Rainbow warriors - Radiohead interview

Published on Friday 20 June 2008 17:20

They broke the mould with album sales, now Radiohead tell Craig McLean why playing Glasgow Green is part of the band's eco-touring manifesto

THOM Yorke had been thinking. A lot. "If we go to the US by ship, on the Queen Mary, it's more carbon emissions than it is if you go on the plane," he says. "'Cause it goes so fast and is so heavy. So the most eco-way of doing it is for us to get on a merchant ship. Get a crate on a freight ship. Then we realised that was probably pretty impractical."

The singer and I were talking in London while Radiohead were riding high on the success of the In Rainbows release/distribution storm. The band's pay-what-you-like download gamble, followed earlier this year by a physical release of a CD, had paid off handsomely, in every sense. Radiohead had made more money per unit sold than they would have if they'd sold the album via their former record label, EMI. Nor did free downloads cannibalise over-the-counter sales: in America, their seventh album went straight to No 1.

Most importantly, and moving away from matters fiscal and statistical to the stuff that these Oxford brainboxes really care about: by noising up the music industry and reinventing how they conducted their own business – that is, free from any record company pressure – Radiohead as a band had undergone a root-and-branch shake-up of their very essence. Almost 20 years since forming at school they felt like a young, brand new band.

And now this spirit of reinvigoration was being applied elsewhere too. Radiohead were about to head out on another world tour. They wanted to do that differently too. They wanted to minimise their carbon footprint, not least because the politically-minded Yorke is a spokesman for Friends of the Earth's campaign against greenhouse gases, The Big Ask.

As guitarist Ed O'Brien recalls: "Thom said, and he was quite right, 'I can't go out on tour unless we do it right.' I think he got burnt a bit by Jon Snow on Channel 4 when he was on there" – under questioning from the news anchor, the rock star admitted he wasn't doing enough in his own life and work to help the planet – "and that was probably quite good in a way because it made us address things and it made us get an audit."

Radiohead asked Oxford sustainability consultancy Best Foot Forward to draw up a report: 'Ecological Footprint & Carbon Audit of Radiohead North American Tours, 2003 & 2006'. The results, say Radiohead, were surprising. As well as breaking down the obvious stuff – aeroplanes bad, slow ships better, buses and trains better still – the audit revealed that the biggest issue was not the conduct of the band but of their fans: thousands of people driving to and from out-of-town stadia night after night was a greenhouse gas nightmare.

So Radiohead routed the In Rainbows World Tour 2008 accordingly. Says Yorke: "We're trying to keep gigs as much as we can to where there are facilities for public transport."

"Like city centre parks," says Ed O'Brien. Which meant goodbye, say, Loch Lomond, and hello Glasgow Green.

But before that, it's ciao Milano. Last Tuesday night Radiohead performed the first of two nights at Milan's Arena Civica. Some 18,000 fans would turn up each evening to this old sports stadium in the middle of the northern Italian city.

I've seen the band perform their only two performances in the UK so far this year. In January they rocked a tiny club, 93 Feet East, in London's East End. In April at the BBC Radio Theatre they used the rarefied surroundings to showcase the more textured moments from In Rainbows. But seeing them in a stadium last week was a reminder of Radiohead's pre-eminent status among rock's premier league big-hitters.

'Everything In Its Right Place', from the supposedly 'challenging' and contrary album Kid A, rolled along on a lissom techno-funk bounce. The ambient subtleties of the new album's 'Weird Fishes' and the twitchy atmospherics of 'The Gloaming' from Hail To The Thief floated over the pitch, losing none of their magic or detail in such a huge space. In contrast, 'My Iron Lung' from The Bends was an ear-melting anthem, the jagged chords matched by an equally jagged, slashing light display. Indeed, Radiohead's rig, assembled from low-energy LED tubes, is one of the stars of the set. If you've never been deafened by a light show, you're in for a treat at Glasgow Green.

Backstage afterwards, the mood was relaxed. With the band performing here the following night too, no one was in a hurry to leave. Yorke hung out with his partner Rachel. Drummer Phil Selway stood in the corridor on his phone. Easygoing bass player Colin Greenwood milled about among the recycling bins. Only his guitarist brother Johnny, the shyest member, was nowhere to be seen. Actor Ed Norton, currently pretending to be The Incredible Hulk in cinemas, and the fat kid from Superbad were the most recognisable of the VIP guests.

Sitting down with a cup of tea, O'Brien announced himself pleased if not overwhelmed with the show. The second night in a town is usually the better one, plus it had been an atypically wet and cold summer's evening in Milan. But, 16 gigs into the tour, the mood was buoyant. They had got over the apprehension that attended the opening shows in Florida early last month; even seasoned stadium rock bands get nervous. Even they need reassurance – public displays of affection – that their new songs cut the mustard.

"You don't know how the new material's going to go down. We're not going out and doing a greatest hits set," he says, a barbed reference to the Best Of… compilation recently released by EMI, much to the band's chagrin. "Instead we're going, 'This is our new album,' and you're playing in front of 20,000 people the first night, and you're not playing 'Paranoid Android' or 'Creep'. But it's good. It's just confirmed that people are into In Rainbows."

O'Brien says he thinks the album was downloaded two million times, but he still doesn't know how many copies it has sold in total, nor how many people took the band at their word and nabbed it for free. But they'll be releasing the figures soon. Their accountant "likes his stats and he's broken it down country by country". As it happens, "the Italians are the most generous – 79% of them paid something. Then the UK, 65%. Then it goes all the way down. You wouldn't expect a lot of African countries being prepared to pay for it."

Previous world tours have not been kind to Radiohead. The OK Computer campaign, a huge schlep that dragged on for the best part of two years (largely because the band's 1997 masterpiece refused to stop selling), almost broke them, as documented in the infamous 'anti-tour' film Meeting People Is Easy. Supporting Hail To The Thief, Yorke told me that they travelled round the world "the wrong way" (geographically speaking) and were again burnt out as a result. It's early days, but this time it seems Radiohead are bouncing along on an In Rainbows-induced high. They're even writing new material as they go.

"Yeah, there's bits and pieces," says O'Brien. "Thom's writing lyrics, there are ideas we've soundchecked, so there's stuff definitely to be recorded. The idea on this tour was, Nigel (Godrich, longstanding producer] wanted to get us in a studio on the road, but I don't think it's going to happen. So the idea is that we finish in October and we will do some recording in November."

But before all that, there's a summer of big gigs to play. Ed O'Brien says: "I'd love to have done T In The Park because we haven't done that for ages, but we're away", but is looking forward to returning to Glasgow Green, where the band played during their 'Big Top' tour in 2000. He is also excited about the prospect of returning to the US for the second leg of their tour there.

"The great thing about that tour is that we'll have all the information about where fans go to and from so we can do a proper environmental audit and a breakdown. Friends of the Earth are using it as their template. Any bands who come to them and say, 'What we can do?', they can tell them, 'Well, Radiohead did this…' It's sort of becoming an industry standard."

Out on the muddy pitch of the Arena Civica, the guitarist got the crowd yelling even louder when he read out the scores from that evening's Euro 2008 matches: Italy had beaten France 2-0. Then it was back to the job in hand. Radiohead launched into the scabrous, Tony Blair-baiting 'You And Whose Army', Yorke pressing his face into the camera mounted on his piano so that his face leered from screens all over and around the stage. But he was grinning as he did it.

These days Radiohead, it seems, are happy bunnies. And their gigs are all the better for it.

• Radiohead play Glasgow Green, Friday

• www.radiohead.com