The Radiohead Story (2002-2004)

On the heels of the Amnesiac tour the band took new material on the road in Portugal and Spain during July and August 2002. Using this opportunity to test and finalise the songs before an audience of their fans, the band completed the album in only two weeks in a Los Angeles studio with Nigel Godrich, with a few additional recordings done later in Oxford. According to interviews, the band was seeking to lessen their perfectionist tendencies and find more of a “swaggering” live sound in the studio.

The band released their sixth album Hail to the Thief in June 2003. The record is considered as an attempt to distill the more electronic and experimental influences of the previous two albums, and fuse them with the guitar-based rock music of Radiohead’s early albums. At 14 tracks and nearly an hour long, the album is the band’s longest. Hail to the Thief garnered mainly positive reviews, yet some critics opined that the band were treading water rather than continuing the ‘genre-redefining’ trend that OK Computer had begun. At the Grammy Awards the band were nominated for Best Alternative Album - the band’s fifth straight nomination in that category - and Nigel received the Best Engineered Album award.

Hail to the Thief’s title was widely assumed in the media to be a comment on the controversial U.S. presidential election of 2000, but Thom Yorke denied this, saying the title had a wider meaning: “If the motivation for naming our album had been based solely on the [current] U.S. election, I’d find that to be pretty shallow.” The band has commented that they feared a backlash in America for the title and politics of the lyrics, as had recently befallen the Dixie Chicks when they spoke against President George W. Bush, and were pleasantly surprised when this did not occur.

However, Hail to the Thief did not have as large a commercial profile, debuting at number 3 on the US Billboard chart, though it was Radiohead’s fourth consecutive UK number 1 album. The lead single “There There” peaked at number 4 in the British charts, with subsequent singles “Go to Sleep” and “2+2=5″ charting at #12 and #15 respectively. But “There There” was a #1 hit in Canada, and returned the band to U.S. modern rock radio favour, after several years without a song on playlists.

After the release of Hail to the Thief, Radiohead embarked on an extensive international tour, which lasted about a year but was punctuated by long breaks; by this time, most members of Radiohead had families and children at home. To many the band appeared more relaxed than on earlier tours, laughing at meetings with the press, and dancing on stage. In June 2003 Radiohead again headlined the main (Pyramid) stage on the Saturday of the Glastonbury Festival.

In late 2003 Radiohead contributed original music to Split Sides, a project of Merce Cunningham’s dance company which also involved their former touring partners Sigur Rós. The band finished the Hail to the Thief tour in mid-2004 with a performance at the Coachella Festival.

After the tour, the band began writing and rehearsing for a new album in their Oxford based studio, then went on hiatus as Ed had had a son, Salvador, born in January 2004, and Colin was awaiting the birth of his firstborn Jesse. Free of any contractual obligations, Radiohead spent the remainder of 2004 resting and devoting themselves to solo projects, only recording together sporadically. They released the DVD version of their webcast television show, The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth Of All Time, in December 2004. Jonny and Thom collaborated with many other artists for the Band Aid 20 project, playing guitar and piano, respectively.