The Future According to Radiohead

A few blocks from the natural-history museum, Yorke arrives for an interview at the Old Parsonage, a centuries-old building — Oscar Wilde lived here as a student — since turned into a quaintly cluttered inn. Yorke's face is furrowed and unshaven, and though he certainly looks his age, perhaps older, he's also the most boyish member of Radiohead, small, fidgety and, this morning, wearing jeans, a gray hooded sweatshirt and a knapsack with the straps stretched over both shoulders. (When guitarist Ed O'Brien shows up an hour later and sits beside Yorke, it's like a study in contrasts, stark examples for schoolchildren on how good and bad boys should behave: There's Yorke, squirming, hair a spiky mess, occasionally putting his head down or wiping his nose with his sleeve, while O'Brien, at six-five nearly a foot taller than Yorke, demonstrates unnervingly perfect posture, barely even moving his head as he speaks in precise tones.)

We're in a side room off the lobby. A Japanese businessman is sitting at a table in the corner, typing silently on a laptop as he waits to check in, while flames crackle in the hearth. "Big fire," Yorke notes, then murmurs, "They should use a stove. More efficient." Yorke's left eye is damaged from a series of operations he had as a child and is now stuck in a permanent downward list. But this morning both eyes are nearly squinted shut, and he has a sleepy grin. His daughter has a cough, and he's been up all night.

In Rainbows, Radiohead's seventh album, was released in October, and any talk of its content was immediately overshadowed by its method of delivery. As everyone knows, the band, in a surprise announcement, decided to release the album as a download on its Web site, where fans could pay whatever they wished, anywhere from nothing to £99.99 (about $212). Though Radiohead have refused all requests to release official numbers, even the estimates of the online survey group comScore — estimates that the band dismisses as low — would make the experiment a success. According to comScore, a "significant percentage" of the 1.2 million visitors to Radiohead's Web site in October downloaded the album, and while comScore claims only two out of five downloaders paid anything at all, the payers averaged $6 per album — which, factoring in the freeloaders, works out to about $2.26 per album, more than Radiohead would have made in a traditional label deal. And that's just downloads: Released on January 1st, the CD version debuted at Number One in the U.S. and Britain.