Jump to content

Intervista di Thom a Dazed & Confused

@li

By @li,
in Generale

 Share

Recommended Posts

@li No Alarms & No Surprises

@li

Posted
Posted

primi estratti dell'intervista di Dazed&Confused (e' lunga 10 pagine):

How well do you think you’ve aged?

My favourite quote of Tom Waits is, ‘I wish to age disgracefully.’ And I’m doing that; that’s me. I’m probably easier to deal with, but I wish to remain disgraceful, if at all possible. (laughs)

What about your image? Have you become more or less confident about your looks over the years?



I’m never confident about how I look, but I’m always into being shocking and visually interesting. It comes down to whether I’m comfortable or not. It takes me a long time to get my head around that. I was deeply uncomfortable with the ‘Lotus Flower’ video. I did the whole thing, it was such a crack, and then they showed me the rushes the next day, and I was like, ‘This ain’t going out.’ It was the like paparazzi footage of me naked or something. It was fucked up. But if it’s a risk, that’s probably a good thing.

Are you surprised that ‘Lotus Flower’ has now been watched over 20 million times on YouTube?



It’s a massive kick. That’s what everybody wants. If it’s something you’ve worked at and it goes over the edge like that, then that’s great. If you do a few duffers, it puts you off for a while.



Which are the duffers?



Oh, I couldn’t possibly say… (laughs).

Which (RH video) is your favourite?


KARMA POLICE is still my favourite, because when I watch it or see clips, it just reminds me how much of a laugh I had shooting that. It was brilliant. Especially because I’m totally wasted in it. 



What were you doing?



All sorts. (laughs)

You have such a diverse back catalogue now. Would you ever go back through your Radiohead archives and remix it all?



I could do, yeah. I love remixing, because you can take something people already identify with and claim it for something else. You can actually spend your whole life going back and sampling yourself - but that would be a bit like masturbation.

Do you find yourself constantly chasing a new buzz? Is that why AMOK is rooted in electronic music?



It’s just what I listen to. My missus says to me, ‘Why do you listen to dance music in the middle of the fucking day when there’s no one around?’ It’s just what I do. But to me, the Atoms album is not dancey enough.

Atoms for Peace is also the name of a song from THE ERASER, and both albums have similarly apocalyptic artwork created by Stanley Donwood. Is this a sequel?



Oh, it’s not like THE ERASER at all. But it’s not a band album either; it doesn’t sound like a band playing. You never hear musicians exploring that weird grey area, apart from LCD Soundsystem, who used to do it quite a lot. We wanted to go into the song realm, because it felt good to do that. If it were up to me, every track would be 10 minutes long.



Who reigns in your epic prog-tronica tendencies?



That’ll be Nigel and his intolerance for expanding.

(Actress): Do you stick to the OK COMPUTER regime of going to the gym three days a week?


I do a minimum of an hour’s yoga a day; usually an hour and a half. I run or do something else, most days. That’s as much a mental thing as anything else. Coming on and off tour, you have this mad adrenaline thing going on, so it’s a way of stopping the adrenaline crash that you get. It’s also good for depression, which is another one of the main reasons I do it. It stops me dropping. Meditation, yoga, and exercise has helped me more than anything else.

(The Gaslamp Killer): Which band or producer has been your biggest influence to date?


I would still say old Richard D James. He burns a heavy shadow. I used to have this big hang-up when I used to DJ at college, and the most exciting thing that used to happen was when a new Warp record came out. That’s what I used to DJ, and the soundsystem would come alive. Aphex opened up another world that didn’t involve my fucking electric guitar, and I was just so jealous of that whole crew. They were off on their own planet. I hated all the music that was around Radiohead at the time. It was completely fucking meaningless. I hated the Britpop thing and what was happening in America, but Aphex was totally beautiful. And he’s kind of my age, too. He’s a massive influence

(Gatekeeper): What is your astrological sign, and what effect does it have on your music-making?


Bloody hippies! (laughs) Okay, so I’m a Libran, a double-Libran, apparently, whatever that means. It affects my music very directly. The Libran is very conscious of those around him, and conscious of everyone going in the right way. So in one way, it’s very ideal, and in another way, not ideal at all because I’m very bad at making decisions. If it’s an important decision, no problem, but it’s all the little ones I have trouble with.

(Ryat): Who is your favourite female artist of all time?


I’ve got two - it’s still Björk and Polly. That’s my generation. I still obsess about WHITE CHALK, Polly’s album. Their records changed my life. Just everything about them. I couldn’t pick it apart, but they resonate for me on an emotional level.

(Flying Lotus): I’ve always been curious: what inspired PYRAMID SONG?


You’re obsessed! We were in Copenhagen; we just started recording the first session after OK COMPUTER, and we were all deeply dysfunctional, especially me. And there was an exhibition, they had a whole Egyptian section where they went on about religious beliefs and stuff, and they had these little boats ready to go wherever it is they were going to go. We were having a really shitty session, but we got in the morning afterwards, sat down, played these chords, and I just said, ‘That’s nice,’ made a note of them, and then wrote words, and it was very quick. We recorded the drumming a few months later, and it sounded like something from a Charlie Mingus record. It was just one of those weird things of, when you make a record, eventually you get to a flow, and that was just part of the flow. We were going through this bad period where nothing was going right, and this was a big breakthrough. But I never expected it to be such a popular single. When we play it live, people go nuts for it, and we’re like, ‘Really?’

Why do you think you’ve been portrayed as such a mercurial character over the years?


I’m not as volatile as I used to be, which is good, ‘cos I’d have burned out if I was. I can still be a nightmare, though.



(Caribou): I’m terrible at sitting still: I always want to move onto the next thing. How good are you at doing nothing?


I’m fucking useless. When we got back from tour, I gave myself a week off from the studio and that was it. That’s me maxing out on time off. I was cheating anyway, because I was actually working on my laptop on the quiet. I’m addicted to having a breakthrough on something. I’m just looking for that all the time, whether that’s a sound or a one-bar phrase you find in the middle that makes you go, ‘Yeah! That’s it!’ I go through phases of doing different types of stuff. At the moment, I’ve got all these nice little boxes for my studio, and I kind of half know how to use most of them, but really, I just enjoy writing words sitting at a piano. I tend to lose interest in the drum machine, but doing that is quite a novelty at the moment.

(Pearson Sound): Does DJing give you a greater interaction with your audience that’s harder to achieve when playing massive arena shows?


I started doing it as a way of winding down, Prince-style. It was also because I wanted to go out, but people always come up to me and tell me their bullshit. If I’m stood behind decks, they can’t. It’s a way of hanging out and not having to talk to people that want something from you. It’s also a way of trying tunes out, seeing which ones work, and changing the mix to react to that. I find that completely fascinating.

(Lapalux): Do you think listening to other music while you’re creating music is an inspiration or a hindrance?


I think you have to listen to music that’s so far away from what you’re doing that it almost cleanses you. When we were doing OK COMPUTER, we listened to a really extreme Coltrane track, the one that apparently sent Syd Barrett mad after he had done acid. It’s so intense, just 20 minutes of freeform jazz - it’s like taking a shower, there’s so many notes. It’s like, ‘Okay, I’m ready now.’ I was beaten to a pulp after listening to it. Anything coherent after that sounds wonderful. (laughs)

(Fatima al Qadiri): Was AMOK a compromise between your desire to make a dance record and the audience’s demand for your vocals? If so, is an instrumental dance record on the horizon?

Oh, God, no. It felt like the right thing to do. In fact, I think if you just had the instrumentals, it wouldn’t really amount to enough. I struggle with working on instrumental stuff because it’s not like my window. It’s not like my first skill. Maybe it is; I don’t know. Honestly, my laptop is full of it. I find it so hard to do remixes. I wonder if that’s because my weakness is having to have a vocal at the core of it, or whether I can’t think like that. Maybe ultimately I’m still a guitar strummer and I need three simple ideas, and I’m off. I hope not.

(Falty DL): How do you deal with writer’s block?


Don’t be so complicated. Slow down, keep it simple, do one thing. When I’ve had writer’s block, I’ve had to force myself to stop doing anything at all. It doesn’t matter how much you stop, things just keep goning in there, but you become less worried about the results because you’re not doing it day-to-day. So when you actually do it again, it’s more of a sense of release; you get the excitement and the sense of being able to do it as a privilege back. When you lose it, you realise how lucky you are that you can do this shit in the first place, and it’s really easy. My missus said to me, ‘Go back to drawing; put your energy where it won’t be judged for a little while,’ and it really worked. And sometimes when you think you’ve got writer’s block, it’s probably the best stuff you’ve ever done, but you can’t even hear because your brain isn’t in the right place.

Welcome home, Thom. How has your relationship with Oxford changed over the years?


Oxford doesn’t change much, to be honest. It’s got richer people here now, which is unfortunate. There’s less of the bonkers nutters. Mentally speaking, I think there’s a high proportion of people that are trapped in their own heads in this city. Definitely. My local is full of researchers in all different fields and sometimes I go there and eavesdrop. I love eavesdropping. But these people’s conversations are not normal. They’re all about nuclear physics and mathematics.

When you were last on the cover of Dazed, you talked about not recognising your reflection. Was that true?

I really didn’t. It was quite scary. It’s hard to explain; it was all part of this weird catatonic headspace I was in. I can’t do a lot of photographs because I become too aware of that projected image and I can’t handle it. It sounds really precious, but that’s just what I know and how I know it is.

There’s a quote that I thought would be a good way to finish. It’s from your friend Stanley Donwood talking about his arwork series Lost Angeles, from which the cover for AMOK is taken: ‘There is no future. There is only the present…no one seems to care much about the present.’ What do you care most about right now?


The present. Trying to stay in the present because that’s how not to get ill. Don’t overthink. Let it go.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Lacatus ANIMA

Lacatus

Posted
Posted

Molto bella, grazie ali.

Io invece dagli atoms, come già ho detto non mi aspetto nulla!

Dai thom fai il bravo ti dò questi mesi per divertiti e strafarti, ma poi mi torni al lavoro insieme a Giovannino Verdelegno eh, niente scherzi

TKOL-2

vedrete ragazzi, vedrete...

ma mi pare di capire che nell'intervista dice che attualmente ha messo da parte la drum machine e sta componendo parole per le canzoni accompagnandosi al piano... o ho capito male io?

Link to comment
Share on other sites
LiveAirSpace There There

LiveAirSpace

Posted
Posted

ma mi pare di capire che nell'intervista dice che attualmente ha messo da parte la drum machine e sta componendo parole per le canzoni accompagnandosi al piano... o ho capito male io?

non esattamente messa da parte. sta perdendo interesse!! (sottigliezze!)

Non lo so nemmeno io! :D

Comunque in questo stato mentale Thom può fare grandissime cose.

Se il disco degli Atoms sarà una cagata la colpa sarà solo di Godrich.

l'importante è avere le idee chiare!

se il disco degli Atomi sarà una cagata la colpa sarà solo di Godrich, solo perchè tu palesemente detesti Godrich!

comunque bell'intervista, bello Thom ... ma se tutto questo benessere psicofisico gli fa fare robe come What the eyeball (whatever!) ... io auspicherei un pochetto di depressione (alti e bassi come ce li abbiamo tutti!), un'altra gitarella triste in Cornovaglia a scrivere robe come EIIRP

OT: non capisco perchè Thom rilascia pochissime interviste .. e l'ha rilasciata a sta rivista che è inguardabile!! la sua foto con gli occhi ribaltati è la cosa più bella in 150 pag... cioè una rivista di moda .. mah!

Link to comment
Share on other sites
@li No Alarms & No Surprises

@li

Posted
  • Author
Posted

comunque dall'intervista mi pare emergere un particolare di non poco conto (e che io non davo cosi' per scontato). Alla fine anche AMOK sara' un disco "solista" di Thom (a livello compositivo). Gli altri, mi pare di capire, non vanno oltre il ruolo di "turnisti" che hanno avuto nel tour degli AFP.

Link to comment
Share on other sites
  • 2 years later...
Lacatus ANIMA

Lacatus

Posted
Posted

Io non ho capito una cosa...

Questo brano si intitolerebbe "You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry Unfinished Rmx", ma non c'entra assolutamente nulla con la You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry di Thom solo pubblicata come regalo natalizio lo scorso dicembre.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGUq5JnhqnE&feature=youtu.be&t=63

Del resto non si capisce se sia un pezzo di Thom solo, un pezzo degli Atoms For Peace o addirittura materiale messo da parte per l'Lp9.

Tra il vedere e il non vedere mi sa che lo metto nella lista dei pezzi non pubblicati...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

Loading...
×
 Share
Go to topic listing

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    No registered users viewing this page.

×
×
  • Create New...