After months of non-activity on Twitter Chieftan Mews returned for a brief tweet that was deleted within the hour but not before being retweeted by @MeToSpeak (thanks heaps!).
The Youtube link is to a video of R.E.M performing ‘It’s The End of The World As We Know It’
He also updated his Twitter cover to show a previously unpublished Stanley Donwood tree sketch
While at first glance to be just about Atoms for Peace the tweet is a satire of a recent hoax regarding Jonny Greenwood and the band heading to Brazil to await the end of the world.
On December 14th Jonny Greenwood posted the following to Dead Air Space:
In Sydney with the ACO
Just a few weeks left of the residency with the australian chamber orchestra – who are amazing. Hope the resulting music is worth all the trust they’ve put in me. Thanks, gut-scratchers….
The link takes you to a feature by NASA titled ‘Beyond 2012: Why the World Won’t End’ which was the summery of a Google+ Hangout with NASA on the 28th of November focused on disproving 2012 doomsday predictions.
The post is a response to a story run by The Daily Mail (The Newspaper..not the song) on the 13th reporting that Radiohead’s management had been forced to deny claims that Jonny Greenwood was in Brazil to await the end of the world.
Radiohead guitarist forced to deny hiding out at Brazilian hotel ‘waiting for Mayan prediction that the world will end’
Representatives of Radiohead today denied local media reports that the band’s guitarist Jonny Greenwood is hiding out in a rural Brazilian hotel to ‘wait for the end of the world’.
The hoax originated with local São Paulo newspaper Folha who co-incidentally happened to put the story up at 12/12/2012 – 12h12 either as a joke or a publicity stunt.
Chieftan describes himself as ‘Running amok near undisclosed location’
AMOK is the title of the upcoming Atoms for Peace album to be released on the 25th of February 2013.
(Source : Dead Air Space)
The cover and videoclip for the debut single Default features the Lost Angeles artwork by Stanley Donwood.
Wiki provides the following meaning of the phrase ‘ Running Amok’
Running amok, sometimes referred to as simply amok[1] (also spelled amuk, from the Malay meaning “mad with uncontrollable rage”) is a term for a killing spree perpetrated by an individual out of rage or resentment over perceived mistreatment. The syndrome of “Amok” is found in the DSM-IV TR.[2] The phrase is often used in a less serious manner in relation to someone or something that is out of control and causing trouble (e.g., a dog tearing up the living room furniture might be said to be running amok)
Bodysnatchin is a reference to Bodysnatchers, a song from In Rainbows.
With the Radiohead tour over for the year there is hope for a Atoms for Peace and/or Ultraista tour next year.. assuming Cheiftan Mews is wrong about it being the end of the world of course!
Chieftan Mews changed his Twitter display picture from clipclopclipclop.jpg to ccccc.jpg on April 1st prior to his second Q&A
The image shows a picture of a Tamiya 1:35 Scale Model Kit for a Chieftain Mk.5 Tank:
Tamiya is a Japanese company famous for their plastic model kits and accessories. Founded in 1946 they celebrated 50 years of producing scale models of military units in 2012.
The image appears to have been taken from ModelCars.com where the kit is on sale for $20.60 USD (Plus postage).
Tamiya provide a very detailed history of the Tank on the site:
The Chieftain Tank is one of the best known of the present generation of battlefield weapons, and is one of the most heavily armoured and armed fighting behicles in service anywhere today. It has not been without its detractors or critics, however, and there has been a running debate by military commentators for several years past on the relative merits of the British Chieftain Tank compared with the main battle tanks of other great military powers- the United States, Soviet Russia, France and West Germany – whose present equivalent designs afford a fasinating contrast with Chieftain in many key aspects.
The Chieftain, however, was developed as a result of British tank experience in World War II and after, and reflects the priorities which British tank men felt to be the most important terms of firepower, protection and mobility. British tank development in World War II resulted in the famous Centurion, which first appeared in 1945 in the closing weeks of the war. The Centurion, together with the Soviet T-34/85, and German Panther, represented the culmination of thinking (arising from actual experience) which pointed the need for a “universal” tank had, meanwhile, been disturbed by the appearance of the Soviet Josef Stalin II tank in 1945, with a powerful 122mm gun.
In the Immediate post-war years it became clear that Soviet Russia and her East European allies (later the Warsaw Pact powers) posed the greatest threat to Western Europe in any future conflict, and this led, subsequently, to the setting up of NATO. If war broke out, much of the initial fighting at least would take place in Europe, notably in Northern Germany, and Britain’s armoured divisions were either located in or earmarked for deployement to Germany. The backbone of the Soviet armoured divisions in the 1950′s was the formidable JS-III and its T-1- derivative, both with the 122mm gun, which could out shoot the 20 pdr. (84 mm)gun of the early service versions of Centurion. To strengthen the firepower of the Centurion, therefore, the British developed an introduced a “heavy tank gun”, the conqueror with a 120mm gun specifically to match the Stalin. The Centurion at this time was classed as a “medium gun tank”. The Conqueror was unsatisfactory in many ways; it was very heavy, noisy, relatively slow, and made an extra logistic liability for relatively few vehicles. By 1066 the Conqueror was withdrawn from service and an up gunned Centurion with 105 mm gun was in service.
The ccccc is probably for 5 x Chieftain being that it was a Mk.5 model.
While Mk.5 is similar to Mk1 and Mk2 from the 2nd disc of In Rainbows the abbreviation is short for ‘Mark’ and used in a number of different fields including the British Military, Cars and Musical Instruments.
In 2009 Radiohead donated Mk2 for a ad for the National Coalition for the Homeless, you can watch it on Youtube here.
One of two links to Youtube Chieftan Mews sent out on the same day both linked Youtube videos of BBC Test Card F titled ‘BBC Test Card F (1978)’.
“The time now very nearly 3 o clock, the next program on bbc1 Songs of Praise follows at 3.15 after a trade test transmission…”
A Youtube commenter names the piece of music as ‘Finally, swing-time’ by Pit Fontana’s New Sound. According to TestcardCircle.uk that song was used during the 2nd half of 1978 to early 1979.
Mew’s tweeted a 2nd Testcard after this one ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6SmOBxP9-g ; Test 2 ), however the second tweet was not deleted until the 20th of March 2012. You can read more about it, and the history of Test Card F here.
Songs of Praise is a weekly religious program first broadcast in 1961 early on Sunday mornings. Consisting of church hymn’s it still runs today and is broadcast in a number of countries.
In 2007 Adam Buxton uploaded a parody of Songs of Praise providing his own subtitles to the program with amusing results:
Adam Buxton is British DJ and Comedian who in 2007 helped Radiohead with their Thumbs_Down webcast to celebrate the release of In Rainbows.
A fan of the band he wrote a nice long detailed blog post about the whole thing here on his website, and later in 2008 entered his own (rather hilarious) remix for the Reckoner remix competition:
On the 29th of November 2011 Adam Buxton ran a live BUG Music Video’s special evening focusing on Radiohead’s career, during which he screened some behind the scenes footage of the recording of Thumbs_Down, Previous video clips from the band and a interview with Jonny and Colin. Described as a ‘one off’ Adam repeated the event in Los Angeles on February 2nd 2012.
A Silly Blog carries a nice review and description of the event Here.
One of the most interesting bits of trivia from the program refers to a In Rainbows Scrapbook mentioned in the Bug Program notes as a ‘proposed but ultimately unreleased DVD ‘scrapbook’ from the In Rainbows period’.
(Source: Attributed to Ian Davies by Auntie Nubbins of A Silly Blog )
Adam Buxton is on twitter as AdamRealBuxton and is one of the accounts Chieftan Mews follows on Twitter.
@ChieftanMews: At 0:36 I appear in the Zigg only to disappear and reflect to the dark side of the moon. http://t.co/Qw0PTnn stuck help #10 of 10
@ChieftanMews: #10: Please @ 1 song that makes you feel energetic & write about it in 1 sentence. (1 answer only, #10 expires August 11, 2011 at 00:00 GMT)
On Facebook this read as:
#10: Please message me 1 song that makes you feel energetic. Write about it in one sentence. (1 answer per person or disqualified/blocked. #10 expires August 11, 2011 at 00:00 GMT)
Chieftan Mews first tweets a link to a video Servo posted to Chieftan Mew’s Facebook wall on August 1st:
Screenshot of Mew's Reply to a question on Facebook, August 1st, 2011.
Servo took the video loop from www.the-ziggurat.com and posted to Youtube on July 31st 2011. The link takes you to 0:36 in the film where a head can be seen to the bottom left of the picture outlined in green and blue.
On the 3rd of August Chieftan Mews replied to the video with:
My face emerges at the 30 second mark at the lower/central portion of the screen and then disappears a short time later. Please call a plumber or a lumberjack immediately.
The Dark Side of the Moon is the title of Pink Floyd’s eighth album released in 1973, a album compared to OK Computer it also happens to show a prism separating a rainbow out of white light on it’s cover. In Rainbows being the band’s previous album for which the moving rainbow blocks video where made.
( Original cover for Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of The Moon – Source : Wikipedia )
Similar to the Ziggurat film was a videoclip for Videotape made for the end of the 2007 Thumbs_Down webcast featuring Thom Yorke’s face turning into a mess of coloured blocks.
Thom ended up uploading the video to Dead Air Space on the 12 of February 2008 with the following message:
RED BLUE GREEn +
had a niggling feeling that this never really got seen much.
Its a kind of video thing to go with Videotape using lots of wierd techniques we were messing with.
Nigel and I really enjoyed making it at the end of last year.
It appeared at the end of a webcast which i think was lost due to transmission problems.
So here it is (roughly) for you to see again.
x
Thom
The original video on DAS is gone but you can still watch it on Citizen Insane.
The #10 of 10 suggested that there was a series of 10 tweets to come, this proved to be correct as it was followed by the first of ten weekly questions asking for fans to respond with their own answers.
Fan’s where given a choice between responding on Facebook or Twitter, two of the most popular Social Networks as of 2011.
@ is a symbol used to direct a message on Twitter therefore requesting fans to tweet him directly with @ChieftanMews.
With Facebook it seemed he wished to receive the replies as Private Messages, of which he would take only 1 per person on threat of banning them so they could no longer send him messages or view his Facebook page.
The difference has to do with a design limitation that on Twitter you can only send messages to people who follow you. This means that while Chieftan Mews was able to send Direct Messages (DMs) to fans following him they would not be able to reply or send their own without Mew’s following them first.
While ’1 answer per person or disqualified/blocked.’ on Facebook seems to suggest a competition to date there’s been nothing suggesting that Mew made direct use of the answers offered to him by fans, or that there was any organized prize for answering his messages correctly.
Though he has been known to Directly Message or reply to peoples Facebook Posts on his wall from time to time it’s unknown if Chieftan Mew’s replied to any of the suggestions given to him in response to his questions.
@ChieftanMews: If @nigelgod deletes my scenes from the final cut, I will gladly show him a new way down the staircase! ␄
On June 21st 2011 Phillip Selway announced on Dead Air Space that Radiohead had filmed a episode of From The Basement, in addition to the news was a HD quality Youtube video of a new song titled Staircase (Previously known to fans as ‘A Walk Down the Staircase’ from Thom Yorke’s solo shows and tour with Atoms For Peace in 2010).
Mew’s addresses this threat to Nigel Godrich the mastermind behind From The Basement. Started in 2006 as a Podcast From the Basement is a music program that focuses entirely on a performance doing away with the traditional format of a host and live audience. Thom Yorke performed on the first episode and Radiohead featured in a full length episode for In Rainbows – Live From The Basement.
Chieftan Mews who made his name hosting The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time clearly is not pleased with this idea and later takes revenge by withholding the footage of Supercollider performed during the set.
As usual Mews signs off with EOT (End of Transmission) to mark the final tweet for the day.
@ChieftanMews: I am stuck in here with some juicy footage: http://www.the-ziggurat.com – Please call a medic or psychiatrist for me immediately. ␄
Jul 10, 2011:
@ChieftanMews: RT: @heidybloom: @ChieftanMews you were edited out of the final cut, mews! Should I call a medic?
Jul 12, 2011:
@ChieftanMews: @nigelgod that buck, took me out of the final cut so I took Supercollider & some juicy footage before being banished to the Zigg. Stuck.Help
These are the first of a series of ongoing tweets where Chieftan Mews states that he was stuck in the Ziggurat with footage taken from The King of Limbs – Live From the Basement.
He accuses Nigel Godrich of removing him from the film and reviles that there is a performance of Supercollider missing from the version shown on television and online. This later proves to be correct when on November 9 Radiohead released The King of Limbs – Live From the Basement on Bluray/DVD with Supercollider as a bonus feature.
http://www.the-ziggurat.com is the web address for The Byzantine Ziggurat a abandoned part of the Radiohead website.
The Memory Hole on Radiohead’s Website describes it as thus:
This was the Strategic Defence Initiative. A ponderous structure stuck in hyperspace which we are not sure what to do with at the moment. But one day, it’s time will come, of that there is no doubt.
Since 2008 it simply contains a looped flash video of coloured blocks that was used as the background for InRainbows.com which hosted the ‘pay what you want’ store for In Rainbows. As of May 2011 the site is no longer available but you can view it here via the Web Archive.
On August 1st Servo uploaded a copy of the video from The Ziggurat to youtube and posted it to Chieftan Mew’s wall on Facebook.
Screenshot of Mew's Reply to a question on Facebook, August 1st, 2011.
Chieftan Mews replied on the 3rd of August with the following message:
My face emerges at the 30 second mark at the lower/central portion of the screen and then disappears a short time later. Please call a plumber or a lumberjack immediately.
( The Lumberjack is probably a reference to a classic Monty Python Sketch entitled The Lumberjack Song which continues the ‘Woods/Trees’ theme. For any poor souls who have never heard it you can watch it on youtube Here. )
Mews replied again to another fan with more details on the 5th of August:
Chieftan Mews I emerge from there, yes. A little more to the left of your red square and to the bottom at the 0:36 mark specifically.
5 August 2011 at 04:41
Chieftan Mews
5 August 2011 at 04:41
The link takes you to 0:36 in the video Servo uploaded to Youtube
Screenshot of 0:36 in The Zigguart video as posted to Youtube by Servo.
Looking to the bottom-left part of the screen you can see the shape of a head (The dark blue is hair and green for the face)
Starting from the 5th of August 2011 Mews sent a series of weekly tweets counting down from #10/10 to #1/10
On the 7th of October Mews tweeted that “Like you, once again, I am a free fugitive of life.” and followed by the statement that he had been “set free by Supercollider.”
Recently in January 2012 a link to the Ziggurat was added to Dead Air Space’s list of Links with the following note:
Servo claims that the film loop on The Ziggurat has been changed and is different to the version he posted to Youtube and Facebook last year as it no longer contains the face at the 36 second mark. You can read his theory on this here at Ims Menoo.
The Byzantine Ziggurat itself has a long and interesting history.
A Ziggurat is a massive structures built in the ancient Mesopotamian valley and western Iranian plateau, having the form of a terraced step pyramid of successively receding stories or levels. Wiki also gives the following:
Notable ziggurats include the Great Ziggurat of Ur near Nasiriyah, Iraq; the Ziggurat of Aqar Quf near Baghdad, Iraq; Chogha Zanbil in Khūzestān, Iran; and Sialk near Kashan, Iran.
According to Herodotus, at the top of each ziggurat was a shrine, although none of these shrines has survived. One practical function of the ziggurats was a high place on which the priests could escape rising water that annually inundated lowlands and occasionally flooded for hundreds of miles, as for example the 1967 flood. Another practical function of the ziggurat was for security. Since the shrine was accessible only by way of three stairways, a small number of guards could prevent non-priests from spying on the rituals at the shrine on top of the ziggurat, such as cooking of sacrificial food and burning of carcasses of sacrificial animals. Each ziggurat was part of a temple complex that included a courtyard, storage rooms, bathrooms, and living quarters, around which a city was built
The Byzantine Empire (or Byzantium) was the Eastern Roman Empire during the periods of Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, centered on the capital of Constantinople. Known simply as the “Roman Empire” (Greek: Βασιλεία Ῥωμαίων, Basileia Rhōmaiōn)[2] or Romania (Ῥωμανία) to its inhabitants and neighbours, it was the direct continuation of the Ancient Roman State and maintained Roman state traditions.[3] Byzantium is today distinguished from ancient Rome proper insofar as it was oriented towards Greek culture, characterised by Christianity rather than Roman paganism and was predominantly Greek-speaking rather than Latin-speaking.
“The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume II” Appears on Page 2 of the Amnesiac Book.
During the Hail To the Thief era The Byzantine Ziggurat looked like this:
The Byzantine Ziggurat cia. 2005 via the Web Archive
Logging in you where provided with a chatroom as part of digital-landfill.co.uk which today also shows the In Rainbows video loop.
Before 2005 The Byzantine Ziggurat was home to the Waste Game which was online treasure hunt of sorts for Amnesiac containing 3 chapters of which only the first two where ever run. A record of the game can be found at Waste-Game-News.com Mike gives the following introduction:
What is the “Waste Game” or the “Byzantine Ziggurat?” It all started like this. At the time, Radiohead had put up a new website, and this was a page called the Byzantine Ziggurat. People were freaking out about how to figure out the password.
And by freaking out, I mean some were going totally out of their minds. I was one of them. I started keeping a copy of everything to do with the game, as did others, some of which helped me collect stuff, and this website was born. While the game was still going, this site helped others keep track of the latest news.
the waste game (Byzantine Ziggurat) was designed and executed by Radiohead,
Stanley Donwood, and many other associates.
..Sounds rather familiar doesn’t it?
Surprisingly it seems the game had two winners! Waste Game News describes the Chapter 2 Prize Kit as including “a Certificate of Byzantine Zigguration signed by the band, two posters, a backstage pass from the 2001 Oxford show, Zigguration Tests taken by each member of the band, and a video of the 2001 Dublin show.”
The Zigguration Tests where a written exam written by Stanley Donwood and apparently administered by Mel from W.A.S.T.E. All five band members sat them but only Ed’s exam paper has been made public. You can check it out Here along with photos of the rest of the prizes.
As of May 2005 Radiohead no longer maintains the waste-game.com domain name, it appears that Chapter 3 titled ‘Playing Zeus’ morphed into what was to become The Scrapbook on the Radiohead website as Mike states that in a conversation with maxk from W.A.S.T.E on April 5 2003 that Chapter 3 was to have 2,700 rooms(pages). There’s quite a few old websites from fans who where working to solve the game so best bet is to do a web search for ‘The Byzantine Ziggurat’.
Greek Mythology has been a reoccurring theme for Stanley Donwood’s artwork since 2000 and Mew’s has used Greek in a tweet (My bucks, must I go out on a limb here and say more is revealing at Ελληνική οδός? That man: ims menooo! Juicy pre-watching. Beware you not!) relating to Stanley.
@ChieftanMews RT: @Neryx: @ChieftanMews Admit it, this is what Radiohead sounds like without you youtube.com/watch?v=j8fv6S… via @youtube
Mew’s retweeted this from a fan, the link takes you to a video on youtube called 15 Step Overdub where someone has replaced the audio of Radiohead’s performance on Jools Holland with a um. less professional take.
RT: @inkybrown: I asked C&P for a statement about @ChieftanMews . Philip said no comment. Colin said he’s disgusting and he’s not supposed to talk about it
@inkybrown I was set free by Supercollider. My first line of business was to make sure that those two don’t appear on Late Night on Monday.
Mew’s first re-tweeted then replied to Inkybrown who managed to ask Colin and Phil about Mews after one of the Roseland Ballroom Shows in New York.
Since July 6th Mew’s has stated that he was stuck in the Ziggurat ( www.the-ziggurat.com ) with footage of Supercollider missing from The King of Limbs – Live at the Basement.
It seems Mew’s got his revenge as only Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon to perform Give Up The Ghost, the episode was screened on Monday October 3rd in the US.
@ChieftanMews: Like you, once again, I am a free fugitive of life.
On July 6th Mews tweeted that he was stuck the Ziggurat (
http://www.the-ziggurat.com ) a old part of the Radiohead website that since In-Rainbows is nothing but a full screen flash video showing a colourful loop of blocks. After repeated pleas for help Mews said that he was ‘set free’ by Supercollider.
Servo states that the contents of The Ziggurat has changed since July 2011 when Mews was said to be in there. You can read about it on Ims Menoo here
It could possibly relate to the fact that The King of Limbs – From the Basement was released on November 9.
While fans had been expecting a webcast of some kind the DVD/Bluray came as a surprise.. though nobody was really that surprised to discover the previously unaired recording of Supercollider as a bonus feature.
@ChieftanMews: “It’s all about the music, Mews.” – Some Rubberneck
Tweeted during the making of The King of Limbs – Live from the Basement Chieftan Mews shares what appears to be a rational for why he was cut from hosting The King of Limbs – Live From the Basement.
He twice changes his Twitter bio to refer to Rubbernecks with “Don’t Be A Rubberneck.” in 2012 and “Will work for Rubbernecks” in 2011.
A slang term Wiki serves a good description:
Rubbernecking describes the act of gawking at something of interest. It is often used to refer to drivers trying to view the carnage resulting from a traffic accident. The term refers to the craning of a person’s neck in order to get a better view.
The phrase first appeared in a post by Thom on Dead Air Space on October 11, 2005.
Rubberneck was a new tune the band was working on during the In Rainbows sessions.
Thom Describes it as thus:
yet another new tune added to the blackboard called Rubbernecks.
at the moment its a demo. when is a demo not a demo? when its in time. whats in time?
HEY!
KEEP AWAY!
im asking jonny to lay off the sweet rock and stick to the sticklebrick licks. more-
their dotting all the tees
and crossing their eyes
welcome to the future
it opened up my eyes
its creeping up the car park
its coming up the drive
rubbernecks with cameras
petrol and bonfires(heres the loud bit)
we need to keep away the rubbernecks
we need to keep away the rubbernecks
me me my my
