Electronic music pioneer Mark Pritchard on obsessive fans, fame and the genius of Thom Yorke

Electronic producer and musician Mark Pritchard first met Thom Yorke in 2012 in Australia via his friend Clive Deamer, who was touring as Radiohead’s second drummer. Pritchard had already remixed “Bloom” for the band the year before, but it was in Sydney, where Pritchard had relocated, that collaborative ideas started to percolate. Yorke and other members of the band went to see Pritchard perform in a club. It was there that he became acutely aware of not only how big they were but also how deeply uncomfortable they were in the spotlight. 

“I met them as they came into the bar,” recalls Pritchard. “I could see people clocking him [Yorke] and then people started coming up. It was fine for a while, but then eventually it became impossible so we had to get them backstage out of the way.”

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In the calm of a restaurant the following night, Pritchard and Yorke discussed collaborative options and “Beautiful People” from the former’s 2016 album Under the Sun became a dry run. The pandemic lockdowns became the catalyst for Tall Tales, the glitchy and itchy hour of electronic music they created together in grabbed moments over a four-year period. 

Fittingly the album is released by Warp Records, whose pioneering acts like Aphex Twin and Autechre were a major influence on Radiohead as they broke free from the shackles of rock and moved into the more abstract, textured and experimental sounds on 2000’s Kid A album and beyond.  

Pritchard originally envisioned an album featuring a multitude of guest vocalists, with Thom Yorke just one voice among many. Then he started to write with Yorke’s voice in mind. In an ‘all-or-nothing’ move, he emailed a file of around 20 tracks to Yorke in the UK, who pounced on the bare bones of what became “Happy Days”, recording vocals to Prichard’s compositions. The stop-start dynamics and remote working conditions stretched across time zones is more suited to electronic music than rock band dynamics. However, with nuance getting lost and miscommunication becoming exponentially more likely over email, the two started having Sunday Zoom calls to bring focus. 

“The Zoom meetings definitely made it a lot easier,” says Pritchard. “But the record [still] took a long time. It was long – even for me.”

His studio set up allowed him to make the time differences align. “I work weird hours,” he says. “And I don’t have the internet on my main computer.” 

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The album has a fug of nocturnal dislocation, that pre-dream ambiguity where reality starts to lose its edge, like Chris Morris’s radio series Blue Jam (and its TV incarnation, Jam). That’s most obvious in the spoken word scrambling of the album’s title track. “It sometimes felt disconnected and woozy,” says Pritchard of Morris’s work. “It was difficult to watch, even though I like dark humour. You had to be in the right mood for it.”

There is a similar sense of crepuscular disquiet in the album, with the folk-horror of “The Men Who Dance in Stag’s Heads” being influenced lyrically by Benjamin Myers’ 2017 novel The Gallows Pole. The album has a tie-in film created by Jonathan Zawada, with the unsettling CBeebies-directed- by-Hieronymus-Bosch style of “Gangsters” being the first taste. Pritchard and Yorke wanted a visual clip for each track, with a vague idea that it could even become an installation. 

Zawada submitted a series of videos and Warp decided it should also be a film to make a complete artistic statement. “Some people [at Warp] said it was stronger as a whole, but we still weren’t sure how that could work,” recalls Pritchard. Zawada solved this by creating animated interstitials between the songs. 

They did play one song together at the Sydney Opera House in March during Yorke’s solo show, but this album is unlikely to be toured. “Thom said this was going to be really difficult to do live,” says Pritchard. “But I’ll be at the mercy of his schedule. He’s unbelievably busy.” 

Yorke does not disclose the meaning of his lyrics, but Pritchard took a line in the title track (“There were two clowns selling tall tales”) to be about Boris Johnson and Donald Trump. Yorke’s political lyrics have often been elliptical (the most explicit example being Radiohead calling their sixth album Hail to the Thief – about George W Bush) but the lyrics to “Back in the Game” really cannot be about anyone but Trump – “Back to 2020 again… Back to my old tricks again… Good to have you back, sir, where’ve you been?”

Yorke is not doing any sit-down interviews for the album, leaving all the heavy lifting to Pritchard. I ask if he is anxious that his music is about to go under the unforgiving microscope on Radiohead/Yorke fan sites and subReddits, where unrelenting scrutiny of everything he does is normalised. (This album might be viewed there as yet another distraction for Yorke when some fans feel he should be focused on making a new Radiohead album.) 

“It’s something that needs to be talked about,” he says of obsessive fandom and the unhealthy side of fame. “If you watch any documentary about any artist that’s had an incredible career, they’ve all had to come up against this. Most documentaries about musicians end up tragic.”

He says Yorke and other musicians like PJ Harvey, whose art is also feverishly deciphered by fans, have had to learn a variety of coping mechanisms. “It takes unbelievable strength of character to handle that,” he says. 

Pritchard handles attention by only surfacing briefly when he has a new project to release, then diving to the tranquility at the bottom of the ocean, like an electronica whale. 

“Financially and career-wise, it probably may not be the best path,” he says of his relative anonymity, “but it does have its benefits.”

Tall Tales will likely be a standalone project as there are no definite plans for a second album. Yet for a moment, Pritchard will experience a fraction of the febrile online and fan attention Yorke has to regularly navigate – and that will be enough. The serenity of the seabed will beckon once again. 

Tall Tales by Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke is out on 9 May (Warp Records)

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