Radiohead Dump on the Daily Mail

Published December 22, 2011 | By skrufff

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Radiohead have released previously unavailable track “The Daily Mail”, over a year after they first previewed the track at live shows.

The track features Thom Yorke performing cryptic lyrics about the notoriously vicious tabloid including ‘the lunatics have taken over the asylum, waiting on the rapture’ and ‘we’re here to keep your down, we’ll feed you to the hounds, To the Daily Mail, to get up, together’.

Details of the new release emerged two weeks after the hugely respected rock star lent his support to Occupy London, a movement the right wing and reactionary Mail have been smearing and trying to undermine since it formed. Mail; http://bit.ly/sQKthg )

“Because it’s in the banking system, because it’s in this great cathedral of glass and steel, we’re not allowed to say anything about it”, Thom told protestors at an Occupy London party he DJed at last week.

“If the British government is not prepared to really make amends to the British people by penalising the banks the way they should, then I think we should do it ourselves“, he added. (Youtube; http://bit.ly/uhGIdw )

The Mail itself has generally been neutral towards the Radiohead singer, apart from branding him a ‘misery (famed) for his abilities to shift vast quantities of CDs and campaign on various issues’ when he appeared on Q Magazine’s ‘most powerful person in the music business list’ (at 34).

They were also remarkably sympathetic about him in an interview with Friends of the Earth director Tony Juniper in 2009, in which the former charities chief hailed him for his willingness to lobby politicians about global warming.

“I used to dismiss all pop-star involvement in green campaigns as celebrities picking up on fashionable causes to win PR points,” Juniper told the Mail.

“But one man in particular changed my mind. In 2006, I found myself propping up a bar with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke, Tory leader David Cameron and David Miliband, who had just been appointed Environment Secretary,” he recalled.

The band themselves also supported causes including the student anti-capitalist protests in London earlier this year, linking to Laurie Penny’s article ‘Lies in London’ in which she lambasted mainstream media organizations as biased and cowed.

“The story currently being spun by the police, by parties in government, and by most of the press is that an otherwise successful mass demonstration was ruined by disgusting little vandals with hate in their hearts,” Ms Penny reported.

“That assessment is incorrect on nearly every level. Unfortunately, the handful of reporters, including myself, who dared to produce accounts of the day that run counter to the mainstream consensus, have been savagely attacked. We have been called thugs, liars and terrorists for having the temerity to put on record the police brutality that some of us observed and experienced in Trafalgar square.” (Radiohead.com: http://bit.ly/uagcp5 )

(The Daily Mail is available via www.radiohead.com ).