yet. There are a great many things we haven’t talked about.
My big problem with corporate structure is this bizarre sense of loyalty you’re supposed to feel — towards what is basically a virus. It grows or dies, like any virus. And you use it for your own selfish ends. Jonny had a big problem with the fact that we didn’t have any obligation — a release date or anything. He found it difficult to work in a vacuum. Which is one of the reasons why we chose to go out on tour: “This is something we can work toward.” It’s human nature. Personally, I don’t have that. But I can see why, if you’re a group of people, you need it.
Has the band talked much about the way you want to release music in the future? There were rumors about a series of EPs.
I’m into the idea of singles and
EPs. Jonny and I were never convinced about that whole thing with Kid A; “We don’t release singles. This is an album, and that’s it.” What gets me down is the emphasis on the LP. It’s one of our strengths. You can create a more exciting picture with lots of different things that you put together. But I want something that gets you on the dance floor. I always have. But we never do that.
So how do you account for the fact that, on your own, you made an album anyway?
There you go — bloody-minded [laughs]. As it went on, this group of songs fit together quite well. It was Nigel who started it: “What if you opened with this song, then put this one and that one…?” Suddenly, we had the first four songs of an album.
How would you describe the status of the next Radiohead album?
We have roughs of things. We have maybe half of something so far. There’s another six tunes we haven’t started playing live yet. There’s one called “Videotape” that’s really cool. It’s got lots of cyclical melodies. It’s one of the first things we had. We were smashing our heads against the wall, trying to figure out what to do with it. Sometimes that drives me crazy.
What have you learned about yourself — as a songwriter — from making The Eraser?
I got a lot more confidence. I go through phases where I have absolutely no faith in anything I’ve done at all. But I was actually talking about what I was doing again. I’d ring up a friend, say “Listen to this,” and play him the bass riff on “And It Rained All Night.” It was things like that, little pockets of excitement that I’d missed for so long.
I was also surprised and reassured by how cool the rest of the guys were with this. When I said I was going to do it, they were like, “Yeah, please.” I was a little worried when I gave them copies of it. If they hated it, that wouldn’t be great. And I was worried that it would freak them out. But it didn’t, which was great.
I had fun doing it as well. That is mostly what I have learned – this is fun. [Laughs] I’m very, very lucky.