If you ever wanted to get your hands on 18 hours of previously unreleased OK Computer-era Radiohead music taken from Thom Yorke’s “minidisk archive” (?), you have some weird hackers to thank. The band has released on Bandcamp exactly what I’ve just described, supposedly after being threatened with blackmail.
[jwplayer gvkTjsCy]
In a post to social media, guitarist Jonny Greenwood said that the archive was “reportedly” (his words) hacked last week, with the hackers demanding a $USD150,000 ransom in exchange for not releasing it. According to Greenwood, the band said ‘fuck it’ and opted to get ahead of it: “So instead of complaining – much – or ignoring it, we’re releasing all 18 hours on Bandcamp in aid of Extinction Rebellion.”
The music will be available for 18 days for £18 (about $32), will all proceeds (as Greenwood mentioned) going to the organisation Extinction Rebellion, a climate action activist group that “uses non-violent civil disobedience to achieve radical change in order to minimise the risk of human extinction and ecological collapse“.
Greenwood seemed pretty ambivalent about the release:
Never intended for public consumption (though some clips did reach the cassette in the OK Computer reissue) it’s only tangentially interesting. And very, very long. Not a phone download. Rainy out, isn’t it though?
Thom Yorke, writing in the description on Bandcamp, seemed equally as enthused:
we’ve been hacked
my archived mini discs from 1995-1998(?)
it’s not v interesting
there’s a lot of it…
as it’s out there
it may as well be out there
until we all get bored
and move on
There certainly is a lot of it, with the download comprising 18 unnamed tracks all about an hour long each. If this sounds exactly like the sort of thing that tickles your fancy and you would absolutely love to give money to an organisation fighting climate change, you can find the Bandcamp right here.
