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10:51 · 1,747 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The OK Computer tour ran another year and a half past a disastrous Glastonbury set, and the cycle of making and touring records left Thom Yorke catatonic with depression.
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- The band could have made another record in the same vein and probably become the biggest band in the world, and the whole point is that they did the opposite.
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- They scrapped everything they had, met in Paris and then Copenhagen with nothing coming of either, and each member had a different idea of where the band should go.
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- The split was concrete: one guitarist wanted to strip the effects and make another guitar record, while Yorke wanted rhythm and had no interest in playing guitar at all.
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- What drew him in was the Warp Records catalogue and the idea that electronics do not emote, that he could set a loop running and let it continue without pouring himself into it.
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- He also did not tell his bandmates that he did not want to sing, which is a considerable thing to withhold from three guitarists.
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- At the mansion they spent much of their time reading manuals for instruments they had just bought, and recorded in teams with the other members not knowing what was being made.
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- Jonny Greenwood learned the ondes Martenot, one of the earliest electronic instruments, and the ambient synths on one track are in fact sampled guitars.
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- Yorke wrote lines on strips of paper and drew them from a hat, so the words are not telling a story and the atmosphere is carrying the meaning instead.
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- The new method produced so much material that they had two albums, with the second following inside a year, and the arguments moved from direction to track listing.
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