The Fiery Furnaces have issued a sarcastic statement in response to the furore created when Matthew Friedberger berated Radiohead's song 'Harry Patch (In Memory Of).'

In an interview with Spinner.com published earlier this week, Friedberger seemingly slammed Radiohead's intentions for recording a song about the last surviving British solder of the trenches, Harry Patch, calling the group 'bogus'.

Under the headline 'We LOVE Radiohead, of course!', yesterday a band rep insisted the band are NOT fans of Radiohead and Matthew DIDN'T misread the song title as 'Harry Partch' as previously thought.

Instead, it's claimed that “ Matt naturally thought it would be interesting to pretend that they wrote a song about the celebrated American composer with a similar sounding name.”

The statement reads:

Like most creative musicians, Matt Friedberger is not a fan of Radiohead and their various chartbusters.

Of course, Matt and all of The Fiery Furnaces family have the greatest respect for all Tommies, living or dead. So much so that lots of The Fiery Furnaces work is, because of the pun, dedicated to imitating the Who's "Tommy".

Now, back in the fall of 1996 or whenever that interview was conducted, the interviewer asked what Matt thought of a Radiohead song celebrating a WWI veteran.

Of course, Matt never 'misread' any song title, as has been reported. Though he is not very proficient at it, he can actually read. Matt naturally thought it would be interesting to pretend that they wrote a song about the celebrated American composer with a similar sounding name, hence his joking in the interview about Radiohead composing a song with something like 48 notes to an octave. It was easy and amusing to imagine Radiohead's attempt to colonize that relatively arcane bit of our musical lifeworld. No doubt that would be very successful.

Matt has not heard the Radiohead song about Harry Patch, as opposed to his imaginary one about Harry Partch, but if he did, he is sure he wouldn't like it. No doubt Radiohead and their fans can ignore his opinion of this matter and the band can continue with their triumphant artistic interventions.

Matt would have much preferred to insult Beck but he is too afraid of Scientologists.

(by Scott Colothan)