John: “Radiohead and ‘A Punchup at a Wedding’ from the new album Hail to the Thief, before that you heard ‘I will’. And ‘A Punchup at a Wedding’, uhm, it has a kind of Can-soul-groove to it, you mentioned Tago Mago and Can.”

Thom: “Woah, ok… Hah, I wish….”

John: “But I was kind of listening to it and I was thinking about the idea that Can were…”

Thom: “I’ve heard [it sounds like] “The meters”

John: “Yeah, well…”

Thom: “In our dream, it was “The meters”, only in our dreams, really…”

John: “Well, if Can were trying to imitate James Brown and his bands, and the way that they played.”

Thom: “Maybe. But this is about half the speed.”

John: “Right… Yeah? But not always.”

Thom: “Yeah, that’s true, no, you’re right…”

John: “Yeah… It has a nice kind of swing and groove to it, in a way that some other Radiohead stuff hasn’t, to date.”

Thom: “Yeah, it’s funny cause, we’d not really, we hadn’t actually really, you know, when we did… that was the first thing that we got together, when we got back together after six months. I think it’s quite interesting that, that was the first thing, ’cause it’s like, has got this like you know, basically a very loose swing to it, like you know, very, you could only, we, we. We as five people could only have come up with that after having a long break! (laughs) And now, it’s interesting, ’cause Nigel was like, in a way he sort of, it’s interesting that he sort of said ‘You’ve never really done anything like that before where you… where the whole thing was just based around a sort of, you know, baggy swagger thing’. Baggy is not the right word… Swagger, anyway.”

John: “Well it worked! It was a treat, it sounds great.”

Thom: “Thank you!”

A PUNCH-UP AT A WEDDING (NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO)
A bit of a departure – ‘Funky Radiohead’.
Thom: “Yeah, that’s kind of it. Bling-blong. It does its thing. It’s got a loose funk at times…”
Jonny: “It comes from the fact that Thom is playing rhythm piano for the first time on one of our records. I hesitate to use the ‘groove’ word…”
Thom: “You definitely should, man. Although there’s got to be a better one.”
Jonny: “Alright, it swings. It swings great.”
Thom: “The words are very much a case of ‘Shake a cup and let them come out’.”

That was a song where I was letting it happen. I mean, a lot of the lyrics for that song to me were born out of listening to Radio 4 an aweful lot, like every day, for 6 months – religiously. And just listening to what was happening, and just had this thing in my head about ‘this is just like a punch-up at a wedding, nobody knows what’s going on, it’s just a riot. And someone in the middle is being affected by this, and this is supposed to be the biggest day in their lives, and it’s being ruined’, or whatever. And it also came out of a… I mean, I basically don’t read anything that anybody writes now about us, at all. Cause I just can’t anymore. And the main reason for that was, that I happened upon, sort of by accident basically, a review of our Oxford gig [july 7th 2001], which was just like.. I mean, one of the biggest days in my life. Obviously for all of us. And this… whoever this person was, just tore it to shreds. And they couldn’t really think of how to tear us to shreds, really, so they just tore the audience to shreds. And just said basically ‘who are these people, bunch of students’, you know, ‘white middle class’, which was not the case at all, but what’s the point in arguing. But this person managed to totally and utterly ruin that day for me forever. And it really shouldn’t have done, and I should be bighead enough to just ignore it. And there was a lesson there, which I have I learned now. But I just didn’t understand why… how someone, just because they had access to a keyboard and a typewriter, could just totally write off an event, that meant an aweful lot to an aweful lot of people. And there’d been just no answering back, no nothing, that was it, the end of the story. And obviously that happens all the way through your career… And that was another impetus for the song, really. Because to me it was like… so many people were there and saw something completely different, but yet you’re the twat who gets to sort of write it all off. And it’s sort of… I don’t know, I should be used to it by now.

‘A Punch Up At A Wedding’ is the last song in the first half. It combines a slow handclap drumbeat with Thom playing repeated house chords on the piano. At seven minutes, it’s their longest new tune and ends with Thom screaming his lungs out.(…)

They hope to release the new LP, their sixth studio album, in March next year. There’s a discussion about the new songs. Since Thom didn’t introduce most of them onstage, people are curious about the titles. Have they really called a song ‘A Punch Up At A Wedding’? They have. Thom finds the fuss over the titles funny. “I should have handed out lyric sheets to the audience,” he says, which seems like such a terribly un-Radiohead thing to do (for a band who, as ‘artists’, hate the idea of giving anything away for fear it will spirit the ‘art’ itself into nothingness) that we assume it’s a joke.

I don’t know why you bother

nothing’s ever good enough for you

I was there, it wasn’t like that

black thunder clouds hanging over your head

don’t piss on our parade

don’t shred our big day

don’t ruin it for all concerned

in a drunken punch-up at a wedding, yeah

hypocrite opportunist

don’t infect me with your poison

a bully in a china shop

when I turn ’round you stay frozen to the spot

don’t piss on our parade

don’t shred our big day

don’t ruin it for all concerned

in a drunken punch-up at a wedding, yeah

Thom : « That was a song where I was letting it happen. I mean, a lot of the lyrics for that song to me were born out of listening to Radio 4 an aweful lot, like every day, for 6 months – religiously. And just listening to what was happening, and just had this thing in my head about ’this is just like a punch-up at a wedding, nobody knows what’s going on, it’s just a riot. And someone in the middle is being affected by this, and this is supposed to be the biggest day in their lives, and it’s being ruined’, or whatever. And it also came out of a… I mean, I basically don’t read anything that anybody writes now about us, at all. Cause I just can’t anymore. And the main reason for that was, that I happened upon, sort of by accident basically, a review of our Oxford gig [july 7th 2001], which was just like.. I mean, one of the biggest days in my life. Obviously for all of us. And this… whoever this person was, just tore it to shreds. And they couldn’t really think of how to tear us to shreds, really, so they just tore the audience to shreds. And just said basically ’who are these people, bunch of students’, you know, ’white middle class’, which was not the case at all, but what’s the point in arguing. But this person managed to totally and utterly ruin that day for me forever. And it really shouldn’t have done, and I should be bighead enough to just ignore it. And there was a lesson there, which I have I learned now. But I just didn’t understand why… how someone, just because they had access to a keyboard and a typewriter, could just totally write off an event, that meant an aweful lot to an aweful lot of people. And there’d been just no answering back, no nothing, that was it, the end of the story. And obviously that happens all the way through your career… And that was another impetus for the song, really. Because to me it was like… so many people were there and saw something completely different, but yet you’re the twat who gets to sort of write it all off. And it’s sort of… I don’t know, I should be used to it by now. »

Ed : « If you think of the links between songs, it’s kind of a cousin of… a dear old friend of ’Karma Police’. »

Jonny : « Yeah, I can see that. It’s sort of all in the rhythm of the piano, and it’s us doing our kind of slow grind kind of funk thing, I suppose. Some of the harmonies in it are quite unsettling as well. So again it’s a mixture of quite straight pop thing and all the wailing that Thom’s doing at the beginning and the end, it’s… you have to hear it, really. »