Nope, this is not an April Fool’s joke, Alec Baldwin (or 30 Rock‘s own glowing blue eyed Jack Donaghy) recently interviewed Radiohead’s Thom Yorke; the pair talked about said super band, Yorke’s views on fame, that old subjective chestnut “normality,” producer and fellow band member Nigel Godrich, and the Radiohead frontman’s other experimental super band, Atoms for Peace, amongst a rich cauldron of other topics.
Speaking to York for his podcast Here’s The Thing on WNYC Radio, Baldwin introduces him as a man whose sound, “actively resists definition,” and who personally, “…complains about celebrity worship,” but denies him no praise, saying: “Yorke’s band has become a commercial and a critical success, selling over 30 million albums.”
But perhaps the most interesting revelation was Yorke’s sentiments surrounding the eventual breakup or end of Radiohead, the band he’s fronted since he was 16. Baldwin highlights the extraordinary “chasm” that exists between the Radiohead teenager and the current Yorke of 44 years, now regarded as one of the most influential and original artists of our time.
Asking, “do you feel like you’re sick of it and you want to be done with it?” Yorke simply replies, “Yeah,” but when probed, underscores this with an admission that “it’s never really the music, it’s always everything else.”
Baldwin continues on the subject, asking, “Were there times when you guys sat there and looked at each other and said, ‘I think we’re done?'” According to Yorke, “I do that frequently.” Baldwin editorialise’s the response, suggesting that, “They wait for you, so it’s like yeah, just stick around, Thom will quit for us.” “I’m feeling it’s coming up. I mean you know, something to do with the fact that we haven’t done anything useful for three weeks. It goes through these phases, you know?” – Thom Yorke
The topic concludes with Yorke saying, “I’m feeling it’s coming up. I mean you know, something to do with the fact that we haven’t done anything useful for three weeks. It goes through these phases, you know? We’ve grown up together. It’s weird.”
Radiohead toured Australia in November last year, part of a larger world tour that saw them on the road for the better part of 2012. Yorke highlighted the toll this tour took on the band, saying that it was, “probably, in theory, the scariest one we’ve ever done” due primarily to the tremendous volume of shows the 5-piece undertook.
Unveiling more, Yorke said it was because, “you can’t get across to people the right way, I felt. So we did spend a lot of time and effort coming up with [a] stage design which used screens in a certain way which made it intimate even though, you know, some nights it was like 30 or 40,000 people,” Yorke explains.
But it wasn’t all cynicism and fear, and from Baldwin’s list of musical abilities – “guitar, band kind of paternal figure, songwriting, producing, singing,” – Yorke suggested, perhaps surprisingly for some, he was best at singing.
Yorke’s other band, Atoms For Peace, recently released their debut album Amok. Beside Yorke stand: Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers, Nigel Godrich (the man regarded as Radiohead’s sixth member, and the producer of every Radiohead album to date, as well as Yorke’s solo album The Eraser), Joey Waronker of Ultraista and Ima Robot, and Mauro Refosco of Forro in the Dark.
Yorke says that Atoms for Peace was “fun” and had consistent appeal because it offered a different form for his creative process.
“You’re not struggling around in the dark for a way into a piece of music. You’re figuring out how to strip it down to its raw essentials, especially if something’s been written on a computer and then you have to humanly learn how to play it. It brings in this quite interesting thing with the feel of what you’re playing. Anyway it’s loads of different things, but it’s a lot more fun and a lot more relaxed if you’re not trying to write, you know, which is what also, all the time what we’re always trying to do with Radiohead,” he said.
Closing the interview is a humorous exchange where Yorke describes his career by interchanging ‘being lucky’ with “being jammy,” to Baldwin’s confusion. ” I have one more question, which is what does ‘well jammy’ mean?” asks the actor, to which Yorke responds, “It’s a total fluke, man. It’s not really – you’re just lucky. I mean I’m British, right, so I assume I’m just lucky… There’s no skill involved. I’m jammy.”
Atoms for Peace are touring Europe, the US, and Japan from the middle of the year onwards, although no Australian dates have been released as yet.
You can listen to Baldwin’s Thom Yorke interview below, or read a transcript here
