Radiohead and The Smile mainman Thom Yorke has again collaborated with electronic musician Mark Pritchard on a new single, Back In The Game, for which they have shared a particularly trippy new music video.
Yorke debuted Back In The Game at his first solo show in Christchurch in New Zealand, which was reviewed back in issue 155 of Prog Magazine and the song remained a part of his live set throughout his subsequent tour of Australia, Japan and Singapore.
Yorke and Pritchard first collaborated on the song Beautiful People from Pritchard’s 2016 album Under The Sun. Prior to that, Pritchard, who has remixed the likes of Depeche Mode, Slowdive and Aphex Twin, remixed Radiohead’s Bloom back in 2011.
Visual artist Jonathan Zwanda, who has worked with Pritchaerd before, also directed the accompanying video.
“On first hearing the original demo of Back In The Game I was immediately struck by the deranged bassline that made me think of the final scene of Staying Alive where John Travolta is cockily strutting through the New York streets but I saw it with a more sinister overla,” he says. “Slowly a version of that visual arose around a character wearing a kind of giant parade head with a fixed expression of mania stuck on their face, such that you couldn’t tell if their endless march was one of aggression or celebration. The more I paid attention to the lyrics the more details began to fill themselves out and the overall concept began to form of parade of many characters marching past a building from within which everything was being thrown out of a window and into a giant bonfire.
“Ultimately the film for Back In The Game ended up depicting a sort of blind celebration taking place as civilization slowly deteriorates around it, a kind of progression through regression. Overlaid onto this is an exploration of how and where we choose to place value in our collective cultural expression and how we collectively confront major cultural shifts in the 21st century.”
