Thom Yorke on XFM

Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood play five songs live for Gary Crowley on Xfm, two of them new. “Airbag” takes its title from a headline, An Airbag Saved My Life, that Thom found in the AA's motoring magazine. The other, which Crowley calls “Uptight”, Thom wants called “Subterranean Homesick Alien”, though the listeners are welcome to phone in something better.

They are a week back from eight weeks in America, where their van was stolen in Denver with all the gear inside. The guitars had cost a couple of hundred pounds new five years before; what Jonny minds is losing the ones their fingers were used to. In Utah a girl followed Thom around for about a week because she “believed that she was an angel sent from heaven”, come to convert him, and he has had an alarm put in at home today.

Touring Europe and the American South with R.E.M. showed them that a band can come through the music business in a very human way, though Thom found Michael Stipe's personal bodyguard strange. On the last night Radiohead played Carly Simon's “Nobody Does It Better” instead of an R.E.M. song. Opening for R.E.M. without “Creep” would have been very stupid, he says, so they kept it in, and “the thing is just to treat it lightly”, because the music is not. Driving round Israel on the R.E.M. tour, a friend played them the Sparklehorse tape, and they have brought the band over to open for them at Brixton Academy next Saturday.

In January they stop everything to do with Radiohead. Thom has 20 or 30 new songs and no interest in a second Bends; after three anxious months making that record, the next one will be rehearsed until it is ready and recorded in about two weeks. “Lucky”, recorded in one day for Help, the War Child charity album, and out five days later, worked because they had already played it on stage for a while. They watched the programme about the Help sessions with Michael Stipe, and the footage over “Lucky” got to Thom. “I cried, but then I'd been on tour for three weeks, so that was going to happen anyway.”