Thom Yorke lays into the Sun, praises Glastonbury, but Radiohead still won't be playing

What’s this? A new twist to the Radiohead/Glastonbury/carbon emissions/public transport saga? Just what you were hoping for on this Thursday lunchtime, I’m sure.

Anyway, Thom Yorke has issued a belated denial to reports last month suggesting he and his band would not be playing Glastonbury until the local public transport infrastructure was overhauled.

“We’re trying to… only play in areas that have a public transport infrastructure in place,” Yorke was quoted as saying. “So that rules out Glastonbury for this year.”

Stirring stuff, but it turns out Yorke’s comments were taken completely out of context and the upshot is… the band still aren’t playing Glastonbury this year, but as so often is the case the devil’s in the detail or, more accurately, the devil’s in the Sun.

“The last thing i did was talk to a UK newspaper called the Sun,” Yorke wrote on Radiohead’s website today, referring to his recent appearance at the launch of the ‘Big Ask Europe’ campaign.

“Which is owned by one of my least favourite people Rupert Murdoch. In the course of the interview I mentioned that we had a carbon footprint study commissioned and the biggest shock was the significance of all the travel to the show by the audience.

“As we have said before we are trying to concentrate as much as we can on playing places with some form of transport infrastructure other than cars and encouraging you lot as politely as we can without sounding preachy to consider car sharing if other things are not available. It is difficult to know how best to go about this. Especially when we are going to have use planes to travel during the tour when there is no alternative. Cue endless meetings and scratching of heads.

“I also mentioned that we were not playing Glastonbury this year but were doing our own shows in London,” Yorke continued. “Not because of transport issues but because the festival goers at Glastonbury were more than likely sick of the sight of us… it felt a little early to be doing it again, we felt as if we had only just played there.

“Unfortunately, as is the way with such newspapers my words were taken out of context and implied we were not playing Glastonbury because there was no public transport infrastructure. Well that's bollocks… but these things spread.”

Indeed they do – the testes even found their way to DrownedinSound, before we contacted the Glastonbury press department who told us that they were “not sure what Thom is on about specifically” but went on to list an extensive number of measures being made to limit harm to the environment. Evidently, they sent the same list to Yorke who found it “pretty impressive”, the Radiohead frontman insisting that he’s “been talking to the Eavises about this and apologised for any misunderstanding and they are totally cool with it.”

“All power to them,” he concludes. “Have [a] good Glastonbury and maybe see you there in 2009. ? maybe?”