The other awards tonight: The ASCAPS

I don't often get surprised by the winners of awards, but tonight's ASCAP prizes have left me agape.

Corinne Bailey Rae's Go Put Your Record On has been named 'song of the year' and even more confusingly in the arse-end of 2008, Dido has picked up songwriter of the year. Have I missed something? There's some talk that she's about to release a single later this month, but how can a year stretch so far to include the release of Bailey Rae's track and the release of Dido's new material?

Jonny Greenwood picked up an award for his There Will Be Blood soundtrack.

Radiohead book some flights

So, it turns out that Thom Yorke's pronouncements about stopping touring to save the planet might have fallen apart when faced with the prospect of not earning money from touring; the band are lining up a leisurely tour for 2008, says manager Bryce Edge:

"We plan to tour next year," he said. "Starting in May through to probably the end of the year, with lots of holidays in that period.

"At the moment we are talking with our agents in North America and for the rest of the world, trying to get a schedule which works for the band and works financially."

Talking to Gothamist a few days ago, Jonny Greenwood made some mumbly noises about trying to work out a way to tour ecologically, without falling into the Coldplay trap of believing in carbon-offsets as doing more than assuaging guilt:

We’ve heard bad things about that. I’m not sure that that’s enough; to buy off our guilt with money. That might not be the best way to do it. We’re kind of looking at a few other ideas. It’s interesting; we’ve had a report done on touring and how much pollution gets created and what would be the most efficient way to do it: playing small venues or big venues, playing venues inside a city or outside a city, playing a big venue and having lots of people drive a long way to get to see you or whether it’s better for us to travel to different places. There are a lot of things to balance out. Whether it’s better to play a festival. So we’ve got to factor that in as well.

We're not quite sure there's a way to play a territory like the US that doesn't involve pumping polar-bear-drowning levels of carbon into the atmosphere, unless they ship themselves over the Atlantic and power everything with windmills - but, to be honest, you wouldn't put that past them, would you?

The canny men of Radiohead

In a response to the criticism of the lowish bitrate of In Rainbows, Jonny Greenwood has tacitly acknowledged the online hoopla was intended really as promo campaign for the definitive, physical item:

I don't know, we talked about it and we just wanted to make it a bit better than iTunes, which it is, so that's kind of good enough, really. It's never going to be CD quality, because that's what CD does."

Now, since "you shouldn't encode at a CD rate because the CD will get jealous" isn't a line of argument a grown-up would essay (besides, distribution of digitally encoded music files is also 'what CD does' - and yet that didn't stop In Rainbows being digitally encoded and distributed online, did it? - we can only assume this is a slightly veiled way of saying "sure, we're not going to give it to you in CD quality because we want to sell the CDs". In other words, the ground-worryingly historic opportunity the band offered fans was to decide how much they'd pay for an advertising campaign, not a record.

Heads up

After all that bloody codery and winks and nods, it all boils down to "new Radiohead album in ten days":

Posting on Radiohead's official site Jonny Greenwood's message simply says:

"Hello everyone.
Well, the new album is finished, and it's coming out in 10 days;
We've called it In Rainbows.
Love from us all.
Jonny"

However, MI5 believe this might, in itself, be a code for 'rise up, rise up, and put the ruling class to the sword' and so have impounded Thom Yorke.

Radiohead switch off tape recorders

Jonny Greenwood - no, no, he's out of Radiohead, not the rugby player - has told Paste that the head have finished work on a collection of tracks:

“We just had a meeting about that today,” said Greenwood on September 7. “We’re very relieved to have finished recording, now we have to decide what we should do with it.”

In other words: they've recorded the album faster than they negotiate a deal to cover its release.