Despite being on a break, Radiohead has lately not been far from its Oxford, England-based studio.
“I was in the Radiohead studio just a couple of hours ago,” guitarist Jonny Greenwood told Billboard.com Monday.
“Drummer Phil Selway was there drumming and recording and lead singer Thom Yorke has been in and out. We don’t take time off very well. We’re enjoying it still, so why just go home and do nothing?”
Beyond an eight-date tour of Australia and Japan that wraps April 27 in Melbourne and a heavily rumored appearance a few days later at the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio, Calif., the group has no concrete plans on the horizon, according to Greenwood.
“I guess we’re just going to record and work,” he said. “We don’t plan so far ahead anymore.” It is unclear if the band considers the work it is doing in the studio as grist for the follow-up to last year’s “Hail to the Thief,” which debuted at No. 2 on The Billboard 200 and has sold 822,600 copies in the U.S., according to Nielsen SoundScan.
One piece of music that won’t be hitting the marketplace is the live soundtrack Radiohead provided in October for the world premiere of Merce Cunningham’s “Split Sides” at the Brooklyn (N.Y.) Academy of Music. The piece is not scheduled to be performed again in 2004.
“It’s just for the dancing and that’s it,” Greenwood says of the music. “It was important to us and we took it seriously. It was a privilege. What a man! Cunningham is inspiring. We went to his apartment in New York and he was demonstrating how he used a laptop to do the choreography, and he’s in his 80s. He sat there using a Macintosh G4. Just to have not given up and keep changing is inspiring.”
Greenwood’s score for the film “Bodysong” will be released Feb. 24 in North America via Capitol.