Newly published Thom Yorke interview on art and politics, Noam Chomsky, and his lyrics

In 2007, I went to interview the Radiohead frontman in Oxford, England. It turned out to be the most candid political interview he's done.

Art and Politics

Some people say there should be a strict dividing line between line between aesthetics and politics. Do you agree?

I wonder if you did a Venn diagram of how they coincided, or if you did a straw poll of their sympathies in terms of artists, what you’d get back. I guess it depends on how broad you see you the definitions of politics, and how broad you see the definition of art or music. If you see art and music as something that extends beyond this little bit of plastic that goes in your CD machine, and if you see politics as something that’s happening not just in the House of Parliament and Portcullis House, then I think you can’t use that argument at all – it’s utter bollocks.

I was just thinking then about when we did OK Computer where there were all these billboards for stuff – that was when the music industry first discovered the idea of billboards around then. And EMI were saying, ‘We could do some billboards’, and we were like, “OK – so can we put what we want on the billboards?”… Yeah, Okaaaaaay. So we did all this Fitter Happier stuff for people driving down the M40 in fucking huge letters – and that was pretty cool, and that’s when I feel like, well, maybe there is some sort of cross, you can put things up like that.

Are there corporate pressures not to get involved in politics, have you felt them?

To be fair to EMI, they never once said anything. Because I think we were never being overtly political – it was always within the realms of the words or the images that went with the music, so it was never polemical for its own sake, it was never out of the realms of the music itself.

Why is that? Do you feel it is too crude when you’re less oblique about it? To have a very campaigning sort of song that you’ve never really done.

Well it’s that thing – it just sounds like a sledgehammer, you can’t do it. Although people have done it, and it never ceases to amaze me how people have managed to do it. But I think the only way it really works is when whatever you are trying to say has become your life anyway, rather than being something that you pick up one day and you get angry about and write a song about it and put down.

I know George Bush’s daughter, and David Cameron are fans of your work, in that sense politics seems to be trumped by art.

And David Miliband!

Is that weird for you?

No, I just want to sort of take the piss, really.

Because David Cameron asked you to play Fake Plastic Trees?

Yeah, and I said, ‘Only if you sign the bill’.

Are you tempted to use this popularity to change these people and lobby?

You’ll never change them – they’re going to get more from you than you get from them generally speaking unless they happen to coincide with what you’re trying to say. But even then I don’t really think it’s a good idea to use it like that, unless you’re taking the piss. I was kind of taking the piss when I invited them to the Friends of the Earth show that we did – it started off as a joke. I was thinking, ‘Well if he keeps banging on about like how he wants the Conservatives to be this environmental party, let’s try it out’ – and he fucking turns up! And we thought we should invite everyone else as well – so I wrote to Gordon Brown as well, quite funny.

Do you think there’s a danger of politicians using people like you as a PR stunt and then ignoring what you’re actually saying?

Yeah, but that’s exactly what they do with the NGOs as well. That’s what they do with everybody! I agree though, it’s better to keep ones distance.

What do you think of Bono and Bob Geldof – you don’t have to get personally into them – but that idea of engaging with leaders. I’ve read before that you’ve said you’re not the type of person that can engage in that because you are too weary of them just using you.

Too cynical as well. I mean that’s probably the difference really. Because whenever I talk to Bono about it, and I haven’t done for a long time, but the last conversation I had with him, he was like, ‘Well, I want to come from it from a positive point of view and work from within.’ And for me I can’t really see that I would be able to do that.

You’ve became politicised by the Iraq war, is that fair?

I’d dearly love to not be interested in it at all. It is ultimately a very sterile, barren, place to spend your time thinking of things. Even back in college, you get involved in it initially and then you see all the petty wrangling going on, and you think, ‘This is so pathetic’, and you want to get the fuck out really. Although it was quite a laugh – when I was at Exeter we managed to kick the Tories out of the Union. And they did it again last year, it seems to be this recurring theme, because there’s so many of them at Exeter.

[Laughs] We banned Jack Straw from our Union.

What one was that?

Leeds University.

Influence of Noam Chomsky

I had a really good friend of mine who went into politics behind the scenes. I used to go out with him all the time talking about it, but by the time I left college I was like, fucking forget it. And the thing that got me back into it was Noam Chomsky.

Really?

Well, I think it was a combination of what was happening to us at the time: we’d starting touring in America a lot, we were signed to this big corporate label, and touring America, and we’d had all this success and people were talking to us in a very peculiar way. We were spending a lot of time at the exposed end of the media, like almost being at the saturated side of it, you know, you go into the gym at the hotel and there you’d be on the MTV, it was just everywhere. And it was all a bit like, ‘What is this, what is going on here?’ We’d suddenly become part of this cultural emblem that’s being used all over the world, you know, along with Nirvana and all that.

And in the midst of that going home and Rachel had recorded this Chomsky thing, Manufacturing Consent, and I watched it when I got home. So I started reading Chomsky and started getting back into it really.

What is it about his work that appeals to you?

I don’t know really. What appeals to me the most is that he always has these caveats like, ‘Look if you don’t believe me, you go find out for yourselves’ - knowing that people probably won’t, they’ll take their judgements and whatever - but I think that’s a good thing.

I was really interested initially as well in his reference to anarchism and how that had been misrepresented. And obviously the foreign policy thing.

Would you call yourself an anarchist?

Well, no. I don’t think he would, would he really now?

I think he does – he calls himself a libertarian socialist.

Essentially as far as I can work out the logical conclusion of what he’s saying is that local communities can govern themselves. But I just always think of trying to rally a different cross-section of people into agreement. If you’ve ever been to a town council meeting, you’d be like, ‘You’re fucking kidding, aren’t you?’

So you’re not as optimistic as him. Would you say you have an optimistic view of human nature, because your songs are quite sad and melancholy, but yet you seem to retain some optimism about humanity?

I think it’s just about if you give people the correct information, if you let them see, if things are open – I’m still thinking of the anarchist thing in a way – if you are open about your proceedings and honest with people about your mistakes, then human nature will go along with what people do. There’s a general will for everyone to avoid suffering and to avoid trouble and actually get along with each other. I think a lot of the time politicians use schisms between people to get their own power which is terrifying.

I reading on the Deadairspace blog, Colin had put a link to Nick Cohen’s book which basically dedicates pages and pages to how Chomsky is a nutter. I was thinking that is quite weird.

Yeah we have many arguments about it.

I thought you might.

[Laughs] Yeah. It’s definitely a very, very sore point.

I looked on Nick Cohen’s website and it said, ‘This has been recommended by Radiohead!’

I was really furious about that. It was like, ‘Well, no, actually, I don’t necessarily agree with this book at all.’ But Colin has discovered the land of the blog. And I don’t trust blogs – unless you have the nerve to put it on paper and print and publish, you should be weary of what’s being said. I think people write what they write on blogs with the luxury of knowing it won’t have any affect and therefore it can be more polemical.

What’s happening – people like Nick Cohen, he’s disillusioned with the left. I’ve been disillusioned with the left for years. There’s this thing about the luxury of making judgments about foreign policy from the left-wing liberal perspective – that terrible word liberal.

It just strikes me as intellectual catfighting amongst themselves and I find it deeply offensive. And I don’t, by any means, take everything that Chomsky says literally at all, and that’s surely the entire point. I don’t see Nick Cohen putting at the end of his essays, ‘If you don’t believe me, read it for yourself’. You know, he’s a polemicist, very much like George Monbiot’s a polemicist, and I don’t necessarily believe everything that Monbiot writes, either.

Yeah – the thing with Monbiot is that he is polemical but he backs up what he says with rafts of facts. Nick Cohen makes sweeping generalisations without any evidence.

What you have there, as far as I’m concerned, is a man at the station of the disintegration of the Old Left, and the Old Left is lashing itself, which is like, fine let it kill itself stone dead.

I think that there is a point to be made about the luxury of demanding troops leave a country like Iraq – there’s an argument that says that’s irresponsible and you can argue that it’s very easy to take for granted the ability to have free speech in the West, which is the other big point. And it’s like, yes. But that actually doesn’t excuse Halliburton making billions of dollars from their contracts in there, it doesn’t excuse the fact that we went in there to protect our own interests. I mean, all this stuff is conveniently forgotten in this little catfight going on which I don’t give a fuck about.

Basically intellectuals being self-important.

Well, no, actually. I think what it is: what happens when you have a thing like Iraq, you have two types of intellectuals and commentators: you have the ones who essentially need to go along with it, and the ones who resist going along with it. And what’s happening within political commentators is what happened in Vietnam as well: you have people that can’t help being part of the status quo and there’s a general inertia – as within the rest of society – you go from the original anger at the idea of the war in Iraq to a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy of justifying it.

I guess it all went wrong when George Galloway turned up – that’s what George Monbiot says – he was at the original meeting and it went tits up after that and they should have kicked him out there and then.

Are you talking about the Respect Party?

Yeah. And Respect basically split the whole resistance to the war in Iraq in half and you’re in this very peculiar state where a large cross section of society was suddenly being highjacked by this prat for his own ends.

I know your dad has had trouble with this as well. You have this whole situation where actually I object to the war on these grounds but simply by saying I object to the war on these grounds I have to justify all these sad fucks. I’m not interested. I’m not part of the left in that way – I’ve never been part of the left in that way, and I’ve no interest in having mud slung at me just because of my resistance to this. And it’s deeply wrong to assume that my objections to the war in Iraq means I’m a liberal, it doesn’t mean that I’m part of this luxurious group of people serving their own old leftwing ends. You know, Fuck right off! That’s the constant row I’m having with the Colin.

The United States of America

You’ve spent a lot of time in America, what do you make of the country internally, not the foreign policy which you’ve criticised. I recently spent a year there and realised its people don’t really understand what their country does in the world.

Oh no. They have no idea. I think the Iraq thing has been interesting – the mainstream press took a long time to come around, but when they did come round it was a big thing. When they did start exposing it for what it was.

On a day to day basis, yeah, it’s a very isolated place in a lot of ways. But the upside of the US has always been for me that when they do find out about things they react a lot faster than people in this country, for example. They’re very animated, very quickly.

Do you prescribe to Chomsky’s propaganda model where the media squeezes out inconvenient truths? Have you made comments that haven’t been reported?

Oh it happens all the time. Watch Sky in the middle of the day, it’s like that times ten. There’s nothing. Although, occasionally if they think they can get some ratings out of it, they’ll pick up a story very fast, but they’ll pick it up and then they’ll drop it just at the point where it might go bang.

There isn’t really, in terms of television at least, there isn’t really a critical media, but in the press there is.

Back to the UK, Tony Blair’s reign is coming to an end. What have made of his time in power, you’ve been quite acerbic about it.

Yeah I have, I’m kind of sick of being acerbic about it now.

Do you think Gordon Brown will be any different?

Oh God help us. I mean, when people talk to me about Brown, I always start talking about the PFI thing, because that is a bomb waiting to go off right there. I don’t know if you read Private Eye, I’m not like one of those people, but they’ve been running all this stuff about PFI for ages, and Brown’s ability to make the money disappear. But recently there was an audit of the whole PFI thing which is happening now, but he’s managed to basically move all the money off the books, he’s just moved it all away, which is absolutely extraordinary.

But, you know, you can only keep that whole thing quiet for so long and someone will dig it up before the election. And that’s why they are talking about David Miliband, because they know that Brown has all these fucking ghosts in the closet.

What about David Cameron?

God help us! Maybe if they got rid of the one who thinks global warming isn’t happening – John Redwood – nutter! But interestingly they’re saying it’s going to be a hung parliament.

Labour might do a deal with the Lib Dems in that situation. With the charismatic Ming Campbell.

Yeah, but he’s great in debates. You wouldn’t want to go up against Ming Campbell in a debate — he would destroy you.

Going back to your music. Do you feel like you have a voice personally? Some sort of power?

No.

Some people would argue with that.

Yeah, I know. I recently had an argument with Jonathan Glazer about it – he did all our videos, well he did Karma Police and the other one, Street Spirit. We’ve kept in contact with him on and off over the years. This is my argument with him: I think there’s a danger of assuming that you have a voice in that way, but at the say time I can’t help commenting on things I feel strongly about. But I think that’s my prerogative as a member of the human race, rather than, I’m a star, and I’ve discovered this.

Do you think your political activism will continue into the future?

No, not necessarily. I don’t really see it as political activism, really. I can’t help responding to the world around me in a certain way, and I guess I’m fascinated about the huge chasm between how we see power and how power is actually used. And the extraordinary gap in our knowledge about what is really going on, generally speaking. The most obvious example I can think of is when we did the launch of the Big Ask thing, we managed to secure a room in Portcullis House – I think that was courtesy of Michael Meacher actually, bizarrely. So we were hanging around Portcullis House and I’d never been there before and I was standing in the lobby area, and it really is the Lobby Area, and everyone’s drinking coffee and there were lobbyists there, like all the fucking time, that’s what they do.

And how many of these are NGOs, and how many are paid corporate lobbyists. People don’t know this shit. Recently there’s been this thing about carbon emissions – the EU wanting to commit car companies to reduce carbon emissions.

But there’s been absolutely enormous lobbying of the EU by the German car manufacturers, because obviously they see the high end of the car market being their thing. And they do the normal thing where they threaten to move jobs to Malaysia. They say, ‘Ah well if you do this we’ll be forced to make this decision.’ Well, where’s your social responsibility? You’re a huge company, you make fuck loads of money, you’ve made sure that the public transport system disintegrates – you are part of the problem, yet you assume you have the moral right to override the general safety of our future for the future of your company.

And obviously it’s very naïve to assume they’d do anything else, I know. But if you’re an EU minister then you should be justifying to me why you’ve even talking to these people, because you serve us, not them. Yes, you can argue that the jobs might go, that’s called blackmail.

But these problems are going to get more acute. You say you’re not going to stay interested, but once you’ve seen it can you turn away?

No, absolutely, but I don’t necessarily see that as politics – although it is. If the left could actually stop tearing itself apart it would actually see that the manifestation of globalisation, the results of globalisation are these things that started to happen in the 1990s. It would be impossible for any self-respecting socialist-leaning person to not start to argue that there are downsides to the global marketplace. At the moment you’ve got a really interesting thing in France – you’ve for two leaders now running, one of them.

Royal, yeah.

Yeah, she’s very soft and saying, ‘I think we can work our way through this and make it okay with our reforms’, and the other guy is saying, ‘No we have to reform and that’s it, otherwise this country is going to disintegrate.’ And they’re both right. One of the most amazing thing about France is it’s managed to protect itself so much, but it can’t do it anymore – but why can’t it protect itself anymore? What’s wrong with that? But we get the arse of that with the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP).

But generally there is going to be a debate about globalisation, and it’s being brought on as well by the climate change issue. I’ve got a friend of a friend who has just bought this huge fishing company – well he’s not a friend, he’s an acquaintance rather – and he made a packet out of basically taking the processing of the fish away from the Scottish borders where it has always been for like a hundred years, and flying the fish when they come off the boat to Thailand for processing then flying it back. And he’s made millions out of it, because he can, because the freight’s really cheap. And with all this stuff, okay so all these people have lost jobs, nobody really wins out, the people in Thailand get paid fuck all, but you can stand and say you’re this brilliant entrepreneur, but you should be fucking locked up.

But humans have this tendency to self-destruction. Take global warming: the economic imperatives of how our system work means green issues don’t impinge even though we know we’re heading for a catastrophe.

Which is why, I guess, the realms of the political debate have to change. The best way I’ve heard it put is that there has to be another economic factor and that’s the ecological one. There needs to be a parallel economy which runs with, and how you make that work fuck knows how.

Do you think your children have made you more political?

Yeah, every night I wake up. I don’t often sleep through the night now because I wake up worrying about it, I should probably go and see someone about it.

What about music, do you see yourself doing that for the rest of your life?

Yeah, I don’t have any choice about that. I wish that…well, it’s sort of happening now, we’re sort of going through a transition period really, where we used to have a big contract and things worked a certain way, and that way that things used to work has basically almost dissolved. So working out how you put music out and all that stuff is a big issue now, and that affects how you see making music, it’s all very cloudy at the moment that whole thing, which is cool, you know, it’s quite exciting really because I still have this sort of old baggage about finishing things and then having to justify them for a year-and-a-half for all these Sunday paper column inches analysing what I’ve said in the words. Bollocks!

So the idea of somehow being able to get away from that whole world would be good.

Going solo

In terms of Eraser, the solo album, did you feel that, after being in a group, the pressure was more acute as what was written was solely about you?

I didn’t read any of it. I don’t read any of it now anyway. It happened really fast. The finishing of it was like, ‘Oh it’s done, better put it out then!’ And then I didn’t really think about it at all until the week it was out. I was like, ‘Oh shit!’ I mean I did do a few interviews but not a lot, and I was on tour with the band anyway, so it wasn’t stressful at all actually, it was really interesting.

I saw you in Berkeley when you were out there last summer.

Oh really?

Yeah, it was great.

The summer before that. I think.

No, last summer!

Was it?

Yeah.

We were in Berkeley last summer?

Yeah! You remember the open air one?

Oh yeah, that was with Dearhoof wasn’t it?

Yeah, they were pretty intense.

They were amazing.

How do you find touring and the adulation you get?

I don’t think we have adulation like that now, generally, I think, which is good.

I saw a lot of open-jawed kids.

I think that’s because they’re stoned.

Maybe. You’ve been in the spotlight for a lot of years, do you find that difficult?

Interesting. I haven’t thought about that before. But it would be if I lived in Primrose Hill. I don’t feel in the spotlight, every now and then the mole comes out of his hole, that’s the way I see it.

Did you enjoy touring?

I did but I actually wanted to be in the studio more at the time. really. But it was like a good way of getting us back together psychologically, to go on the road.

Can I ask about the new album?

Well, there’s not a lot to say really. We’ve got a vow of silence.

Okay. I’ll finish on your lyrics. Do you think they’ve got more indirect and oblique and strange?

See I don’t think they have, I think they were always a bit like that. I always thought Karma Police was pretty strange and very oblique; I thought Paranoid Android was pretty weird. You know, my biggest lyrical hero has always been Michael Stipe, so I think I’ve always been imitating that anyway.

What sort of cultural figures are you into?

Have you heard of that Cloud Atlas book? I thought that was fucking amazing.

Do you read poetry?

Yeah, T.S. Eliot. I’ve been reading it since school. I really enjoy reading him at the moment, I go to sit and have pints in the pub and read T.S. Eliot. I live in Oxford, that’s what you do. You’ve got to fit in, you know what I mean? But I gave up the roll-ups a long time ago.

I gave up two years ago as well.

So you’ve still got the urge presumably?

Yeah, horrible. It’s bad when I’m really stressed. I read the Allen Carr book though. You heard of that?

Is that the giving up smoking book?

Yeah, and he died recently of lung cancer.

Yeah, they say that if you smoke even just for a few years you are still at a big risk of getting cancer later. And when I smoked, I really fucking smoked. I used to break the filters off the Silk Cut because I couldn’t be bothered to roll up properly.

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You can pre-order The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire - out in June from Bloomsbury - here.