Thom Yorke has claimed that advisers to Tony Blair tried to force him to meet the former prime minister in 2003.
The Radiohead singer’s comments, which were made in an interview between him and Guardian columnist George Monbiot on the French online magazine Télérama, referred back to the time when he was the spokesman for the Big Ask, a climate change campaign by Friends of the Earth.
Yorke says he was asking politicians to acknowledge the existence of climate change, but soon ran into difficulties.
He said: “It got into this big fight ... [They said] ‘If you don’t agree to meet the prime minister, Friends of the Earth will be denied all access to him.’ Because of the Iraq war, I didn’t want to do it. I felt it was morally unacceptable for me to be photographed with Blair.”
A spokesperson for Blair told the Guardian: “The suggestion is both preposterous and nonsense.”
Back in 2008, Yorke wrote in the Guardian that he had “not made a habit of meeting politicians” as part of his activism.
In the lengthy interview, Yorke also talked about Radiohead’s commitment to carbon-neutral touring, which he described as like “pissing in the wind”.
“If you have a Radiohead show where 20,000 people turn up, happy to see you play, and it’s the only venue in the area and yet the promoter is saying, ‘The only way to get there is to drive,’ you’re faced with this decision and you’re going, ‘OK, do we blow out because there’s no support or public transport and we deprive the fans of a concert in order to reduce our carbon footprint?’”
He added: “Initially, it kept me awake at night – which sounds really stupid. I got unhealthily obsessed with it. But when I started to get involved in doing something about it, that helped me a lot. But I always have the impression that I am not doing enough at all.”
Yorke recently tweeted that, despite the banning of all public protests for security reasons following the Paris terror attacks, he would be travelling to Paris on 4 December for the COP21 climate change conference to “put pressure on our glorious leaders ... now or never.” In 2011, he was also on board for the maiden voyage of the Rainbow Warrior III, the Greenpeace boat built for campaigning and activism.
Speaking to Monbiot, Yorke also explained his reluctance to write protest songs about the environment. He said: “In the 60s, you could write songs that were like calls to arms, and it would work. If I was going to write a protest song about climate change in 2015, it would be shit.
“It’s not like one song or one piece of art or one book is going to change someone’s mind.”
- A previous version of this story was amended on 25 November 2015 to remove the incorrect use of the word “blackmail” and to include the response of Tony Blair’s office.
