Thom Yorke to start the week. Not only in solo session, but in conversation with Mary Ann Hobbs at BBC 6 Music, recorded at Maida Vale studios on October 15, 2018.
As a rule, I tend to edit out the conversational bits, letting you concentrate on the music rather than the promotion. But in the case of Thom Yorke, he’s discussing the process and the transformation he underwent while working on his first-ever soundtrack score for the 1977 Dario Argento horror classic Suspiria, being remade in 2018 by Luca Guadagnino, who came into prominence with 2017’s Call Me By Your Name.
The interesting irony here is that, the 1977 version featured a soundtrack composed and performed by the Italian Prog Band Goblin, who issued an album of the score. The music was a collaboration between Argento and Goblin, and the band had subsequently worked on several Argento films since.
In this case, the collaboration is between Thom Yorke and Luca Guadagnino. Thom Yorke had never recorded the soundtrack for a film until this one. While Radiohead’s music has popped up in movies before — OK Computer’s “Exit Music (For a Film)” was famously recorded for Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet in 1996 — and the group’s guitarist Jonny Greenwood has been celebrated for his film score work for Paul Thomas Anderson, Yorke has been more reluctant to commit himself to a larger film project. He told the BBC that he was offered the chance to score David Fincher’s Fight Club, but was simply too exhausted from recording OK Computer to commit. “They sent me the script and Ed and Brad Pitt wrote to me and said, ‘We really think you should do this,'” he recalled in the interview. “I went ‘Nah, I can’t.’ I couldn’t. I wouldn’t have been able to do it then, but every time I see the film I go ‘Oh…'”
In this session and conversation with Mary Anne Hobbs, Yorke talks about the process he went through and the discoveries he made along the way – traveling in uncharted territory, as it were. The soundtrack has been given a lot of positive reaction and Suspiria has been doing very well in limited release.
If you aren’t familiar with either, Yorke performs in session some music from the film – just enough to get you curious for more.
Have a listen.
