So Thom Yorke has come out and declared the album dead. This isn’t the first time Thom’s been the bearer of bad tidings. In 2004 he cancelled the second Melbourne Radiohead show due to a frail voice. Frail voice? I thought that was the whole point. Not only did I have a ticket, I’d won a competition to meet him by sending in four barcodes from my brand of antidepressants.

Well, if the album isn’t dead, it’s certainly lying in intensive care, with a cracked case and a terminal cross-hatch of scratches on the disc. Since the advent of iTunes, the trend has been that no one under twenty buys CDs – and why would they? The things get ripped straight onto computers, and then what use are they? To load into your Discman on the train? To slot alphabetically into your CD tower? I’m afraid this, along with lying on your bed reading lyrics in 6-point, is relegated to the 1990s, along with Vienetta and Magic Eye. Now we get an album cover Gravatar and a track list destined to be corrupted by file sharing cowboys and DJ shuffle.