Ask Thom Yorke, and He Will Answer (If You Are a Famous Electronic Producer)

Unfortunately the headline doesn’t relate to the thousands of emails and postcards that I have been sending to Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. As Thom prepares to release the Atoms for Peace album, he is answering questions that electronic producers such as Flying Lotus, The Gaslamp Killer, and FaltyDL ask him.

The answers will run in the February issue of Dazed & Confused, but you can read some of them now on Dazed Digital. Radiohead fans might know the answer to this first question, but Flying Lotus asks about the lyrics behind Pyramid Song.

FLYING LOTUS: I’ve always been curious, what inspired ‘Pyramid Song’?

Thom Yorke: 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 figures in 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 it 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?’

This seems like the perfect way for me to somehow fit in the cool video for Pyramid Song. Check it out below.

Radiohead – Pyramid Song