THOM YORKE has spoken out for the first time about the harrowing time he encountered prior to the recording of the new Radiohead album ‘KID A’.
In an interview with Q Magazine to be published tomorrow, Yorke describes his mental state prior to the recording of ‘Kid A’ in January 1999 as “one of the lowest points of my life”. He said: “New Year’s Eve ’98 was one of the lowest points of my life. I felt like I was going crazy. Every time I picked up a guitar I got the horrors. I would start writing a song, stop after 16 bars, hide it away in a drawer, look at it again, tear it up, destroy it…I was sinking down and down.”
It was at this point Yorke started buying more electronic music, which would be a major influence on ‘Kid A’ – purchasing the “whole Warp back catalogue…listening to John Peel and ordering records off the net”. He continued: “It was refreshing because the music was all structures and had no human voices on it. But I felt as emotional about it as I’d ever felt about guitar music…I’d completely had it with melody…I just wanted rhythm. All melodies to me were pure embarrassment.”
Elsewhere in the interview, guitarist Ed O’Brien said that the band had to learn “how to be a participant in a song, without actually playing a note”, something which caused tension within the band. He continued: “Thom drove the album, more so than on any other album. It was an eye-opener for me. He has a great art-school ethic. He did art at university and had that kind of drive: ‘OK, I’ve done that – now I’m going to move on’. I think Thom is in the line of the John Lennons, the David Bowies…he has an incredible gift.”
O’Brian also admits that throughout the duration of the recording process, the band held “several crisis meetings”, about the progress of the record, and that the track ‘Knives Out’, which doesn’t even appear on ‘Kid A’, took 373 days to complete.
‘Kid A’ is released in the UK on October 2 through Parlophone.
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