Radiohead

An Israeli DJ who had played their songs for three or four months has Radiohead in the studio before their concert there, with listeners phoning in to talk to them and win tickets. They give the first broadcast of “Pop Is Dead”, the first thing they recorded themselves with their live engineer instead of an expensive producer, and the next single. It is about the death of pop music.

Colin Greenwood, who introduces himself as the bass player, used to work in a record shop and sold the Doors' greatest hits with depressing regularity. Every two years the Doors get discovered again, he says, because in a recession that is easier for a record company than investing in new bands, who are signed, given loads of money and dropped if the first single is not a hit. “Inside My Head” stayed off the album because it ended up sounding like them trying to be something else. Thom Yorke writes the words, and if he sings something the others find spectacularly bad they fool around laughing until he gets the message. One lyric was written blind drunk at three in the morning after a news report on the pit closures.

Singing “Creep” live, Yorke says, still brings back how he felt when he wrote it. They pick a Tim Buckley BBC session recorded with a hangover, and say the surprise cover at the show, if the audience is good, may be Glen Campbell's “Rhinestone Cowboy”. They also play Ride, the Oxford band who beat them 17-1 at football about eight weeks earlier, and the Fall, for the oboe on the track they chose.