Not long ago, Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood were joined by the USC Marching Band for a performance of In Rainbows opener “15 Step” at the Grammy Awards. And it was awesome. Well, the USC band, which has collaborated with Andre 3000 and performed other unlikely covers for unsuspecting football stadium crowds, unveiled a revamped medley of “15 Step” last week, complete with Yorke’s vocal freak out melodies, and a killer intro/outro of (personal favorite Radiohead track) OK Computer’s “Paranoid Android,” complete with “rain down on me” breakdown and Jonny Greenwood’s guitar freak out.

Watch the USC Marching Band’s home opener Radiohead medley below:

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Ed O’brien did an hour-long interview with Dave Fanning for Sky TV recently, discussing the struggles within the band as they recorded their seven LPs, the In Rainbows release scheme, and their uncertain future plans (a “mid-seventies dance track”?). The whole Q&A is fascinating, but isn’t online yet, so here’s one of my favorite parts:

“The Bends was our response to Britpop, completely, and OK Computer was our response to hanging out with R.E.M. on tour,” Yorke said, adding that Kid A and Amnesiac were products of his anti-guitar obsession.

O’Brien then interjected that Hail to the Thief was the band’s attempt at making a record “where we all got on and it was harmonious. The problem with that record I think we feel, or me personally and others as well, was it wasn’t edited that well.”

“No, we didn’t spend enough time on it,” Yorke added.

“So you get to a stage where everybody gets on fine, but then you have to edit it and that’s when disagreement comes,” O’Brien continued, adding moments later, “There are too many songs on the record.”

There’s so much talk these days about Radiohead as an infallible band that this whole interview was quite refreshing, in that it reveals how much insecurity and infighting the band struggles with to keep the bar set so high. I’ll update when there’s a full vid, but watch an excerpt here for now.

Every time I try to write a Radiohead news post today, another bit comes across my screen, so let’s drop some info in one fell swoop, shall we?

First off, we’re grateful to our buddy Brock Thiessen over at Exclaim, who gave us a helpful heads-up on his scoop that Thom Yorke will release a limited 12” solo single for the songs “Apart By Horses” and “The Hollow Earth” later this month. We were the second site on the Internet to report on the story and many followed suit, adding a question mark to the title. Well, drop those ?s, folks, ‘cause Thom Yorke confirmed the news at Dead Air Space this morning and you can pre-order your copy (digital download included) here.

Also, Sasha Frere-Jones interviewed Jonny Greenwood in the second installment of his “Dithering” series in The New Yorker. Greenwood’s opinions on MP3s, FLACs, and “thirty-something men who lurk in hi-fi shops” are predictably fascinating. Not only is he a fan of the compressed audio file format, but Greenwood even asserts that they have a “helpful crunchiness.” I’ve got a whole rant about audio quality, live music, and the Tascam 246 rarin’ to go, but I’ll save that sort of madness for the weekend. Check out the interview thataway.

Now let’s get back to Thom Yorke: according to Billboard (via The Daily Swarm), Yorke is planning a possible string of live dates for later this year and they are… drum roll… “potentially his first with a band other than Radiohead.” That’s cool, but if he replaces Jonny with Dave Navarro, I may have to only cover Thom Yorke news every other day.

Those are three names you never thought you’d see together, no? The former U.N. Secretary-General and X-Files star will be participating in a panel discussion followed by a performance by the Radiohead frontman at the U.S. premiere of The Age of Stupid, an eco docudrama, reports Paste. The whole event will be filmed live from New York.

The official website describes the film as “the new four-year epic from McLibel director Franny Armstrong. Oscar-nominated Pete Postlethwaite stars as a man living alone in the devastated world of 2055, looking at old footage from 2008 and asking: why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?” The movie’s followed by the aforementioned panel with Annan and Anderson, among scientific and other political types with a couple other celebrities thrown in there too. Then Yorke’s acoustic rendition of the film’s title track.

Yorke seems to be on an ecological bent lately: first “The Hollow Earth,” then this movie. Hey, I’m not complaining, as long as I get to see Scully grill Annan on just what the U.N. knew about those alien lifeforms.

The Age of Stupid Live from New York hits 444 theatres nationwide on September 21. Check out Fathom Events for tickets in your area.

Just when we thought a week could pass without Radiohead shaking up the music news world via intentional song leaks and EP rumors, information about an actual physical release next month has been uncovered. Exclaim’s Brock Thiessen made contact with a source at Sonic Unyon distributors who confirmed a limited 12-inch of two new Thom Yorke songs, “Apart By Horses” and “The Hollow Earth,” to be released on September 22.

The release, by ATO’s TBD Records (Exclaim points out that this is the same label that put out the In Rainbows’ CD release), is limited to only 4,000 copies in North America, 4,000 in Europe, and 300 in Canada.

The most likely explanation for all this is that one or both of these new Yorke tunes are his contribution to the forthcoming New Moon soundtrack. After all, “The Hollow Earth” does sound a bit vampire-y, does it not?

After a long weekend of waiting for a rumored new EP from Radiohead today, fans were likely a bit disappointed to only get a free download of the single “These Are My Twisted Words,” which leaked on the Internet last week and started all this EP speculation in the first place. In a post on Radiohead’s official site, Jonny Greenwood posted the news this morning:

So here’s a new song, called ‘These Are My Twisted Words’.

We’ve been recording for a while, and this was one of the first we finished.
We’re pretty proud of it.

There’s other stuff in various states of completion, but this is one we’ve been practicing, and which we’ll probably play at this summer’s concerts. Hope you like it.

Download the audio here or torrent here.

On one hand, this does put an end to the speculation that the leaked track is Thom Yorke’s contribution to the New Moon soundtrack and it does confirm that the song to be a new tune from the band, but perhaps Radiohead’s “surprise” this time around was simply that there were no surprises.

Remember in that Will Smith blockbuster Independence Day when Jeff Goldblum’s character discovers a secret alien algorithm counting down the seconds until the total destruction of the human race? Well, when it comes to music news, last night’s mysterious Radiohead leak took over the airwaves about as fast as a spaceship hovering over the White House did in that film and so have similar conspiracy theories. Let’s take a look at what’s surfaced thus far and find out if we need to warn the president.

The popular theory of the moment is that Radiohead are unveiling a new EP called Wall of Ice. This idea stems from analysis of the leaked “These Are My Twisted Words” MP3 file information and accompanied ASCII text file. The MP3’s title, “01-radiohead-these_are_my_twisted_words-(advance)-2009-woi.mp3,” suggests the track is part of an album coming out this year and the “woi” is allegedly explained in the ASCII’s cryptic poem, which contains multiple references to a “wall of ice.” Not to mention, the file says that the release date is on this coming Monday.

As CNET’s Harrison Hoffman points out in his analysis of this theory, there is also a popular anti-RIAA cartoon (seen here), which could be providing inspiration for the possible EP’s title. And that leads us to another theory:

If Radiohead are slowly rolling out songs for a new release, is it all just to spite EMI’s recently announced Kid A, Hail to the Thief, and Amnesiac reissues? Take a look at the cartoon’s caption and decide for yourself:

Dear Sony, Microsoft, the MPAA, the RIAA, and Apple: Let’s make a deal. You stop trying to tell me, where, when, and how I play my movies and music, and I won’t crush your homes under my inexorably advancing wall of ice.