“For a while I thought, ‘I want to write some new stuff for him,’ but I was not in that headspace,” Mark Pritchard tells Apple Music about collaborating with Thom Yorke. “I thought, ‘I’ll just send him a load of different things in different states [of completion]. That would be more interesting for him, he might want to pull some apart, add some things.’ Keep it open and organic and not be like, ‘We’re doing an album here.’” In 2020, Yorke was in COVID-enforced lockdown in the UK when he reached out to Pritchard. The Radiohead vocalist and the veteran electronic producer had worked together on the song “Beautiful People” from Pritchard’s 2016 album Under the Sun, while the British-born, Sydney-based Pritchard had remixed Radiohead track “Bloom” in 2011. The purpose of Yorke’s email was simple: If Pritchard had any ideas floating about that would make for a good collaboration, he would love to hear them. What followed was a three-year process of swapping files over email and regular video calls. The duo also teamed up with visual collaborator Jonathan Zawada, who created a feature film comprised of videos for each song. With Pritchard composing and recording his ideas on a collection of vintage synths, Tall Tales is a dystopian collection of songs and soundscapes that takes in ’70s synth, dub, krautrock, synth-prog, minimalist techno and haunting synth-pop. At times claustrophobic (“Ice Shelf”) and relentlessly dark (“The White Cliffs”), the album bristles with the sense of paranoia and global upheaval that enveloped the world around 2020 (even though the music was written prior). “There’s tense moments, it’s heavy, everything’s feeling a bit off, the way I programmed stuff,” says Pritchard. Here, the producer takes Apple Music through Tall Tales, track by track. “A Fake in a Faker’s World” “It was one Thom got into early on, he had fun going in on that. It might have been one that made him think, ‘I want to do all of this.’ It’s quite a heavy song melodically. I feel it does what a couple of songs do in one song, so while it is long it goes through these different phases.” “Ice Shelf” “It was going to be an ambient song, it works without vocals. But I’m glad I sent it through and Thom turned it into a song. That one’s dystopian—it’s sad, and slightly dark. The tension in it pushes it heavy.” “Bugging Out Again” “I thought, ‘I want to try some stuff with Thom’s voice. I want to try his vocal through a Leslie speaker,’ which is [in] a Hammond organ—they have speakers built in that have rotary horns inside that spin around, which give you this kind of modulation effect. It really transformed the sound of the vocal. It just opened it up and gave it this space.” “Back in the Game” “The original instrumental had no drums; it was just the synth. It felt like a John-Carpenter-type horror film vibe. Then Thom said, ‘You should put some drums on it.’ I ended up using this Lowrey ’60s organ that has like a drum pad: kick drum, snare, open and closed hi hat, maybe a cymbal. It’s coming out of an organ speaker, it’s close mic-ed and room mic-ed, which means I can mix the ambience around the sound. The other layer of drums is from this Mattel Synsonics drum machine. It’s like a cheap toy drum sound.” “The White Cliffs” “[I’m using] a Suzuki Omnichord, which is a Japanese-built electronic accordion. The night I got it I wrote that song. I knew ‘The White Cliffs’ was heavy and the subject matter’s heavy—a few people were like, ‘I really like that one but I can’t listen to it that much.’ There’s a desperation in the lyrics.” “The Spirit” “It’s in the most obvious major key, and I thought Thom would go sad over it, but he didn’t. I was a bit taken aback. I wasn’t convinced and I added a load of weirdness to it to push it away from it, and he just said, ‘Nah, you need to get rid of all that.’ He sent me a reggae song by Janet Kay, ‘Silly Games’, and he said, ‘It’s a totally different song, it’s not comparable in most ways, but there’s a feeling that this has and people don’t do it that often and we need to keep it.’ I was like, ‘OK, I get it.’” “Gangsters” “It’s a weird song. When Thom first sent me the vocals I wasn’t sure if he needed to do more. Then it was like, ‘No, this works.’ It’s not really a traditional song, it’s not really a verse, chorus. Once he sent me the vocals I was like, ‘I need to not try and make this into a song.’ What’s good about it is it’s a bit random and comes and goes and it’s unexpected and it just ends a bit abruptly.” “This Conversation Is Missing Your Voice” “To me this one felt like a Stereolab-type vibe but with slightly more aggressive drums. It’s an old drum machine but there’s a lot of top-end energy off the hi hats. I was going to put guitars in it. There’s something about early indie music there and that’s cool, ’cause I like that stuff. It had a different bassline in it originally that Thom wanted me to get rid of and leave it open. He then put the bass in the final track.” “Tall Tales” “We wanted to have a chaotic buildup that’s tense, there’s a lot of chatter. Thom was going to do a spoken-word piece over it, but then he manipulated his voice [as] a backdrop and used computer voices to do the various voices. I spent a lot of time trying to make them sound tense but not harsh.” “Happy Days” “A lot of the drum machines that ended up on this record are like preset drum machines, so they’d be like bossa nova, polka, march, waltz, pop, rock, different styles. That march pattern’s not an easy pattern to use. But that’s appealing to me—can I get this to work? I was really surprised what [Thom] did on it. Some spoken-word female voice, posh BBC announcer in the first part, and then he’s singing all different types of hooks. It definitely has a darker, older feel to it. I was trying to get a bit of ’40s, ’50s jazz in there.” “The Men Who Dance in Stag’s Heads” “I always wanted to do a song with harmonium. There’s an artist called Ivor Cutler, who I’m a huge fan of, and he used a harmonium. I was trying to do an Ivor Cutler folkie thing, and then I distorted it a little bit and it went a little psychedelic, and then I pushed it back a little bit more towards folk with the percussion and layering in the oboe.” “Wandering Genie” “This is one of the ones where the arrangement was finished. It’s this loop that’s falling over itself that doesn’t change key, so Thom put some piano chords in to shift things. Then he decided, ‘I’m just going to do it with my voice, I’m going to layer up a five-part harmony.’ I think there’s five vocal layers and they all have their own effect channel to them.”