Veteran genre-hopping producer Mark Pritchard has released records under a multitude of aliases, including Link, Reload, Troubleman, Harmonic 313 and Africa Hitech. Under his birth name, his latest album ‘Under The Sun’ – out May 13 through Warp records – sees him team up with Thom Yorke for the track ‘Beautiful People’. He tells NME how the pairing with Radiohead’s mainman happened.
How did the collaboration with Thom Yorke come about?
“They [Radiohead] have a website and do an office chart, and had charted some of my tracks. And I did a couple of remixes for them for the ‘King Of Limbs’ remix album in 2011. Then a friend of mine, Clive Deamer, ended up being their second drummer on the last few tours, so when they were here in Australia, the band had a night off and came and watched my Africa Hitech gig. So I met them then and went to dinner with them the next night. I asked Thom, ‘would you be up for doing something at some point if I sent you some music?’ I had to ask! And he said ‘yeah, I’ll do what you want’. I kept in contact with him and sent him four tracks – he did ideas on two of them. We focussed on ‘Beautiful People’ because it fit the album. It took a while to get the vocals because he’s a busy man, but I let it happen naturally – sending things back and forth online. He’s open to ideas. He likes being creative and doing different things.”
You’ve described it as a “personal song about loss, hopelessness and chaos.” What influenced it?
“When I wrote the original instrumental, I’d just heard that two friends had passed away. I was sitting in shock. I wrote something thinking of them. Obviously there’s sadness in there. I mentioned it to Thom and said take from that what you want. Although he wrote the words, it definitely captures the emotion of what the original song was about.”
A lot of Thom’s vocals are distorted. Did he explain what his lyrics were about?
“With Thom, you don’t often hear exactly what he says a lot of the time. I like that style – it’s about the emotion. He sent me his vocals pitch-shifted – initially I was enjoying not knowing what he was saying. I asked him if I could print the lyrics in the album and he said although he doesn’t normally do that, he wouldn’t stop me if I was doing it with everybody else’s words.”
Will the other track be released?
“Yeah. I said let’s do this one for the album and we can work on the other one later. I’ll keep sending him stuff. Last time we spoke he said ‘send me any new bits that you’ve got’.”
Recommended
Has he talked to you about the new Radiohead album?
“I always ask him how it’s going. He hasn’t sent me anything. They have to be unbelievably on lockdown for their music. When my album was announced, I realised there was a high chance it would be leaked because of the Thom Yorke connection. He tells me it’s going good and they’re working away on it but I have no idea what it sounds like.”
Were you thinking about how the track would fit into Thom’s back catalogue?
“I sent him four things to give him a variation of styles, trying to keep away from what they usually do. One was quite new wave, another was psychedelic – quite Silver Apples-y with a ’60s guitar going on. Out of the ones I sent, ‘Beautiful People’ was the one I hoped he’d do. It has a different instrumentation to what they normally do, and the melodic structure meant he’d have to write some kind of song. He was into the vibe of all them and did two straight away – he works fast. He’s got studios in his house and goes in and vibes. He sent me rough versions straight away.”