It feels like the two ofyou should have made an album a long time ago.
I know that you did Beautiful People, which is a great song, a while ago.
But there was no contact at that point.
Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke’s ‘Tall Tales’ began at the height of the pandemic in 2020.Pierre Toussaint*
That came via the label.
Then [in 2012], Radiohead came to play Sydney, Australia.
Obviously it was a secret kind of thing.
Everything has to be kept secret with Radiohead.
And Clive said, The band might want to come to where youre playing tonight on their night off.
So they came and watched me and Steve Spacek play.
We did a set at this festival here under the name Africa HiTech.
The next night, we went for dinner with the whole band, me and my partner.
And he just said, Yeah, yeah, just send me whatever you want.
Im definitely up for doing something.
So I started sending him things, one of which became the single Beautiful People from myUnder the Sunalbum.
He tried three or four things, he was really busy at the time.
And then kept in contact from there on in really, via e-mail.
Just every now and again, wed have a little catch-up.
And what was the path to this album?
At the time I was thinking its probably going to be an album of various featured vocalists again.
And then we got into 2020 and of course the crazy pandemic hit.
So were all adjusting to that.
If youve got any music, send it through, because Im just stuck at home.
I thought, Id really like to write specifically for him.
And then I just thought, Its going to take me a while to write.
I should just send him a load of random things.
So I sent him a folder of, like, 20 ideas.
I now know at the time he was working on the first Smile record.
But theyre in lockdown.
He was in the writing stage of vocals, I think, for that album.
He got back to me that night and said, Can I hey do this one?
which ended up being Happy Days.
I just said, Yeah, whatever you want.
Maybe a few days later, he emailed me and said, Can I just do these 14?
I was like, Well, yeah, whatever you want to do, Im happy.
Just try it out.
A few months went by, and hed email me to touch base: Dont forget about me.
Im going to do this.
So I thought, A smart move would be to try and tidy these up a little bit.
And he just sent me two or three a day for a week.
I was quite nervous.
I had no idea what I was gonna be hearing.
Ive never really heard him sing in that register before.
I was like, These sound amazing.
And then he just kept sending me a couple each day.
Certain songs need to be slowed down, need to take stuff out.
He needed to try and sing it in different ways.
If it wasnt working, hed send it back to me.
Id try and do something.
So we focused on those.
We did that for quite a long time.
And then I sent him Stags Heads, which Id done quite recently, as an additional one.
And I sent him White Cliffs, which Id done a long time before.
I actually sent that to him when I did Beautiful People.
And I never got a response.
I thought, Well, he doesnt like it or he didnt get that email.
So I played that to a friend of mine and he said, You should send him that one.
So I sent it to him again.
And Thom said, Oh, this is amazing.
I definitely want to do this one.Youve done all sorts of music.
The challenge was how to get songs to work, which was an exciting challenge.
Because Ive done lots of tracks with vocalists before, but not a full album.
We were both trying to push each other.
He was definitely trying to do something different and I was trying to push the songs in different areas.
And so that was the main challenge through that period.
It was a long mission.
It was probably three years of work.
What was your initial reaction to that change in Radioheads sound?I really liked it.
I mean, you could hear it a little bit onOK Computeralready.
I didnt find it that surprising because I could hear aspects of it there.
Maybe quite early on Id heard Idioteque.
And I was really, really kind of pleasantly surprised.
Its a strong electronic song with electronic drums, with an amazing pad and amazing hook.
I was into indie music when I was youngerandelectronic music.
So it wasnt any shock to me.
I think it was actually a very good move.
I enjoyed those records each time they shifted around.
To me, that is what makes them a really interesting band.
You just gotta allow people to do what they wanna do.
But there were also fans of Warp stuff who felt a little encroached upon, I recall.
It was sort of a purist thing at the time.Yeah, I can imagine.
I bet you it was more fans than it was artists.
Because they proved themselves and they did it really well.
Its interesting, the kind of music heads that are into Radiohead.
Hip-hop people can check it and appreciate it.
Theyre probably quite happy that theyre inspired by it, I guess.
So he was a fan of Warp from all that period.
Because the story came out that they asked Warp to send them everything [beforeKid A].
And then they just got inspired by that.
So that probably was the case, but he was already a fan.
I know you and Thom did a lot of interesting stuff working with the vocal tracks.
Tell me about some of those treatments that you did.Its a mixture of him and me.
He also likes experimenting with his voice.
So he was running his vocals through his modular system.
He doesnt want it to be like the Smile stuff or other things hed done.
I think Bugging Out, I put his voice through a [rotating] Leslie speaker.
I was always wanting to try it and that song felt like the right one to do it on.
So I sent that to a friend of mine in the U.K. thats got a few different Leslie speakers.
And we recorded the vocal through those multiple times.
He did that vocal quite clean.
Take what Ive done and just mess it up.
I didnt want it to be all manipulated vocals just because its more of an electronic thing.
I was wary of that.
But he did a good range of things.
He was definitely having fun.
And also, from his perspective, imagine singing for that amount of time.
He needs to find new ways to be excited about using his voice and writing songs in different ways.
And also for Jonathan, who was doing the videos.
I wrote it, it was faster and it had drums in it.
And he tried singing it, he said, and hed take the drums out.
And they were taking up a lot of room.
He put a guide drum in to sing to it, a basic kick and snare drum.
But I couldnt find…
I mean drums is one of my favorite things to do and I couldnt hear anything on it.
And then I just put on some percussion.
Just kept adding to it and seeing whether I could get this to work.
Because it had something special and I needed to leave space for the vocal performance.
Its all about his delivery of that vocal.
And then he still wasnt happy with the vocal, so he changed it to first-person perspective.
So its like, Iam not the fool.
And then just got the right balance of performance on the song.
And when he sent me the demo, hed gonewiththe chords.
And I was like, He needs to go sadder on this, not go with the chords.
And then I tried to add some stuff to it to almost steer it.
He was just like, This is going to be really difficult to get to work.
It was onTop of the Pops, even.
Its a reggae song, beautiful vocal.
Theres a hopefulness and theres an optimistic feeling and we need to keep that feeling in this song.
And he was totally right.
A Fake in a Fakers World is a really strong, ominous album opener.
He added the drums and put effects on the drums.
He actually added quite a lot of stuff.
In Gangsters, theres a mad percussive synth riff that comes into that.
He likes having fun playing synthesizers and whatever he can.
The Men Who Dance in Stags Heads is very organic-sounding.
He had a couple of harmoniums because hes a fan of Ivor Cutler.
In the end, it sounded so good that I just kept the samples that he gave me.
I didnt need to re-record it.
So it was going to be a folk tune, really.
I didnt know what Thom was going to do on that song.
Thom went for the kind of Bob Dylan low-vocal thing, you know?
I was like, Wow, Ive never heard you do that before.
He never found a way of getting into the headspace.
Because he did it on that song and he did it on White Cliffs halfway through.
That was one of the first demos he sent me.
And I was like, Wow.
The vocal wasnt finished, and he said, Ive almost got it.
I just need to find a way of getting a little bit more.
I need to put a little bit more of my own thing in.
I think he then had another few goes and then got it.
I love that one.
Its one of my favorite ones on the album.
I mean, when he sent me what he did, I was like, This is nuts.
We had no idea how to get that to work.
It was really hard to get it to work.
Theres so many vocals and theyre so odd.
It sounds like a female well-spoken English Sixties kind of announcer for the intro parts.
And then its almost a bit punky in the middle.
And then he sings those really nice parts.
To do those kinds of things, you oughta be confident enough to do something that sounds ridiculous.
you better be not afraid to sound like youre doing absolute nonsense, really.
It was the hardest one to get right.
Cause I lost the vibe at one point.
Thats gonna split people.
He didnt feel like he could do the spoken-word parts himself.
I thought, Should we get people to do these voices instead of using a computer voice?
But it was in its early stages.
Trump was in at the end of the first term.
But its not just about that period.
I think he thought about it, but then he realized its not gonna work with the song.
So he just layered up his voice, ghosting the riffs.
It was a huge amount of vocals.
Its like 40 tracks of vocal layers, and modular effects layered.
And then theres a huge block chord that hes done.
So he layered up these three, four-part harmony block chords.
In the initial discussions, we were talking about vocal areas to try on this record.
And I sent him some of that stuff.
With This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice.
I could hear an alternate life for that song as a rock song.
Even though theres no guitars.
Which I guess stuck out to me when I started playing it.
I thought about putting guitars on and I think Thom was just against it.
I think in his head it was just like, I do lots of stuff with guitars.
We dont need guitars.
Were you together in person at any point during this process?No.
There was something where he did something and I loved it.
And I basically, whatever I wrote, I was basically saying, This is amazing.
But he translated it to, I didnt like it.
There was no nonsense all the way through.
We were fighting, you know, we both had different opinions.
Hes a very straight-up guy and we trusted each other straight away.
There was no bullshit going on, no angles, just straight up honest chat.
It would have been nice to be in the same room, but it was just circumstances.
You know, we couldnt leave Australia for two years.
And it was actually fine.
He could do his thing.
I could do my thing.
But other than that, it was fine.
And I was like, Yeah.
I came in for soundcheck and we ran through it a few times.
He said, Do you want to play the mod?
I was a bit nervous about doing it because Im not used to being onstage.
Im not in front of that amount of people.
Cause to start with, he said, I dont think we can do this live.
He was thinking about ways of possibly doing it.
Because I think whats put me off touring is, electronic stuffs quite hard to do live.
And I didnt want to stand there and just press a button.
I think it can be done, because I was just impressed how he translated those songs live.
I guess eventually hell tour that around the world and get people to see it.
It was really impressive what he did.
It was just him for two hours.
And then sometimes its just a sequencer running his palette of sounds that he had onstage.
It was all live.
There werent any computers involved.
And theres a lot of chance for things to go very wrong, which is kind of exciting.
Realistically, its at the mercy of his schedule.
And hes one of the most busy people Ive ever met.
Hes annoyingly productive and busy.
Ive never met anybody like him.
Hell do another Smile album and another one and Im still working on this one!
So Id be surprised if it could happen this year, but I have no idea.
At some point, I guess it may fit in somewhere, depending on what hes doing.
Maybe at some point itll work.
And then I dont often take huge parts out of songs.
But I guess once youre dealing with songs and vocals, then you have to.
The song is finding a way of making the song work and you have to throw things around sometimes.
And then I was like, What the hell have you done with my bass line?
And he was just like, I cant sing.
And it made total sense straight away.
I had to find another way of getting bass in that went along with what he did.
Because then it was obvious that the song worked being very sparse.
Ive just started to think about what Im going to do next.
Ive been writing some club stuff because I hadnt had a chance to do that.
Depending on how varied.
But its gonna be totally different from what Ive just done.
I wanted to ask about the Gangsters 8-bit sound.
Its aMattel Bee Gees [toy] synthesizer.
If you look it up.
I gotta tell you something insane.
I owned that as a small child.
And Kraftwerk used it to do Pocket Calculator, I think, definitely [at least] live.
They put some tin foil over it so it looked cooler.
Im pretty sure they used that to do the bleeps on Pocket Calculator or one of those songs.
So I knew that theyd used it and they just went looking for one, years ago.
I didnt really use the bleeps, just used the bass preset.
Its just one note.
So I put it into Melodyne and changed the key of it up and down.
So you have that eight-bit, lo-fi thing going on.
And I really hear it on this album.
I really like Fifties- and Sixties-sounding albums.
But I also dont want to make anything that just sounds straight retro.
So its not been compressed.
Ive not limited the music.
Ive left the dynamics in there.
Ive mixed it through a mixing desk.
I use some old gear, some new gear.
That was the mission, really.
Then Thom adding his thing changes it again.
And then Jonathan doing what he has done, he then balances it again.
He can pull things with the visual world into a different place.
Back in the Game, to me, the original song sounds like a John Carpenter soundtrack.
I put drums on it.
And it kind of went a little bit more New Wave.
Then it goes into the instrumental section.
The drums, I used a Sixties organ to do the drums.
Its not retro at all.
Theres certain songs I wasnt sure about.
When he did the video, then it actually finally made sense to me.
Theres a lot of that going on.
I guess Radiohead do the same.
Theyre trying to do the same thing, but in whatever different ways that they try and do it.
Everybodys enjoying doing their stuff.
If they feel like it should, its the right thing to do in the timing.
I guess its timing in all sorts of different things.
I think that the Smile project is a great project.
The last album had some really, really killer songs in it.
As strong as anything theyd ever done, I think.
I feel that way about your album.Cheers!
I just want the thing out.
I want people to hear the whole thing.
