Radiohead on Galei Tzahal

Radiohead spend part of a show on Galei Tzahal, the Israeli army station, eight hours after landing in Israel, choosing records and taking listeners' calls the day before their first night at the Roxane in Tel Aviv. The host has been playing them for three or four months and puts their answers into Hebrew as he goes. It opens on “Pop Is Dead”, their next single and the first thing they have recorded with their live engineer instead of an expensive producer. Colin Greenwood, who used to work in a record shop, watched the Doors' greatest hits come round with depressing regularity when the time could have gone on new bands. “A band has to be given time to develop,” he says. Drill, their first EP, sold badly only because it was on a major label, they reckon: on an independent it would have made the indie top ten, but in the commercial chart it did not do so well.

“Inside My Head” stayed off the album because they were very unhappy with how it came out on tape, the sound of them trying to be something else. A caller asks how it began, and the answer is school in the 80s, then years of band names and no gigs, just something to talk about in the pub. Thom Yorke loved techno when it started and finds most of what he hears now alienating. Jesus Jones, one of them says, were the best band in Britain on their first single and the worst by their third. Of “Creep”, Yorke says, “every time I sing it, I still get this amazing sensation”, because he remembers how he felt writing it.

Tim Buckley's “Sing a Song for You” comes from a BBC session played, one of them says, after a heavy Saturday night, and he has never found it anywhere else. One of the guitarists picks Ride's “Leave Them All Behind”; the two Oxford bands played football about eight weeks ago and Ride won 17-1. Jonny Greenwood chooses the Fall's “Chicago Now” for its oboe. If the crowds are good, the surprise cover may be Glen Campbell's “Rhinestone Cowboy”. One of them finds all the covers around hilarious, since record companies only trust dead artists and new bands play dead artists' songs, and here they are playing a Tim Buckley record.