Thom Yorke Concerned That Touring Hurts The Environment

Radiohead are making progress on recording their new album, but singer Thom Yorke is having reservations about touring in support of it because of the harmful environmental impact he says such road shows have.

Yorke is a spokesperson for Friends Of The Earth's The Big Ask campaign that's lobbying governments to enact laws that would cut carbon emissions by three per cent, and apparently he's worried about being seen as a hypocrite.

"The way that tours are structured now and the way it works is a ridiculous consumption of energy," he said in an interview with the U.K.'s Guardian newspaper. "I would consider refusing to tour on environmental grounds, if nothing started happening to change the way the touring operates."

The other members of Radiohead don't have as strong a view on the matter as Yorke, so there's no need for fans to fear that they'll never see the band perform again unless they start travelling via a fleet of giant rickshaws. "I think it's a necessary part of what I do, to tour or play live, but I find it unacceptable what the consequences of that are," Yorke explained.

"Some of our best ever shows have been in the U.S., but there's 80,000 people there and they've all been sitting in traffic jams for five or six hours with their engines running to get there, which is bollocks."

Yorke said that he looked into the idea of travelling to North America by ship, which The Cure did years ago when frontman Robert Smith refused to fly, but discovered that such a voyage would use just as much carbon. Since he feels so strongly against long-haul flights, he told the paper that he's trying to figure out a way of getting to Japan by train.

"I quite fancy that Trans-Siberian whatsitsname, but apparently it's a bit scary."

What about that long-awaited follow-up to 2003's Hail To The Thief album that was mentioned in the opening sentence? Yorke wrote this cryptic statement in an October 15 post on the Radiohead website:

"weve started the record properly now. starting to get somewhere i think. finally."