Radiohead‘s hiatus definitely hasn’t kept Thom Yorke out of the studio — he’s released three great albums with the Smile, and earlier this month, he dropped the excellent Tall Tales, a long-in-the-works collaboration with veteran electronic producer Mark Pritchard.
In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Pritchard breaks down the long journey of creating Tall Tales, with Yorke which is accompanied by a dizzying “visual world” created by artist Jonathan Zawada. To hear the whole episode, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above. Here are some highlights from the discussion:
The collaboration began when Radiohead played Sydney, Australia over a decade ago. “We went for dinner with the whole band,” Pritchard says “And in that conversation, I said, ‘Would you be up for doing something if I sent you some music at some point?’ And he just said, ‘Yeah, yeah, just send me whatever you want. I’m definitely up for doing something.’”
The pandemic lockdown provided the perfect creative opportunity when Yorke reached out in 2020. “A few months into the pandemic,” Pritchard recalls, “Thom emailed me and just said, ‘I hope you’re well, it’s all a bit mad, I’m locked away at home. If you’ve got any music, send it through, because I’m just stuck at home. Can’t go out.’ So I sent him a folder of, like, 20 ideas. He got back to me that night and said, ‘Can I please do this one?’ Maybe a few days later, he emailed me and said, ‘Can I just do these 14?’”
Yorke experimented with entirely new vocal approaches, including a Bob Dylan-inspired low register. “‘Men Who Dance in Stags’ Heads’ was one of the first demos he sent me,” Pritchard says. “Thom went for the kind of Bob Dylan low-vocal thing, you know? I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve never heard you do that before.’ And he told me that he’d always wanted to do that and he never found a way of doing it. He found a little trick where he found if he vari-speeded the audio, it allowed him to get into character a bit more to deliver the vocal in that register.”
Yorke sent Pritchard an unexpected musical reference to capture the right feeling for “The Spirit” — a 1979 reggae hit. “He actually sent me a song by Janet Kay called ‘Silly Games,’ which charted in the U.K.,” Pritchard says. “It was on Top of the Pops, even. It’s a reggae song, beautiful vocal. And he just said, ‘This song is nothing like this reggae song, but there’s a feeling in that song and in a lot of the music from that era. There’s a hopefulness and there’s an optimistic feeling and we need to keep that feeling in this song.’ And as soon as he sent it to me, I just went, ‘OK, now I get it.’”
The most challenging track was “Happy Days,” which features Yorke’s wildest vocal experiments. “Thom did the wildest vocals. I mean, when he sent me what he did, I was like, ‘This is nuts.’ We had no idea how to get that to work,” Pritchard says. “It sounds like a female well-spoken English Sixties kind of announcer for the intro parts. And then it’s almost a bit punky in the middle. To do those kinds of things, you need to be confident enough to do something that sounds ridiculous.”
Pritchard used unconventional instruments, including a Seventies Mattel Bee Gees toy synthesizer on “Gangsters.” “It’s got like maybe one octave and you’ve got these three bass presets,” Pritchard says. “And Kraftwerk used it to do ‘Pocket Calculator,’ I think, definitely live. They put some tin foil over it so it looked cooler,” he says “I didn’t really use the bleeps, just used the bass preset. It’s just one note. So I put it into Melodyne and changed the key of it up and down.”
The creative process required constant negotiation and compromise between the two artists. “There was no nonsense all the way through,” Pritchard says. “We were fighting, you know, we both had different opinions. Sometimes he pushed something, sometimes he was right, sometimes I was right, but it was always very much about ‘How are we going to get this to work and for the better good of everything?’ He’s a very straight-up guy and we trusted each other straight away.”
Pritchard is open to performing the material live, despite his nervousness about being onstage. When Yorke invited him to perform during his recent solo tour, Pritchard says, “I was a bit nervous about doing it because I’m not used to being onstage… After seeing how he did it and how much range of things he could do live, I told him, ‘If you are up for doing something, I’m up for doing it.’ I think it can be done.”
Yorke never spilled any details about the current state of Radiohead. “He definitely does not talk about it to me, because I guess they have to keep it on lockdown,” Pritchard says. “But I mean, they got together last year, they played together. So that’s interesting. If they’d all fallen out or anything, that wouldn’t have happened… I kind of feel like that will happen if it happens. If they feel like it should, if it’s the right thing to do in the timing.”
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