Before I start this post, I’d like to say how proud I am of my blog! It passed 4000 views on Friday and Itching For More was featured in Rock Paper Shotgun’s Sunday Papers today!

It was very tempting to leave this entire post blank.

It has been over five years since Radiohead released their divisive eighth studio album, The King Of Limbs. Since then we’ve seen numerous solo projects from every member of the band, art projects, but no ninth album. However, as 2015 has come and gone, and 2016 progresses, Radiohead have begun to slowly tease us with tiny tidbits of news about the recording of it. Rumours of a video, claims that it is their best work yet, a canned James Bond theme released, it’s all been very exciting. Nothing, however, has been as significant in the run up to LP9 as this weekend.

It began yesterday, when people began to receive leaflets reading

SING THE SONG OF SIXPENCE THAT GOES BURN THE WITCH WE KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE

Burn the witch, famously being a heavily teased but never fully released/played track. As the leaflets contain some of the lyrics, it is now heavily assumed that they are linked to the forthcoming LP9. Nothing much more was heard until Dawn Chorus day.

Radiohead have had a habit with their past couple of albums of creating a company before the release, which is then used to facilitate the album’s release. Spotted back in January, Dawn Chorus is a company set up by Radiohead. Queue massive hype leading to massive disappointment when the album failed to materialise in January. One of the many, many, many theories linked Dawn Chorus to Dawn Chorus day (May 1st, or, today).

(Thanks to reddit for the timings in the rest of this article)

And so, at 17:19, it was first spotted that Radiohead’s website had begun to pulsate, as if fading away. Queue mass analysing of the website’s source until someone worked out that the opacity thickened every ten minutes, the website fading further and further away until 18:28, when Radiohead’s website disappeared, leaving only a blank page.



This appeared to be the start of an avalanche. On cue, Radiohead’s Twitter and Facebook changed their profile pictures to white, before spending the next half an hour deleting every post, Thom Yorke’s own twitter following soon after. Even as writing this post, more has happened! Johnny Greenwood’s twitter has just updated, with a strange skin-pink profile picture. However, his tweets remain.

What could this all mean? Practically, it could symbolise a new start for Radiohead, wiping the slate clean and pushing themselves into a new era of art, shrugging off social media in favour of their own different platform.

However, Stanley Donwood described the new album as “A work of art”. So perhaps this is all one big artistic statement?

Erasing all facebook and twitter posts, as well as their website seems to point massively to privacy - a much debated topic within this era of Social Media. One interpretation is that it represents Radiohead rebelling against the complete lack of privacy that now comes hand in hand with the internet. A much lamented criticism of the internet is that it is now so easy to keep up to date with people, without any form of interaction. Once something is published, that’s it. It’s out there. Within the internet there is also the sad nature of details being leaked. We’ve seen it recently with Radiohead being filmed in LA, and there are countless other examples. Radiohead could be rising up against this. By completely erasing their internet presence they could be taking a stance against the all seeing eye of the internet.

However, Radiohead is a band that have embraced the internet, whether that be through the famous pay-what-you-want for In Rainbows or the use of their website to record scrapbooks and ideas, in admittedly bizarre ways. A much likelier interpretation of this blank-out, is a statement on the permanence of the web.

With the deletion of their website and the subsequent erasure of their social media, Radiohead seem to be pointing to the temporary nature of it all. The speed and nature of it all going seem to be suggesting the lack of meaning within it all. With governments constantly pushing for more and more snooping tools, moving further and further towards a dangerous “1984″ situation, where data can be created and erased in the blink of an eye, bands, art, personal information slowly fading until forgotten.

A final thought is the significance of Burn The Witch. With this line and the focus on their internet representation, Radiohead could be making reference to the mob-like tendency of internet commenters. Instead of the government forcing people to remove their profiles, it could instead be us, driven by inexplicable anger, learning people’s addresses and swatting them (“we know where you live”), acting childish and immature (sing a song of sixpence), fueling our own selfish actions by destroying other’s work. BURN THE WITCH.

Whilst I’m sure that a lot of people are hoping that LP9 will be released promptly, I can’t help but enjoy this build up. ARG-hunts are always fun, but with bands like Radiohead, you can always expect something more.

“There is always another secret” - Brandon Sanderson