Radiohead have announced a new live album, ‘Hail to the Thief Live Recordings 2003-2009’. It is available digitally now, with a one-off physical pressing available to pre-order ahead of release on 31st October.
Drawn from shows in London, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, and Dublin between 2003 and 2009, the collection arrives as the group revisit and reassess their sixth studio album, ‘Hail To The Thief’. The release has been mixed by Ben Baptie and mastered by Matt Colton. To mark the announcement, Radiohead have shared a live video of ‘There, There’, filmed in Buenos Aires in March 2009.
“In the process of thinking of how to build arrangements for the Shakespeare Hamlet/Hail To The Thief theatre production, I asked to hear some archive live recordings of the songs,” Thom Yorke said. “I was shocked by the kind of energy behind the way we played. I barely recognised us, and it helped me find a way forward,” he added. “We decided to get these live recordings mixed and released (it would have been insane to keep them for ourselves). It has all been a very cathartic process. We very much hope you enjoy them.”
The project follows Yorke’s co-creation of Hamlet Hail to the Thief, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s play set to a deconstructed score built from reworked material from the 2003 album. Yorke also revealed that, despite apparent synchronicities, “Hamlet was not in our minds when we made the record.” “I don’t not subscribe to the synchronicity thing,” he told The Observer. “You know, the one about The Wizard of Oz and ‘Dark Side of the Moon’; you watch a movie, turn the sound down, put on another soundtrack and something is revealed. But, obviously, my initial reaction was, this is Hamlet, therefore it’s sacrosanct, it’s untouchable. You can’t. “But the idea didn’t go away. It planted a little seed in my head.”
Physical editions of ‘Hail to the Thief Live Recordings 2003-2009’ will be pressed in a limited-edition red colourway for independent stores, with a cyan variant available exclusively via Radiohead’s W.A.S.T.E. store.
The announcement arrives shortly after Radiohead opened ‘This Is What You Get’ at The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, an exhibition of artwork by Thom Yorke and longtime collaborator Stanley Donwood. Featuring over 180 objects, it includes original paintings later used for album covers, unpublished drawings, sketchbook lyrics, digital compositions, and etchings.
Outside Radiohead, Yorke has continued work with The Smile alongside Greenwood and Tom Skinner, toured solo across Asia and Oceania, and, with Mark Pritchard, announced a collaborative full-length, ‘Tall Tales’. Greenwood has also played live with Dudu Tassa, while earlier this year Radiohead shared a playlist of ‘The Bends’ B-sides and remixes to mark the album’s 30th anniversary, alongside an unseen live video from the era.
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