Radiohead are delightfully obtuse aren’t they? Those crazy guys gave an album away for very little money (good thing as it was of very little quality) and Thom Yorke has an eye so low down his skull that he can tickle his Adam’s Apple with his eyelashes.

And now, totally toying with our preconceived notions of what a band should do, maaaaan, they’re releasing a new album called ‘The King Of Limbs’ on February 19th.

That’s this Saturday! They didn’t let us know months in advance! Because they’re like that! That’s just sooooooo Radiohead isn’t it? ISN’T IT? You guys! If they were any more edgy, our heads might actually explode with kaleidoscopic tedium.

Radiohead announced the news on their website, pointing everyone in the direction of www.thekingoflimbs.com, where you’ll be able to order it. If you like eerily static music, sung by a maudlin voice backed by a band still indebted to Boards of Canada LPs.

Apparently, the band are referring to this new release (available as a download from Saturday, released physically on May 9th) as a ‘newspaper album’. That obviously means that ‘The King Of Limbs’ is perfect for holding a portion of greasy chips.

Oh, and track 3 has its tits out.

As ever, we can imagine that songs will be based around Thom Yorke’s insultingly obvious observations about the world, channelling a feeling of disenfranchisement after having watched Falling Down with Michael Douglas for the thousandth time. Filled with a feeling of sticking it to the man, Thom could have written a song in character, as a pre-packaged sandwich from Asda, filled with self-loathing and worry about those caught in the rat-race… a rat-race Thom Yorke hasn’t ever been part of… but he’s seen Falling Down, so that’s okay.

Yorke’s views on mankind are about as relevant as Roger Water’s, a man divorced from the public since the late ’60s, who is also a keen proponent of the whole ‘look what we’ve become’/'life in the machine’ nonsense. Both artists could benefit from something the world-at-large does with alarming frequency – having a good night-out with pals.

Of course, there’s little anyone knows of the new cut, but it’ll be a ‘high brow’ affair no doubt. Even the title is 6th form dense.

It’s named after an oak tree in Wiltshire’s Savernake Forest. The tree is a thousand years old and the phrase appears in the 23rd chapter of the Qu’ran.

We geddit. Trees. Religious text. Trees make paper. Paper makes books. Books have words in them. Words were invented by man. Radiohead are also men. They also use words. Words written on pulped wood. Like a tree. Trees are made of wood. The Qu’ran. Men. Mankind. Bits of wood. Wood with limbs. Like a wooden man. A wooden man with paper brains. A thousand year old man with a Radiohead t-shirt on. Made of the Qu’ran.  Invented by religious trees and given away as a free download. CDs pressed on Johnny Greenwood’s limbs…

[this continued for well over an hour]

Still, Muse will be thrilled at this news as they’ve needed something to crib notes from for their new tracks. So devoid of inspiration is Matt Bellamy is that he’s gone about impregnating a Hollywood actress, possibly in the hope that feeling fertile or the miracle of birth would give him some ideas. Alas, if he’d only waited a couple of months, he could have saved himself the bother of all those shitty nappies and just listened to ‘The King Of Limbs’.

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In the depths of the countryside, five men collectively known as Radiohead locked themselves away in a big empty house to make their new album In Rainbows.

People everywhere had high expectations for this one so savvy people like us could call it 'the return to OK Computer days' album. Finally in October, an announcement was made that a new album had been created with an immediate release a few days later. Not only would this mean that the traditional three month wait between news of a new album and release would be quashed, but the geeks on the internet wouldn’t have to brave the outside when the big day finally came. And on Monday everyone else got to buy it on CD. 

And, according to plan, In Rainbows has shot to number one.

When In Rainbows came out on the internet, fans had the choice to pay £40 for luxury artwork, vinyl and CD versions of the album and an exclusive CD of extra material. But not everyone is a mega-fan and the average person doesn't have that amount of money to spend on something that will sit on a shelf collecting dust and looking pretty. Unless you’re the sort of fan to make it in to some sort of Radiohead gangster chain and parade down the local indie disco. 

But since last Monday, people have been able to go to the shops and buy a physical, normal-priced copy of In Rainbows for themselves. And they did – enough of them for In Rainbows to knock Leona Lewis off the top of the album charts. Even though we could release a CD of a monkey belching the alphabet in the first week of January and it'd get to number one in the album charts, for the Leona thing we thank Radiohead a lot and offer them an open invite to come round to our gaff for endless cups of tea, coconut cake and those chocolate digestive biscuits with caramel in them. 

So it looks like Radiohead's 'pay what you like and then pay what we ask you to like everyone else' tactic has worked on all fronts. But who are the big losers in all of this? Old record label EMI upset lead singer/writer/depressed man Thom Yorke when it released a statement saying that the band wanted silly amounts of money for a new contract. A reply written like one of our many abusive comments was posted back by Yorke on the band's blog saying it was a load of porkie pies and they wanted to so something different or whatnot. 

The floodgates haven’t quite opened for more people to release music like Radiohead, but we expect the next industry-defining moment to be from Razorlight. Soon they will actually be posting a CD to everyone in the UK with a personalised apology for what they have done to our ears and a grovelling admission of guilt about how they’ll try to give us our time back for the amount lost listening to their bilge.  

Read more:

Radiohead CD Tops UK Album Chart - BBC

We’ve all made the occasional balls-up. In some instances, it can be quite comical. You know, like that time when you accidentally gave you peanut allergy-suffering uncle a Reese's cup? How all the family laughed down in A&E as he had his stomach pumped so he could live a few more months! 

However, sometimes a mistake can be quite costly and leave multiple people in the shit. Look at Katie & Peter Unleashed. The commissioner must literally want to encase himself in cement as he has to witness two human pieces of plastic talking shit for an hour week after week. So we must spare a thought for the not-so working class Lily Allen who tried to come over all clever and intelligent when she tried to have a pop at Radiohead. She must be trying to practise slagging off other people for her new rubbish chat show. 

Lily Allen and Radiohead couldn’t be more apart. One of them is multi-million selling band that's been around for over a decade, and one is an oddly-nippled chav who wants to come over as a commoner but fails badly due to her privileged posh background. 

In October, Radiohead put the shits up the music industry when they offered their fans the chance to pay whatever they wanted for their new album. Millions supposedly flocked to do this and ten days later, In Rainbows was available to download, ranging in price from user to user. By doing this, they were the first band to ever sell their album with no fixed costs, potentially scaring record companies and CD shops out of jobs.

While fans and independent record labels praised Radiohead for sticking two fingers up at the industry, some people weren’t happy. Of course, it had to be cockney loudmouth Lily Allen. She said of In Rainbows that: 

"It's arrogant for them to give their music away for free – they've got millions of pounds. It sends a weird message to younger bands who haven't done as well."

Yes, because instead of record labels taking a slice of cash your work, the money will go straight to the people who deserve it the most. The actual band. Obviously, having millions of pounds is probably why Radiohead aren't fussed about making anything of this new record. It was an experiment to see how much people would pay for an album, nothing more. Forget the set cost that HMV charges, it’s all down to what the user wants.

Reportedly a lot of people didn’t pay anything for this album. But with a hardcopy due for release on New Year’s Day, could many people just be using this as a taster? Exactly what many do on P2P networks anyway before buying it? We don’t know, but if they get to number one, we guess Thom Yorke and co will be sniggering away like schoolgirls who’ve just won first place in a cake-baking contest. 

And for some more Lily Allen comedy gold, she added this strange comparison: 

"You don't choose how to pay for eggs. Why should it be different for music?" 

Erm, we believe it’s because most farmers don’t tour the world raking in millions of pounds from gigs demonstrations about how good their eggs are. And because most bands aren't being killed because they've got bird flu. Although if anyone from DEFRA is reading, we did see Razorlight looking a bit peaky next to a turkey shed the other day…

When Radiohead announced that fans could pay whatever they wanted for new album In Rainbows, it was meant to show that a band could trust its fans to acknowledge all the work that goes into an album's creation and pay accordingly.

Yeah, hasn't happened. Of all the people who downloaded In Rainbows last month, less than half of them actually paid anything at all for it, it's been revealed. According to researchers ComScore, only about 40% of people who downloaded In Rainbows by Radiohead decided that paying money to hear it was a good idea, spending an average sum of just $2.26 for it. Although this could be seen as a disastrous embarrassment for Radiohead, the band shouldn't get too downhearted – after all, most bands would struggle to charge $2.26 for a bunch of songs that sound like a bunch of Broken Social Scene B-sides in the first place.

For a band whose music sounds like a ghost trying to fix a broken robot, Radiohead really captured the public's imagination with its new album In Rainbows. After the thrill of releasing traditionally-distributed albums made entirely out of nothing but whirs and clicks wore off, Radiohead announced that it would instead release an album of actual songs on the internet, letting fans pay whatever they wanted for it.

The idea caught on fast. With the music industry in crisis, perhaps this was really the future – trusting fans to pay a reasonable amount of money for the fruits of a tortuous 20-month recording process. After all, everyone who likes Radiohead must be sensible and intelligent, otherwise they'd never be able to decode Thom Yorke's witchy yowl, so they'd stump up an appropriate wedge, surely.

The signs looked good at first – on the first day of release so many people downloaded In Rainbows that Radiohead's website broke and the feeling that this was the future of music was such that even dear old Cliff Richard adopted the Radiohead model. Looking back, all the crowing might have been a little bit premature, because it turns out that no bugger actually paid for the sodding thing.

ComScore revealed yesterday that, of the 1.2 million people who visited Radiohead's website since In Rainbows was made available to download, 62% of customers chose not to pay a penny for it, with the majority of the others only spending a minimal amount. In fact, accounting for both paid and unpaid downloads, Radiohead only made $2.26 for each copy of In Rainbows downloaded. In perspective, for the latest album by one of the world's biggest bands, people paid less than half of what Amazon is currently charging for a bargain-bin collection of choral Elvis Presley arrangements. But who doesn't love Elvis, huh?

Of course, you could argue that that's still $2,712,000 that Radiohead earnt from In Rainbows – and it all belongs to the band now that none of it goes to a record label – plus the band has made double that from pre-orders of the physical deluxe In Rainbows box-set, and In Rainbows is still to be released traditionally on CD, and Radiohead is likely to overcharge for concert tickets because of the innovative way it all but gave the album away. So the band hasn't done badly out of this.

It hasn't done badly, but it could have been an awful lot better, too – something that Radiohead plans to explore on its next album, How Are We Supposed To Buy That Fleet Of Diamond-Studded Speedboats Now, You Tossers.