Radiohead: Hail to the thief

By STEPHEN DOWLING

It's a Friday afternoon in one of London's grander hotels, in a conservatory brimming with businessmen and conference delegates. A brace of waiters are gliding between tables laden with 15 club sandwiches and gourmet fish and chips. A pianist is tinkling his way through The Spy Who Loved Me and Queen's We Are The Champions.

Radiohead - Thom Yorke, bassist Colin Greenwood and guitarist brother Jonny, drummer Phil Selway and guitarist Ed O'Brien - have arrived for the day's press, invisible to everyone, walking one by one between the tables to begin the day's trial-by-tape-recorder.

Waiting in the hotel rooms are Rolling Stone and magazines and papers from a dozen different European states, eager to hear the story behind Hail To The Thief, the band's sixth studio album.

They are back on the record-release-promote cycle that, it seems, nearly broke them up in the aftermath of OK Computer. But now they are accepting it with good grace, getting into the battlebus for the latest round of electioneering.

And things are different this year. Hail To The Thief led them to decamp to Los Angeles, a seemingly unlikely place, to bask in the Californian sunshine and make their new album.

California? Sunshine? Radiohead's genial bassist Colin Greenwood is aware of just how out of the ordinary this sounds - the holiest of anti-corporate bands rubbing shoulders with so many kicking, screaming, skinny-latte little piggies.

"It was great," he says amid silver service morsels, surrounded by the polite din of the restaurant. "We rented some cool cars - we rented Minis, just like The Italian Job, though it didn't end with a bus teetering over a precipice."

They had been dragged out to California by Nigel Godrich, their longtime producer who had helmed two Beck records and Travis' The Invisible Band there.

Radiohead's American sojourn led them to record Hail To The Thief in a Los Angeles studio that had once hosted the jazz greats Nat King Cole and Lionel Hampton.

"It's all 70s, funky and steampowered, full of all that chipboard with little holes in it, like where the White Stripes recorded their new record, except in a sunny place where you can get green salad with alfalfa sprouts 24 hours a day."

"It was great, I really liked it, met some great people. There's a really healthy music and artistic scene there because it's a lot cheaper to live there than in New York," he says.

Hail To The Thief comes two years after Amnesiac, the second of a pair of albums that created the aura of 21st-century Radiohead seemingly scared of guitar chords, uninterested in choruses, brimming instead with ideas to take their music in ever sparser, more minimalist directions - a ghostly apparition of their former selves.

The start of Hail To The Thief is quite something to behold. 2+2=5 starts with a loping Thom Yorke vocal, the music restrained but, you sense, aching to let rip. When it explodes it is with a ferocity Radiohead haven't shown for years, and is more in common with something from Yield-era Pearl Jam.

"It was the first thing we recorded. You can hear Jonny plugging his guitar in. It was like, 'right here go'," says Greenwood. "It's brash and colourful and short, like our stay in LA, actually."

While it is fair to say nothing quite manages its spirit on the rest of the album, There There is another track that explodes with gusto, framed by a guitar that has a chiming, Smiths-like sound and rumbling drums.

"That was, like, Ed and Jonny's frustration at not being able to play drums with Phil really," explains Greenwood. "And it's good because Thom has always wanted to have two drumkits in the studio and two people playing drums at the same time."

Greenwood thinks the song might extend an olive branch to those who have scratched their heads at their most recent material.

"It is fragmented, but it also joins up a lot of different kinds of music from all the records before. You can hear elements of everything from The Bends to the present day. It is a compilation of the things we've done to date, without looking back."

Greenwood is a big fan of the lyrics for the song, saluting Yorke's bleak wit, one which seems to have resurfaced following the serious sabbatical of Kid A and Amnesiac.

Has fatherhood changed the notoriously glass-half-empty Yorke?

"I have noticed a change in children's toys, building blocks and playmats. And they can't all be for Phil!"

It is the words of this skewed album that you really want to get to grips with, after marvelling at the fact Radiohead have rediscovered their outward, extrovert side again.

It is occasionally unsettling stuff. A Wolf At the Door, the album's final song, has dark visions of dragging out the dead. It is not the self-loathing of Creep but something deeper and nastier.

And there is no escaping the title. Since George W. Bush won a dubious victory in the 2000 presidential elections, a clarion call for his opponents has been "Hail to the thief". Calling your album the same name would seem to be making a strong political statement.

"I don't think it would be fair to the record if people thought it was about or because of George Bush. We decided on the title of the record months ago, and it was about a lot of things apart from George Bush," says Greenwood.

"This is our sixth record with our record company. We would like to carry on ,but the world is changing, the way the internet is taking over. Anyone who thought the record was about George Bush, I think the balloon was burst when it was announced the tracks were already on the internet two weekends ago," he says.

Things have changed since Radiohead released Pablo Honey in 1993. Then, the occasional radio station would break an embargo to play tracks. Now, reviewers have to sign the rights to their firstborn if they dare to divulge extraneous details of major records.

The internet is a hive of music, even after Metallica's anti-Napster campaign. In the case of Hail To The Thief, it seems stolen music.

"It was like having stuff stolen halfway through, and people don't quite get the point because the point hasn't been edited down yet by us. That was frustrating.

"And the music was stolen from the studio. That's what we think happened from the date of the mixes. They were from LA in February. They're not the same mixes as on the record," Greenwood says.

A few years ago Greenwood was appearing on British current affairs TV shows espousing the joys of the internet and how it wasn't about to kill music. Now things have changed.

And for Radiohead themselves, Greenwood admits time is more precious. The band that nearly burned themselves out while touring for OK Computer now have other priorities - children, for the most part - but also seem in a healthier place than a few years ago.

Radiohead don't seem the kind of band for tantrums, but the soul-searching after their rise to global prominence caused problems. "It wasn't so much friction, it was just weariness from coming out of OK Computer," Greenwood says.

"And all the touring. We were staying out of each other's way, whereas this one we were pitching in a lot more and it was just a lot more fun generally."

There is not the same pressure any more. In fact, Radiohead road-tested the album's material last year on a tour that took in only Spain and Portugal.

"It sounds like we're used to playing them in front of people instead of just writing and arranging and recording them behind closed doors in a hermetic environment and presenting them."

"You always change things when you play things to people. You have the focus group in front of you, like New Labour, or you've got people who have paid money to see a show.

"It's a good way of doing it. This record was tested in live spaces rather than the dead spaces of studio recording booths."

So this year Radiohead is taking a step back, to all intents and purposes, but considering where they have been before this is not a bad thing.

"It's with spirit and gusto, not hiding a light. It is more extrovert, there are more colours," Greenwood says.

* Hail To The Thief is released on Friday June 13.