Thom Yorke on Galei Tzahal

Thom Yorke, hungover, and Jonny Greenwood play live on Galei Tzahal, Israeli army radio, and Yorke picks “Street Spirit” from “our wonderful new album The Bends, which doesn't contain ‘Creep’”. A tiny amp the size of a small shoebox goes everywhere with them, and they wrote “My Iron Lung” when they bought it. Most of their songs are written on tour, so they stay songs for two guitars for a long time, and the new one they play next has so far been just the two of them, with no drums. It is called “Subterranean Homesick Alien”, as in the Dylan song, but not.

Israel was the first country outside England to play them and invite them over, one of them says: every interview opens by asking why they were bigger in America before England, and Israel makes a better answer than America. When R.E.M. asked them on tour they assumed there was another Radiohead, until they saw 50,000 people outside the gig. One of them remembers going down to the rocks in front of the hotel at six in the morning on the last visit, very drunk. Signing off, the host hopes they grow up to be Take That, and one of them says he is never going to grow up.