Thom Yorke on BBC Radio 1

Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood play “Black Star”, “Street Spirit” and a new song they only half know, “Subterranean Homesick Alien”, named in deference to Bob Dylan, live for Johnnie Walker on Radio 1. Asked about “Creep”, Yorke says putting it out again in Britain, which everyone back home wanted while the band were touring America, made it “even more difficult to kill the beast”. Very drunk one night, he moaned about it to Mike Mills of R.E.M., who told him to shut up and write some more, because one, two or three songs like that are what all bands aim for. “And he was exactly right,” Yorke says.

Radiohead's agent rang in tears with the news that they are the only support on R.E.M.'s smallest shows, in Berlin, Sicily and Israel. R.E.M. haven't seen Radiohead for a year and a half, so they must have picked them from the album, and the band take that as the highest compliment. One of them remembers the shock of the day they all realised that to carry on they would have to kiss arse, having got into this to play music. O level music meant writing 200 words on Queen's “Man on the Prowl” for one of them, when his friends would happily have written essays on Joy Division.

Yorke has just bought a suit. At art college his friend Ben bought a new one every three or four weeks, wore it until people complained about the smell, then hung it on the picture rail, until his room was ringed with smelly suits. One of them once sold ugly brown suits to middle-aged men, and was fired for telling the shop that nobody bought them because they were crap.