Radiohead haven’t released an album since 2016, but the band’s frontman, Thom Yorke, has been on an extraordinary run of studio creativity lately, laying down three great albums with the Smile, his band with Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood and jazz drummer Tom Skinner. And it turns out that since 2020, Yorke has been quietly enmeshed in another collaboration, piecing together a sublime new album with veteran electronic producer Mark Pritchard: Tall Tales, due May 9 on Warp Records. It’s accompanied by an intensely trippy animated film by artist Jonathan Zawada, which is set for a one-day theatrical release sometime soon. The duo already dropped the eerie single “Back in the Game”; a second song, “This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice,” is out today.
From the haunted-house ballad “The White Cliffs” to the pulsing, drumless uplift of “The Spirit” (“I keep the spirit alive,” Yorke sings, in one of his most unabashedly anthemic moments since The Bends) to the eight-bit freak-out of “Gangsters,” Tall Tales feels like the most fully realized of Yorke’s non-band projects, a prog-tronic sonic journey with a dystopian kick that evokes the best of Radiohead. Pritchard, a Brit currently based in Australia, spent four years kicking tracks back and forth with Yorke for the album, with the singer manically layering and electronically treating his vocals and adding his own synth parts.
In his first interview about the album, Pritchard — who previously collaborated with Yorke on the 2016 track “Beautiful People” — dives into the making of the record, the nature of the collaboration, the possibility of live performances, and more.
It feels like the two of you should have made an album a long time ago. I know that you did “Beautiful People,” which is a great song, a while ago. How did the two of you first cross paths?
So yeah, the first thing that happened was being asked to do some remixes. But there was no contact at that point. That came via the label. Then [in 2012], Radiohead came to play Sydney, Australia. And at the time, a friend of mine became their second drummer — Clive Deamer, who’d drummed with Roni Size and Portishead and Robert Plant. I’d worked with him years ago and kind of kept in contact with him, and he said, “I can’t tell you at the moment, but something’s happening and I might be coming to Australia.” Obviously it was a secret kind of thing. Everything has to be kept secret with Radiohead.
Then I think the whole band had a night off on a Saturday, which I guess is quite rare. And Clive said, “The band might want to come to where you’re playing tonight on their night off.” So they came and watched me and Steve Spacek play. We did a set at this festival here under the name Africa HiTech.
The next night, we went for dinner with the whole band, me and my partner. I met Thom properly that night, just sort of sat down, chatted for a good few hours, saw the shows, hung backstage with them, went to both nights. And in that conversation, I said, “Would you be up for doing something if I sent you some music at some point?” And he just said, “Yeah, yeah, just send me whatever you want. I’m definitely up for doing something.”
So I started sending him things, one of which became the single “Beautiful People” from my Under the Sun album. He tried three or four things, he was really busy at the time. When I heard “Beautiful People,” I said, “Look, this is amazing, let’s just finish that one and put it on the album.” And then kept in contact from there on in really, via e-mail. Just every now and again, we’d have a little catch-up.
And what was the path to this album? How did it start?
Maybe in 2019, I was thinking about what my next album was going to be. At the time I was thinking it’s probably going to be an album of various featured vocalists again. And then we got into 2020 and of course the crazy pandemic hit. So we’re all adjusting to that. Then, a few months into the pandemic, Thom emailed me and just said, “I hope you’re well, it’s all a bit mad, I’m locked away at home. If you’ve got any music, send it through, because I’m just stuck at home. Can’t go out.”
So I thought about it for a couple of days. I thought, “I’d really like to write specifically for him.” And then I just thought, “It’s going to take me a while to write. I should just send him a load of random things.” Like, some songs that were kind of complete, some songs that might just been a really good drum idea that had a couple of sounds over it, some songs that were just ambient. So I sent him a folder of, like, 20 ideas.
I now know at the time he was working on the first Smile record. But they’re in lockdown. He was in the writing stage of vocals, I think, for that album. He got back to me that night and said, “Can I please do this one?” — which ended up being “Happy Days.” I just said, “Yeah, whatever you want.” Maybe a few days later, he emailed me and said, “Can I just do these 14?” I was like, “Well, yeah, whatever you want to do, I’m happy. Just try it out.”
A few months went by, and he’d email me to touch base: “Don’t forget about me. I’m going to do this.” And I was just in the background trying to work on the ideas, because a lot of the things I sent him were kind of demo sketch ideas. So I thought, “A smart move would be to try and tidy these up a little bit.” Later that year, August, September, he emailed me and said, “I’m gonna start sending you the first demo sketches next week.” And he just sent me two or three a day for a week. I was quite nervous. I had no idea what I was gonna be hearing.
The first day he sent me three, and it was “Men Who Dance in Stags’ Heads,” “Fake in a Faker’s World,” and I can’t remember, maybe “This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice.” The first three were really strong, and I’d never heard him sing the way he does in the “Stags’ Heads” song. I’ve never really heard him sing in that register before.
I was like, “These sound amazing.” And then he just kept sending me a couple each day. He sketches down songs with some lyrics, but he’s looking for hooks, like where the melody is going to be, where’s the tone, where he sits.
Certain songs need to be slowed down, need to take stuff out. He needed to try and sing it in different ways. If it wasn’t working, he’d send it back to me. I’d try and do something. So we focused on those. We did that for quite a long time.
The initial batch of demos that he picked, did that pretty much end up being the album?
I reckon a few of the 14 that he said he wanted to try, a few fell away. And then I sent him “Stags’ Heads,” which I’d done quite recently, as an additional one. And I sent him “White Cliffs,” which I’d done a long time before. I actually sent that to him when I did “Beautiful People.” And I never got a response. I thought, “Well, he doesn’t like it or he didn’t get that email.” So I played that to a friend of mine and he said, “You should send him that one. That’s killer.” So I sent it to him again. And Thom said, “Oh, this is amazing. I definitely want to do this one.”
You’ve done all sorts of music. It does seem like you must be in a different zone when you’re writing things for vocalists to write over — that must be a whole different mentality than when you’re just making an instrumental track.
Yeah, and with this album, the weird thing was, everything I sent him was already written in various periods. I think maybe “Wondering Genie” was nine years old, because I write all the time and stuff sits there and then I try and think about where it could go. It was a weird process, because from the moment of starting the project, there was no writing, it was more production. The challenge was how to get songs to work, which was an exciting challenge. Because I’ve done lots of tracks with vocalists before, but not a full album.
We were both trying to push each other. He was definitely trying to do something different and I was trying to push the songs in different areas. And so that was the main challenge through that period. It was a long mission. It was probably three years of work.
To take you back for a second, obviously when Kid A came out, it was this huge rock band drawing on the sounds that people like yourself were creating. I knew people in the electronic world who loved it back then, and some who were kind of suspicious of it. What was your initial reaction to that change in Radiohead’s sound?
I really liked it. I mean, you could hear it a little bit on OK Computer already. I didn’t find it that surprising because I could hear aspects of it there. Maybe quite early on I’d heard “Idioteque.” And I was really, really kind of pleasantly surprised. It’s a strong electronic song with electronic drums, with an amazing pad and amazing hook. I was into indie music when I was younger and electronic music. So it wasn’t any shock to me. I think it was actually a very good move.
I enjoyed those records each time they shifted around. To me, that is what makes them a really interesting band. Some people wanted more of the guitar stuff, but then they came back and did guitar stuff afterwards, you know. You just gotta allow people to do what they wanna do.
But there were also fans of Warp stuff who felt a little encroached upon, I recall. It was sort of a purist thing at the time.
Yeah, I can imagine. I bet you it was more fans than it was artists. Because they proved themselves and they did it really well. It’s interesting, the kind of music heads that are into Radiohead. Hip-hop people can check it and appreciate it. Anybody that’s into music can understand they’re just really good at what they do and it’s fair play they’ve tried something different.
None of the electronic artists that I know have ever gone, “Oh yeah, they came and took our thing.” They’re probably quite happy that they’re inspired by it, I guess. The other thing Thom told me that I thought was quite interesting is that when he was in college in Exeter, which is not far from where I grew up in the west country of England, he used to DJ in the local university and he used to play the early Warp Records stuff then. He mentioned Nightmares on Wax, like the first wave of Warp Records, which is kind of like bleep, clunky, techno music with big bass. So he was a fan of Warp from all that period.
That’s interesting, because people always thought he got into that stuff much later, right before Kid A.
I knew he was a fan of Autechre, a fan of Aphex Twin. Because the story came out that they asked Warp to send them everything [before Kid A]. And then they just got inspired by that. So that probably was the case, but he was already a fan.
I know you and Thom did a lot of interesting stuff working with the vocal tracks. Tell me about some of those treatments that you did.
It’s a mixture of him and me. I think he, from his perspective, was trying to find a way to get his voice to fit in with what I’ve done. He also likes experimenting with his voice. So he was running his vocals through his modular system. He’s got a huge wall of the modern modular Euro-rack type stuff behind him every time I speak to him on Zoom. I think he was having fun doing that, because I guess he also wants to try and find a different vibe for this. He doesn’t want it to be like the Smile stuff or other things he’d done.
And then I would obviously want to have a contrast, so you want some stuff to be manipulated, you want some stuff just to be his voice. I think “Bugging Out,” I put his voice through a [rotating] Leslie speaker. I was always wanting to try it and that song felt like the right one to do it on. So I sent that to a friend of mine in the U.K. that’s got a few different Leslie speakers. And we recorded the vocal through those multiple times. It’s quite a tricky thing to do because you get a lot of distortion and it’s quite random, but that’s also what makes it kind of good.
I thought about certain ones that it would be fun for me to mess with, like “Back in the Game.” He did that vocal quite clean. There were no effects on that vocal when he did it and it worked as a song, but then he said, “Just go wild on the effects on this one. Take what I’ve done and just mess it up.” So certain ones he was encouraging me to do, other ones he’d done himself, other things he just kept clean. I didn’t want it to be all manipulated vocals just because it’s more of an electronic thing. I was wary of that. But he did a good range of things. He was definitely having fun.
And also, from his perspective, imagine singing for that amount of time. He needs to find new ways to be excited about using his voice and writing songs in different ways. And so he thought about that, and he said he wrote in a different way to normal on this project because he doesn’t normally let his lyrics go out. I thought he wouldn’t want us to put the lyrics into the world, but I wanted the lyrics for myself so I knew what he was actually saying. And also for Jonathan, who was doing the videos. And he emailed me and said, “I actually do want to put these in the world and put them into the album.”
What’s a good example of a song where he sent an initial version and then you ended up altering the track and sending it back and forth?
“The Spirit” was one of the hardest ones. I wrote it, it was faster and it had drums in it. And he tried singing it, he said, and he’d take the drums out. Because the drums I had in it were an old-school drum machine, but doing a Latin preset kind of thing going on. And they were taking up a lot of room. So he just said, “Let’s take them out, but we’ll have to find a new way to put rhythm in.”
He put a guide drum in to sing to it, a basic kick and snare drum. And then he sang it to the guide drums and I was like, I need to replace these drums. But I couldn’t find… I mean drums is one of my favorite things to do and I couldn’t hear anything on it. Tried a couple of things and then I just made the decision: I’m not going to put drums on it. But I needed to then find a way of how I was going to get this to work as a song.
So my friend who’s in the building where I’m working who’s a bass player, I got him to play bass on it. I got him to play a very simple bass part because bass can be a little bit percussive and it’s a good starting point. And then I just put on some percussion. I’ve got a [physical] drum kit, so I just pedaled the hi-hat now and again, then laid electronic snare and some electronic hi-hats in. Just kept adding to it and seeing whether I could get this to work. Because it had something special and I needed to leave space for the vocal performance. It’s all about his delivery of that vocal. And then he still wasn’t happy with the vocal, so he changed it to first-person perspective. So it’s like, “I am not the fool.” And then just got the right balance of performance on the song.
Yeah, that’s definitely one of the more upbeat, hopeful songs, both lyrically and musically on the album.
It’s unusual for me to write in a major key. It’s so basic. We usually go for sadder, minor chords or stranger things, but I guess every now and again, you just need to do something that you don’t normally do. So I did that and I assumed he’s just going to sing minor over major and it’s going to make it sadder. And when he sent me the demo, he’d gone with the chords. And I was like, “He needs to go sadder on this, not go with the chords.” And then I tried to add some stuff to it to almost steer it. And then he emailed me and just said, “No, no, no, no, no, get rid of all of that.” He was just like, “This is going to be really difficult to get to work. But if we can get this to work, it’s going to be a really strong, interesting track for the album.
He actually sent me a song by Janet Kay called “Silly Games,” which charted in the U.K. [in 1979]. It was on Top of the Pops, even. It’s a reggae song, beautiful vocal. And he just said, “This song is nothing like this reggae song, but there’s a feeling in that song and in a lot of the music from that era. There’s a hopefulness and there’s an optimistic feeling and we need to keep that feeling in this song.” And as soon as he sent it to me, I just went, “OK, now I get it.” He said, “It’s going to be down to me getting the performance right and then you finding a way to get it to work.” And he was totally right.
“A Fake in a Faker’s World” is a really strong, ominous album opener. Do you remember how that developed?
That song was one where he took the drums from a song that I sent him and the bass, and he got rid of the pads that I had in that song, and then he took the strings in another song that I sent him and chopped them over the top of the drums.
And then he added the modular bleep section that comes in after the first set of vocals that goes on its own for a while, then the drums come back in. He added the drums and put effects on the drums. There are quite a few songs where he actually added synthesizers, modular systems, extra sounds, extra pads, which is kind of cool because it’s not just me sending him a track and he sings over it.
I think he enjoys doing that stuff as much as he does singing, and I guess sometimes more than singing. He actually added quite a lot of stuff. In “Gangsters,” there’s a mad percussive synth riff that comes into that. He added that. He likes having fun playing synthesizers and whatever he can.
“The Men Who Dance in Stags’ Heads” is very organic-sounding. It could be almost like a Velvet Underground song or something.
I’m a big fan of Ivor Cutler, who is a Scottish poet who played harmonium, which is tan instrument that you pedal with your feet. And the studio that I’ve been working with in the U.K. has loads of ’50s, ’60s synthesizers and organs. So I was sending [a friend] some parts and then I’d get him to replay them with the original synths. He had a couple of harmoniums because he’s a fan of Ivor Cutler. So I asked him to sample every note of the harmonium and he gave me it with close and room mics so I could then play that in and the idea was to then get him to replay it live.
In the end, it sounded so good that I just kept the samples that he gave me. I didn’t need to re-record it. So it was going to be a folk tune, really. But then I put the harmonium through a little bit of distortion, which kind of edged it up and made it a little bit more psychedelic. And then when I put the drums in — which is like a medieval timpani, doing the simple kick-drum part, and then I used this tambourine I found in a kind of second-hand charity shop — that gives it definitely the Velvet Underground feel, but it’s like a folk version of Velvet Underground in a way. Then I was like, “I need to balance this a little bit,” and I put the bassoon part in.
I didn’t know what Thom was going to do on that song. Thom went for the kind of Bob Dylan low-vocal thing, you know? I was like, “Wow, I’ve never heard you do that before.” And he told me that he’d always wanted to do that and he never found a way of doing it. He never found a way of getting into the headspace. And he found a little trick where he found if he vari-speeded the audio, it allowed him to get into character a bit more to deliver the vocal in that register. Because he did it on that song and he did it on “White Cliffs” halfway through.
That was one of the first demos he sent me. And I was like, “Wow.” The vocal wasn’t finished, and he said, “I’ve almost got it. I just need to find a way of getting a little bit more. I need to put a little bit more of my own thing in. I need to find a way to actually do that sort of Bob Dylan, Lou Reed area, but of course I need to personalize it.” I think he then had another few goes and then got it. I love that one. It’s one of my favorite ones on the album.
There’s some even weirder shit going on with songs like “Happy Days,” which has all these high-pitched spoken voices going around.
Thom did the wildest vocals. I mean, when he sent me what he did, I was like, “This is nuts.” We had no idea how to get that to work. That one was messed around with right up to mastering actually, because I like the fact that he’d done vocals all the way through, and it’s just a crazy song, and it felt like it needed to be constantly hitting you with vocals. He felt like he’d done too many vocals on it and he kind of overpowered the track, so that one was going backwards and forwards a lot.
It was really hard to get it to work. There’s so many vocals and they’re so odd. It sounds like a female well-spoken English Sixties kind of announcer for the intro parts. And then it’s almost a bit punky in the middle. And then he sings those really nice parts. To do those kinds of things, you need to be confident enough to do something that sounds ridiculous. You need to be not afraid to sound like you’re doing absolute nonsense, really.
It was the hardest one to get right. ‘Cause I lost the vibe at one point. I had to go back to the original demo and try and keep what was right about the demo, but then improve it subtly. That’s gonna split people. You’re gonna either love that or you’re gonna hate it, but it’s one of my favorite ones because it’s unexpected.
On “Tall Tales,” he has that old-school Macintosh spoken-word vocal generation going on, like on “Fitter Happier.”
I guess he’d done it before, hasn’t he? I’d done it quite a lot, and on the EP that I had out in 2020, I’d done quite a lot of it again. He didn’t feel like he could do the spoken-word parts himself. I thought, “Should we get people to do these voices instead of using a computer voice?” At one point I was actually going to try and employ voice actors to do the voices, and then flatten them out to make them less human.
AI was kind of happening at that point, and people were using AI to clone voices, and I thought about that. But it was in its early stages. And then I just spent a lot of time trying to get those kind of Mac voices to work, really. I think the idea behind that song to me feels like the sound of 2020, when we were online. I guess Thom was trying to have cascading voices and noise, almost like a sort of an audio version of Twitter in a way. When Twitter was in that period where it was just mayhem, because there was so much horrible shit happening.The U.K. was going through Brexit. Trump was in at the end of the first term. To me, it felt like waves of chatter, just noise and chatter, voices over the top of each other, but trying to put it in waves.
We were very reluctant about talking about this as a lockdown record, because for me the music was all written before the lockdown. But of course Thom was writing the lyrics and the songs during 2020. You can hear some things across the record.
And [in the film] Jonathan reacted to those themes, sometimes trying to push against them, sometimes balancing them, going against it, sometimes going with it to try and get that feeling across. But it’s not just about that period. Like “Stag’s Head” is inspired from a book called The Gallows Pole by Benjamin Myers, which is a book about people filing coins down for the metal in the 1800s as a way of getting money. So I think the album has various themes in it, and political themes, but they span different time zones, you know.
The wordless final track, “Wandering Genie,” is really a journey.
Yeah, he tried to do a vocal on it. I think he thought about it, but then he realized it’s not gonna work with the song. So he just layered up his voice, ghosting the riffs. It was a huge amount of vocals. It’s like 40 tracks of vocal layers, and modular effects layered. And then there’s a huge block chord that he’s done. He was going to play piano on it and he was going to do strings, but he just decided to do it with his voice. So he layered up these three, four-part harmony block chords.
In the initial discussions, we were talking about vocal areas to try on this record. I told him, you know, I’m a huge fan of [Fifties vocal groups] the Hi-Los and the Four Freshmen. And I sent him some of that stuff. To me, it had a little bit of that kind of harmony group type vibe in there, which I was really happy about, because I love those kinds of vocals.
With “This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice.” I could hear an alternate life for that song as a rock song. I feel that vibe in it.
Yeah, even though they’re synthesized chords, it’s like a slightly indie feel to it. Even though there’s no guitars. Which I guess stuck out to me when I started playing it. I thought about putting guitars on and I think Thom was just against it. I think in his head it was just like, “I do lots of stuff with guitars. We don’t need guitars.”
Were you together in person at any point during this process?
No. We were doing emails and then I quickly realized that it was too difficult to do emails because the stuff was getting lost in translation. There was something where he did something and I loved it. And I basically, whatever I wrote, I was basically saying, “This is amazing. Well done.” But he translated it to, “I didn’t like it.” So I was like, “OK, we need to do Zooms,” which really, really helped, because you can read what somebody’s saying or if they’re unsure about something.
There was no nonsense all the way through. We were fighting, you know, we both had different opinions. Sometimes he pushed something, sometimes he was right, sometimes I was right, but it was always very much about “How are we going to get this to work and for the better good of everything?” He’s a very straight-up guy and we trusted each other straight away. There was no bullshit going on, no angles, just straight up honest chat.
It would have been nice to be in the same room, but it was just circumstances. You know, we couldn’t leave Australia for two years. And it was actually fine. He could do his thing. I could do my thing. The only downside is that he was locked away at home and he couldn’t go to studios to do certain things. But other than that, it was fine.
Is there any thought, and I don’t know how it would work, of the two of you performing in some way?
When Thom just did his recent solo tour, he was going to play “Beautiful People,” but I don’t think he got time to work that one up. But he basically found a way of doing a solo tour live by himself, which he’d been trying to work out, he told me, for a long time. And he’s found a system to be able to add songs as he’s touring and be able to have fun with the instrumentation and have a range of instrumentation to cover lots of songs he’s made over the years in different styles.
So when he was in Sydney, he said, “Do you want to come up and tweak something while I’m playing?” And I was like, “Yeah.” I came in for soundcheck and we ran through it a few times. He said, “Do you want to play the mod?” You know, there’s a certain modulator that’s doing a certain part of “Back in the Game,” which he played.
I was a bit nervous about doing it because I’m not used to being onstage. I’m not in front of that amount of people. I don’t like being in front of people, full stop, but I could see that it could work. ‘Cause to start with, he said, “I don’t think we can do this live. It’s too complicated.” And the sound sources are so unique, because I use lots of old synthesizers and it’s all about capturing a certain vibe and then protecting that vibe.
Then he said, “Maybe we could do some stuff where we run some stuff live and maybe we do it like the Depeche Mode style, where we have stuff on a backing tape, just a reel-to-reel behind us, pressing play.” He was thinking about ways of possibly doing it. I was a bit worried because I’d never played live, really, and never really had much will to want to play live. So part of me was excited and part of me was petrified that I might have to go out onstage and tour this thing.
I just said, “Look, I’m open to it, but I don’t know how we’re going to do it.” But then after the tour that he’s just done and me seeing how he was doing it, I was like, this is actually interesting. Because I think what’s put me off touring is, electronic stuff’s quite hard to do live. And I didn’t want to stand there and just press a button.
After seeing how he did it and how much range of things he could do live, I told him, “If you are up for doing something, I’m up for doing it.” I think it can be done, because I was just impressed how he translated those songs live. I guess eventually he’ll tour that around the world and get people to see it. It was really impressive what he did. It was just him for two hours.
Some songs would be acoustic, some of them at the piano, some of them at just one synthesizer playing something. And then sometimes it’s just a sequencer running his palette of sounds that he had onstage. It was all live. There weren’t any computers involved. And there’s a lot of chance for things to go very wrong, which is kind of exciting.
Realistically, it’s at the mercy of his schedule. And he’s one of the most busy people I’ve ever met. He’s annoyingly productive and busy. I’ve never met anybody like him. He’ll do another Smile album and another one and I’m still working on this one! So I’d be surprised if it could happen this year, but I have no idea. At some point, I guess it may fit in somewhere, depending on what he’s doing. Or maybe he does a solo thing and we do some songs that we do more than we did before, or it’s a combination. Maybe at some point it’ll work.
I’m curious how this whole experience transformed any ideas about your own creative possibilities or way of working.
I write something and then I usually get it to a certain place and it works. And then I don’t often take huge parts out of songs. But I guess once you’re dealing with songs and vocals, then you have to. The song is finding a way of making the song work and you have to throw things around sometimes. That was really interesting to me and it was a bit of a shock sometimes, because I’d send him something and he’d take the whole bass line out.
Like, “White Cliffs” had a totally different bass line, which is quite a lot of the song, and he just got rid of it. And then I was like, “What the hell have you done with my bass line?” And he was just like, “I can’t sing. I need to take the bass out to be able to sing, to give me the freedom to sing, to find the hook.” And it made total sense straight away. I had to find another way of getting bass in that went along with what he did. Because then it was obvious that the song worked being very sparse.
I’ve just started to think about what I’m going to do next. I’ve been writing some club stuff because I hadn’t had a chance to do that. I started working on whatever the next album is going to be last year, but it was very early stages. But I’m definitely at the point where I’m just writing, really, to see what I get, where it all goes to, to then think about who could sing this next. I think if I could find somebody to do all of the tracks, I would try to do that.
Depending on how varied. I mean, Thom is very versatile, and he got on a lot of different types of styles, which is very impressive. There’s other people out there, I’m sure, can do this kind of thing, but he’s very, very talented and it takes a lot to be able to do that amount of range. But it’s gonna be totally different from what I’ve just done. That’s for certain.
I wanted to ask about the “Gangsters” 8-bit sound. I know you’ve used an Atari 2600 synthesizer — is it that?
I think Thom was almost shocked when I showed him what it was. It’s a Mattel Bee Gees [toy] synthesizer. If you look it up.
I gotta tell you something insane. I owned that as a small child. I know exactly what you’re talking about, and I owned that.
Yeah, it’s got like maybe one octave and you’ve got these three bass presets. And Kraftwerk used it to do “Pocket Calculator,” I think, definitely [at least] live. They put some tin foil over it so it looked cooler. I’m pretty sure they used that to do the bleeps on “Pocket Calculator” or one of those songs. So I knew that they’d used it and they just went looking for one, years ago.
I didn’t really use the bleeps, just used the bass preset. It’s just one note. So I put it into Melodyne and changed the key of it up and down. So you have that eight-bit, lo-fi thing going on.
One thing that you have in common with Thom and with Radiohead is this sense of physical space in your music. And I really hear it on this album. Every track is sort of a realm that you create, and I’m just curious to what extent you think in those terms.
Yeah, there’s a sonic thing I’m trying to get. What we spent so much time doing is finding a way to make this all fit together from quite an unusual range of sounds and sources, synthesizers, trying to make it all fit.
What I’ve been trying to do with the last few albums, is I like the sound of old records. I really like Fifties- and Sixties-sounding albums. But I also don’t want to make anything that just sounds straight retro. So the mission I’m always on is, how can I use the sounds that I like and then mix it in a way that feels like at least the area of these records? So it’s not been compressed. I’ve not limited the music. I’ve left the dynamics in there. I’ve mixed it through a mixing desk. I use some old gear, some new gear.
That was the mission, really. Then Thom adding his thing changes it again. And then Jonathan doing what he has done, he then balances it again. He can pull things with the visual world into a different place.
“Back in the Game,” to me, the original song sounds like a John Carpenter soundtrack. I put drums on it. And it kind of went a little bit more New Wave. Then Thom did a very hooky verse, and then I messed those verses up and made them a bit more crazy with effects. Then it goes into the instrumental section. And then in the last chorus goes into this totally different area again, where he sings low.So the song has like a few different eras going on. The drums, I used a Sixties organ to do the drums. Then Jonathan then made this crazy CGI video that doesn’t look anything like you can imagine. It’s not retro at all.
There’s certain songs I wasn’t sure about. I was still unsure about that song until he did the video, and I was unsure about “Gangsters” until he did the video. When he did the video, then it actually finally made sense to me. There’s a lot of that going on. I guess Radiohead do the same. They’re trying to do the same thing, but in whatever different ways that they try and do it.
Does Thom talk about Radiohead like it’s a going concern? I’ve talked to the other members about that and they seem unsure.
He definitely does not talk about it to me, because I guess they have to keep it on lockdown. But I mean, they got together last year, they played together [in a rehearsal]. So that’s interesting. If they’d all fallen out or anything, that wouldn’t have happened.
I can only guess what everybody else is guessing: Everybody’s doing their stuff. Everybody’s enjoying doing their stuff. A lot of fans want another Radiohead record, but, you know, I kind of feel like that will happen if it happens. If they feel like it should, it’s the right thing to do in the timing. I guess it’s timing in all sorts of different things. I think that the Smile project is a great project. The last album had some really, really killer songs in it. As strong as anything they’d ever done, I think.
I feel that way about your album.
Cheers! Thanks. I just want the thing out. I want people to hear the whole thing.
From Rolling Stone US.
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