Radiohead – “Staircase” (Live From the Basement)

While watching Thom Yorke discuss his longtime obsession with Neil Young tonight (via a chat with the BBC from a few years back), I got to thinking about Radiohead’s surprise cover of After the Gold Rush cut “Tell Me Why” at the Hollywood Bowl in 2008, as well as Yorke’s multiple performances of the title track off that 1970 classic record, beginning with his 2002 Bridge School Benefit rendition mentioned in the Q&A. As it turns out, though, there are 3 more Young songs that Yorke has applied his similarly high-register vocal range to with Radiohead over the years, and, fortunately, listenable clips are readily available. So I can’t help but share multiple versions of one of my favorite bands of all time covering 5 timeless tunes by one of my favorite solo artists of all time below (alongside the aforementioned interview):

Happy Radiohead Day, everyone! While we’ve been letting The King of Limbs soak in and getting irrationally excited about a conspiracy theory or two, some links of note made a blip on the radar…

• Step aside, Who Is Arcade Fire?! meme. Dancing Thom [Yorke] arrived.
• Read an excellent (and rare!) interview with the Radio Dept., in which Johan Duncanson and Martin Larsson reveal that they’re not familiar with Coachella (where they’re performing at in April), future recording plans, and their lost collaboration with Jens Lekman.
• With help from Hipsters United, Popdust calculated that Billy Corgan’s claim that current Smashing Pumpkins bassist Nicole Fiorentino was on 1993’s Siamese Dream cover has a 0.33% “Truth Threshold.”
• Lykke Li is streaming another cut off her sophomore LP, Wounded Rhymes, “Love Out of Lust.”
• Enjoy new Ryan McGinley-shot Strokes promo pictures here or below.

Behold! Radiohead announced this morning that their eighth album, The King of Limbs, will arrive digitally on February 19, followed by an elaborate physical release — dubbed “the world’s first Newspaper Album” on their new Website — set for May.

MP3 copies of their In Rainbows follow-up are priced at $9 (WAV are $14), as Radiohead have moved on from their 2007 pay-what-you-want model, asking this time for $48 for the physical + digital bundle, which includes two 10” clear vinyl records, “many large sheets of artwork, 625 tiny pieces of artwork, and a full-colour piece of oxo-degradeable plastic to hold it all together.”

Check out the album cover above and head here to pre-order The King of Limbs.

Radiohead kicked off the year by raising over a half million dollars at their relatively low capacity Los Angeles concert for Haiti relief in the wake of the country’s catastrophic (7.0) earthquake. Now a group of intrepid fans have — once again — compiled footage shot by the audience in 2 high-quality formats for a Radiohead-approved concert film.

Free up a ton of hard drive space and download the entire show here. Meanwhile, the band and fans responsible ask that you consider making a donation to Oxfam in support of their laudable efforts and, of course, this important cause.

*Update: You can now watch a YouTube upload of the concert below:

A few weeks ago, Ed Norton provided some non-specific fun facts about Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke offering “tons and tons” of “sound experiments” to director John Curran for use in his new film, Stone, starring Norton, Robert De Niro, and Milla Jovovich. Great news, but details were scarce regarding Yorke and Greenwood’s compositions making their way into the final film, as well as the background of the film’s main musical contributor, mistakenly transcribed as “John O’Brien” by Variety. As it turns out, O’Brien is actually Jon Brion, the great multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer for the likes of Fiona Apple, Of Montreal, Spoon, and Kanye, among others. Norton told Examiner:

[Greenwood and Yorke] had files and files and files of stuff, like taking instruments and literally breaking them down into wave forms and sounds…and they flipped a bunch of stuff off to us, to just play with and then we worked with their engineer a bit, but then you needed themes too, so [Curran] went to Jon Brion, as we both really love his work, and it seemed in sync in many ways with what the Radiohead guys play with. [Brion] does a lot of atonal, arrhythmic stuff, so Jonny recorded some organs, [Brion] recorded some organs, [Curran] did some things and then two of the sound engineers came up with some textural stuff. And at the end of the day, John Curran really conducted it all, he just threw it all into a Cuisinart to create this sort of soundscape. It was fun, very experimental and very unusual.