Start of a new year. Back to work. That’s my way of saying it’s been quiet here and I’ve got some good excuses. January in Sydney is crazy, people can’t get over the thrill of new year’s and summer, and the Sydney Festival doesn’t help.

Well here’s a stop-gap. First up, check Vaughan Healey’s funny q & a with Andy Weatherall.

Healey: I was talking to some friends about this interview, and one of them asked me to ask you when you are going to stop making goth records….

Weatherall: (laughs) ha ha yeah well they can get fucked… No but I guess there is a dark side to the music, it’s kind of infused with a dark humour. To me goth takes itself too seriously, whereas my music has a kind of sick humour; maybe like dark overtones but there will be a poppy melody over the top. If you mix the dark and the light it turns out even weirder. Perhaps they are gothic records, but gothic in a subtle way.

If someone asked me to sum up the vibe of my records I would say it was something like this old 1950s British movie called the Lady Killers… or like a friend of mine who a couple of years ago said the music sounds like an Edwardian bathroom. I thought that was a perfect description. It probably is gothic, but not in that kind of po-faced, long-leather coat, eyeliner.. not that kind of teenage goth, I supposed it’s grown-up goth.

It’s always a pleasure reading David Byrne’s blog, and Wired has him interviewing Thom Yorke here, which is pretty great too. It takes a while to get started, there’s a bit of backslapping. But it’s a frank discussion of sustainable touring, Radiohead’s pay-what-you-think-it’s-worth opening gambit on the new record, and talking in the abstract, just what an album is about now music’s downloaded one song at a time.

Byrne: I’ve been asking myself: Why put together these things — CDs, albums? The answer I came up with is, well, sometimes it’s artistically viable. It’s not just a random collection of songs. Sometimes the songs have a common thread, even if it’s not obvious or even conscious on the artists’ part. Maybe it’s just because everybody’s thinking musically in the same way for those couple of months … Probably the reason it’s a little hard to break away from the album format completely is, if you’re getting a band together in the studio, it makes financial sense to do more than one song at a time. And it makes more sense, if you’re going to all the effort of performing and doing whatever else, if there’s a kind of bundle.

Yorke: Yeah, but the other thing is what that bundle can make. The songs can amplify each other if you put them in the right order.

Byrne: Do you know, more or less, where your income comes from? For me, it’s probably very little from actual music or record sales. I make a little bit on touring and probably the most from licensing stuff. Not for commercials — I license to films and television shows and that sort of thing.

Yorke: We always go into a tour saying, “This time, we’re not going to spend the money. This time we’re going to do it stripped down.” And then it’s, “Oh, but we do need this keyboard. And these lights.” But at the moment we make money principally from touring. Which is hard for me to reconcile because I don’t like all the energy consumption, the travel. It’s an ecological disaster, traveling, touring … We did one of those carbon footprint things recently where they assessed the last period of touring we did and tried to work out where the biggest problems were. And it was obviously everybody traveling to the shows.

Byrne: Oh, you mean the audience.

Yorke: Yeah. Especially in the US. Everybody drives. So how the hell are we going to address that? The idea is that we play in municipal places with some transport system alternative to cars. And minimize flying equipment, shipping everything. We can’t be shipped, though.