An album made by two people who have only met twice might not sound overly enticing. But when those two people are electronic maestro Mark Pritchard and canonical songwriter Thom Yorke who needs to meet IRL? The duo’s ‘Tall Tales’ is an exquisite trip into the combined minds of two of our most cherished and innovative musicians. “I could tell it was a thing for him to be on Warp, which is nice,” Pritchard confides in Piers Martin of Yorke…

Mark Pritchard and Thom Yorke go back a long way – they just didn’t realise it at the time. At the turn of the 1990s, the Radiohead singer was in his final year at Exeter University studying English and Fine Arts. Pritchard, a Crewkerne lad well into his synths, had a regular DJ gig at a club in Taunton, a 40-minute drive up the M5 from Exeter. Yorke was also an enthusiastic DJ and would often play between bands at the Lemon Grove, an Exeter venue that Pritchard would visit occasionally. Bands tended to end their South West leg at Exeter, swerving Taunton, as most still do.

“The Lemon Grove was one of the closer places I could go and see bands at that period,” recalls Pritchard, 53, from his studio in Sydney, Australia, where he’s lived for 20 years. “I saw The Orb there around the time Thom was at Exeter. When he used to DJ between bands, he would play that first wave of Warp – Nightmares On Wax, the bleep stuff. He’s been a fan of Warp since the beginning.” 

Pritchard is pointing this out because he and Yorke have collaborated on a fantastic record called ‘Tall Tales’, which is coming out on Warp, the pioneering electronic label that’s released the bulk of Pritchard’s output this century – as Harmonic 313, Africa HiTech and lately under his own name – plus some choice ambient house in the 90s as Link and Reload. Ever since Radiohead put out ‘Kid A’ in 2000 and talked about the influence of Aphex Twin and Autechre on tracks such as ‘Idioteque’, Yorke’s admiration for the label has been clear. “I could tell it was a thing for him to be on Warp, which is nice,” says Pritchard, “and it made sense to separate this from his Radiohead and The Smile records he does with XL.” 

Under Pritchard’s stewardship, ‘Tall Tales’ revamps the ghostly, conspiracy-laced electronica of Yorke’s solo albums into something stranger and altogether more appealing: a series of eccentric grooves and sloshed pop songs that glow with lurid intensity as Yorke documents, in his elliptical fashion, the state of play during the Covid pandemic when we were all under lockdown. On the surface, it’s very much a Thom Yorke record: his voice – that angelic, yearning, sinister sneer – is unmistakeable, particularly after three albums in quick succession by his prog-fusion trio The Smile. But it’s Pritchard’s playful production that gives ‘Tall Tales’ its legs. He threw all sorts of ideas and sketches at Yorke to see what would work – even stuff he’d had in the vault for a decade – and when you consider how prolific and versatile Pritchard is (not to say industrious), you get an idea of ‘Tall Tales’’ eclectic patchwork of styles. 

One song, for example, a queasy folk ballad called ‘The Men Who Dance in Stag Hats’ – the lyrics for which Yorke based on Benjamin Myers’ novel ‘The Gallows Pole’ – features a harmonium because Pritchard is a fan of the Scottish poet Ivor Cutler who would often play that keyboard as he sang. “I always wanted to do something with a harmonium and, to me, that song sounds like if Ivor Cutler did something with Lou Reed. So, I tried to balance it out by putting a bassoon in – I didn’t want it to sound too much on a Lou Reed tip,” he says. 

The pair have met in person only twice: the first time, in November 2012, when Radiohead toured Australia and played Sydney and Pritchard’s old Somerset pal Clive Deamer, who was there as Radiohead’s second drummer, invited him and his partner to a meal with the band. Before that, Yorke had been posting Pritchard’s tracks on his semi-regular playlists online and had asked him to remix ‘Bloom’ from ‘The King of Limbs’, in 2011. 

At the restaurant, Pritchard sat next to Yorke. “There was a moment where I thought, this is an unusual Tuesday night, because I’d never met the band before, but I knew their music. But it was very natural and open with Thom straight away,” he says. “We talked about music and all sorts of things and that has carried on through into what we do now. There’s no agenda, no hiding.”

This led to their first collaboration a few years later – Yorke singing the whimsical ‘Beautiful People’ on ‘Under the Sun’, Pritchard’s first album under his own name. They met for the second time in November last year when Yorke performed solo at the Sydney Opera House forecourt as part of his Thom Yorke: Everything tour. Having tied up ‘Tall Tales’ in March 2024 after working on it remotely for four years, this was a chance to take press shots for the campaign and go for a drink, though Yorke spent a lot of time setting up and rehearsing, as each of his shows can be quite different from the last. Pritchard was impressed with Yorke’s innovative tech rig, which showed how the singer thought about how best to deliver his music.

“I went on stage to do ‘Back in the Game’ (the lead song from ‘Tall Tales’) with him. He showed me a modulator and said: ‘Just tweak this.’ He’s got a sequencer triggering all his synthesisers and drum machines that are running live – it controls a palette of sounds – and it really works. He likes to strip his songs back to the essence,” says Pritchard, who’s never been keen on performing in public. “I’m actually worried that Thom might want to do this album live.”

Given Yorke’s profile and the giddy nature of the material – visualised in an album-augmenting series of films and animations by regular Pritchard collaborator Jonathan Zawada – ‘Tall Tales’ looks set to be one of Pritchard’s most popular projects. It might even return him to the UK Top 10, which he last visited in 1991, when the rave track he made with his schoolfriend Adrian Hughes, ‘Roobarb & Custard’, under the name Shaft, shot to number seven over Christmas after being picked up by FFRR. The track sampled the grungy riff from the 70s kids’ cartoon ‘Roobarb’ – catnip for British Gen-Xers – and led to two ‘Top of the Pops’ appearances for the 20-year-old Pritchard, as well as funds to buy new gear. Incidentally, Radiohead also appropriated a well-loved children’s show in 2016, when their video for ‘Burn the Witch’ depicted characters from ‘Trumpton’ turning feral.

‘Tall Tales’ began with an email from Yorke in the spring of 2020, checking in on Pritchard as the pandemic began to grip the planet: “Hope you’re well, mate. This is all a bit mad, isn’t it? Have you got any music? Send it through because I’m locked down at home.” Pritchard had been planning another project and didn’t have any specific material ready, so after some head-scratching he rummaged through his hard-drives and sent a folder with around 20 ideas in it: “Demos that were finished or close to being finished, bits of ideas, sketches, some ambient tracks, some drums that are quite mad.” 

Yorke replied straight away: “Can I do this one, please?” Then a few days later he emailed saying he would have a go at doing 14 more tracks. “I was like, cool, yeah, whatever you need. I left it chilled,” says Pritchard. That September, Yorke started to send his demos, sometimes two or three a day. “On the first day, the three he sent were unbelievably good,” recalls Pritchard. “He works quickly to get the vibes down and then sees what’s there. Sometimes he had lyrics, sometimes he was trying to find melodies and sometimes he had the whole song. I think he had The Smile going on at the same time. He’s superhuman the way he manages to do so much stuff. It’s almost annoying.”

They discussed the direction of the songs regularly over Zoom – Pritchard works nocturnally – and although he handled most of the production, Yorke would add modular synth parts or suggest removing elements to reveal a track’s essence or to create tension. Sometimes Yorke would acknowledge his partner’s skills: “When I’d send him stuff back, he’d say: ‘I don’t really understand how you did it’,” says Pritchard. “When it was all finished, I knew that Thom had done some different things and I had too. My mission was to make this as strong as I could and to push myself to make something that works as an album, which is difficult because the songs are very varied.”

In many ways, ‘Tall Tales’ is another of Pritchard’s deep dives into a certain genre or a particular way of working. Across his career he’s mastered a panoply of styles, from the early-90s house days of NY Connection and his Detroit techno-influenced Reload and Link projects via his hook-up with Tom Middleton – they met in that Taunton nightclub – plus the funkier Jedi Knights and Global Communication, through to his work with Dave Brinkworth as the Latin-flavoured Troubleman and exotica-inspired Harmonic 313. Pritchard doesn’t have a signature style or sound, yet his name is a mark of quality. 

“Mark is the absolute pinnacle of an artist to me,” says Jonathan Zawada, who lives in Sydney and is friends with Pritchard, having worked with him for 12 years. “He’s more dedicated and committed to his work than anyone I’ve ever met. There’s a kind of depth and authenticity at the heart of everything he makes which comes from his dedication to understanding the roots of everything he explores rather than just superficially dipping in and out.”

Pritchard’s next project could involve a virtual trip to South America as he seeks to dig into the sounds of Peru, Chile and Ecuador, and then maybe Egypt as well. He usually starts on YouTube and works backwards, often heading to the 1920s and 30s to see how a style started. “You can find anything these days.” 

More immediately, though, he’s due to catch his old West Country friends Polly Harvey and John Parish when they stop over in Sydney for a PJ Harvey show at the Opera House in a couple of weeks. Their friendship centred around the only studio in the area, The Icehouse in Yeovil, in the early-90s. Howard ‘Head’ Bullivant, who ran the studio, still does Harvey’s live sound. Pritchard’s friendship with Parish goes even deeper: Parish’s mother was a teacher at Pritchard’s school, who, aware of his interest in music, suggested he meet with her son who was making a go of it professionally. Parish plays percussion on a couple of 1992 Reload tracks.

“I remember all the teachers saying: ‘Nobody does music for a job – it’s not a proper career path’,” says Pritchard. That’s still sage advice, of course. But if things do go your way and you have a hit record at the age of 20, you know you’re doing something right. 

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This article first appeared in issue seven of Disco Pogo.

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