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Radiohead to launch long-awaited album in Barcelona

Radiohead will play its long-awaited new album in June when the experimental rockers headline Primavera Sound in Barcelona, the festival announced on Thursday.

Published: 22 January 2016 08:58 CET
Radiohead to launch long-awaited album in Barcelona
Thom Yorke of Radiohead performing last July Photo: AFP

After years of speculation on Radiohead's recording plans, the band appeared to have broken the news in a characteristically unorthodox way – a line buried inside a press release.

Primavera Sound, in the announcement of its June 1-4 lineup, said in the second paragraph that the festival will include “the presentation of the new album by the British band Radiohead.”

The band made no further comment other than to link on social media to the announcement and to reveal plans to play two later festivals – Open Air St. Gallen in Switzerland and Nos Alive in Lisbon.

The new studio album would be Radiohead's ninth and the band's first since 2011's “King of the Limbs,” which plays wildly with traditional song structure by using as a base a loop of music the band had previously recorded.

Longtime critics of the music industry's commercial practices, Radiohead initially self-released “King of the Limbs” as an online download and did not put out singles.

Primavera Sound will also feature another acclaimed British rocker, PJ Harvey, who on Thursday separately – and more directly – announced a new album.

Entitled “The Hope Six Demolition Project,” the album will come out on April 15th and be her first album since 2011's “Let England Shake,” which won Britain's prestigious Mercury Prize.

Radiohead members hinted throughout 2015 that they were in the studio but revealed few concrete details.

On Christmas Day, Radiohead offered on its website an unreleased song that had been meant as the theme to the latest James Bond film, “Spectre,” but for unspecified reasons did not make the cut.

Frontman Thom Yorke in 2014 released a second solo album, “Tomorrow's Modern Boxes,” which was dominated by electronic rifts and explorations of the role of the individual in inudstrialized society.

Yorke in an experiment sold the album over BitTorrent, the file-sharing program more commonly associated with piracy.

Radiohead, which has sold more than 30 million albums, first emerged in the heyday of alternative rock in the early 1990s but started swapping traditional guitar-based song structure for more electronic and experimental sounds with 1997's influential album “OK Computer.”

Other highlights at Primavera Sound will include the Icelandic post-rockers Sigur Ros, who will be opening a limited European tour, and New York electronic band LCD Soundsystem who are reuniting in April for the Coachella
festival in California.

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CULTURE

New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday’s death

Fans of the late Johnny Hallyday, "the French Elvis Presley", will be able to commemorate the sixth anniversary of his death with two songs never released before.

Published: 17 November 2023 09:05 CET
New songs mark sixth anniversary of French star Johnny Hallyday's death

Hallyday, blessed with a powerful husky voice and seemingly boundless energy, died in December 2017, aged 74, of lung cancer after a long music and acting career.

After an estimated 110 million records sold during his lifetime – making him one of the world’s best-selling singers -Hallyday’s success has continued unabated beyond his death.

Almost half of his current listeners on Spotify are under the age of 35, according to the streaming service, and a posthumous greatest hits collection of “France’s favourite rock’n’roller”, whose real name was Jean-Philippe Leo
Smet, sold more than half a million copies.

The two new songs, Un cri (A cry) and Grave-moi le coeur (Engrave my heart), are featured on two albums published by different labels which also contain already-known hits in remastered or symphonic versions.

Un cri was written in 2017 by guitarist and producer Maxim Nucci – better known as Yodelice – who worked with Hallyday during the singer’s final years.

At the time Hallyday had just learned that his cancer had returned, and he “felt the need to make music outside the framework of an album,” Yodelice told reporters this week.

Hallyday recorded a demo version of the song, accompanied only by an acoustic blues guitar, but never brought it to full production.

Sensing the fans’ unbroken love for Hallyday, Yodelice decided to finish the job.

He separated the voice track from the guitar which he felt was too tame, and arranged a rockier, full-band accompaniment.

“It felt like I was playing with my buddy,” he said.

The second song, Grave-moi le coeur, is to be published in December under the artistic responsibility of another of the singer’s close collaborators, the arranger Yvan Cassar.

Hallyday recorded the song – a French version of Elvis’s Love Me Tender – with a view to performing it at a 1996 show in Las Vegas.

But in the end he did not play it live, opting instead for the original English-language version, and did not include it in any album.

“This may sound crazy, but the song was on a rehearsal tape that had never been digitalised,” Cassar told AFP.

The new songs are unlikely to be the last of new Hallyday tunes to delight fans, a source with knowledge of his work said. “There’s still a huge mass of recordings out there spanning his whole career,” the source said.

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