New York Times have an interview online with Thom Yorke. Thom talks about the current Radiohead situation and of course The Eraser. The story is available for subscribers only. Here are some bits and pieces.

“We lost all momentum and it’s very, very difficult to get momentum back,” Mr. Yorke says. “When I say momentum, I don’t just mean the physically working everyday, I mean just hanging out and playing each other music and swapping ideas and stuff. It’s something that you take for granted until it’s gone. And then you’re like: ‘What’s wrong? There’s something wrong here.’”

As he had between “OK Computer” and “Kid A,” Mr. Yorke plunged toward depression. “I lost my confidence in all of it, I mean for about a year,” he says, and then dismisses the topic. “I used to bore my friends stupid in the pub.”

“There was a lot of me trying to pick myself up off the floor,” he says. “Because I really sort of dropped — what’s the word? sunk — dropped down and went into this big lull and couldn’t do anything. There’s a lot of internal monologue stuff going on. But it’s never literally. What ends up in the song tends to be what the song wants to have, rather than ‘I’m going to put this amount of garbage from my life into this particular song.’ “

Radiohead has been one of the holdouts against having their music sold on iTunes, Apple’s online music store, because, Mr. Yorke says, “the record companies basically don’t want to pay the artists at all for the downloading.” Without a contract, it can decide exactly how it wants to sell its recordings, which has left the band with “too many variables,” he adds.

“We were having endless debates, spending entire afternoons talking about, ‘Well, if we do something, how do we put it out?’ ” he recalls. “It just became this endless and pointless discussion. Because in our dreams, it would be really nice to just let off this enormous stink bomb in the industry.”

Eventually the band simply decided to postpone any decision about recordings, although it has decided to own its recordings and license them for distribution rather than signing a standard recording contract.

“When we have something,” he says with a shrug, “then we’ll find whatever seems the most appropriate way to put it out.”

Backstage after the show Mr. O’Brien, Radiohead’s other guitarist, says happily that the songs are “morphing rapidly” as they are played each night. Some might even be considered finished. But there is, for the moment, no album in sight, just a band that will let the music business wait until its songs are ready. “All we have to do,” Mr. O’Brien says, “is record them.”

Radiohead news on this day..

• Radiohead live at the Roskilde Festival – 2008
• ‘In Rainbows’ available as free stream at Last.fm – 2008
• I was born for your magazine – 2006
• Radiohead.org moved to Radiohead servers – 2005
• Radiohead on MTV Netherlands tonight – 2005
• DirecTV update – 2003
• Win Radiohead tickets – 2003
• More stories on At Ease sponsorship – 2003
• NME at Glastonbury – 2003
• Radiohead on MTV Poland – 2003