In a recent interview with Rolling Stone, Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich talked about Atoms for Peace, EDM, and Radiohead. A hilarious highlight: Thom Yorke reveals that he has no idea who Bruno Mars is.
On Bruno Mars:
You’ve booked some big venues on this tour, like the Barclays Center in Brooklyn. Is that exciting or a little scary?
YORKE: There are some. But nothing too big. The Roundhouse [in London, where Atoms will play in July] is quite small. That will be fun. I know it sounds stupid, but it’s a new band, you know? Even though we did go in at Number Two.
GODRICH: Bruno Mars had a special on Amazon. That’s why.
YORKE: Yeah, Bruno Mars. Who the fuck is Bruno Mars? Sorry. I’ll get slandered now.
On Los Angeles:
YORKE: Actually, that is quite an important bit of it. Setting up in L.A., rehearsing in L.A., it’s nice, it’s sunny. We’ve got loads of friends there. We hang out. No one’s, like, “Oh, really? Have I got to go to work?” It’s, like, “Yeah! Fucking wicked!” It’s a bit like a holiday. I hope it carries on like that. My fear is it suddenly becomes work, because that hasn’t happened yet.
Nigel, on going from producer to performer:
GODRICH: I decided pretty early on that I liked being behind closed doors and sort of in the laboratory in the middle of the night and able to fuck things up and try things. That’s me. And that still is what I love to do. I’m not a natural performer. But it is fun to go out and confront the people who listen to things that you do, you know? The biggest shock of your life is when you first make a record and go to a show and then people start singing the words. Because it occurs to you that they’ve listened to it!
On DJ culture:
YORKE: I have to say, I don’t like a lot of the DJ culture that goes around it. I don’t like this sort of, get paid a lot of money and the DJ comes and he just fucking does his set. Which is fine, ’cause he knows it works and he’s worked hard at it – but sometimes, you’re like, “Really? What, really?” I mean, my favorite DJ, if you’re just talking about a performer, is Gaslamp Killer. I think he’s fucking amazing, because he’ll just switch styles and he just doesn’t care. When I was in Australia, Mark Pritchard was talking about how for a lot of DJs, it’s their main source of income, so they’ll do what works, ’cause otherwise they don’t get booked. So they don’t take risks. But he was talking about how, like, in the Panorama Bar in Berlin, for example, and in Plastic People when it first started in London, and in Low End Theory [in L.A.], people would come in and play what the fuck they wanted, and they would switch styles, and that’s the whole point!
