Thom Yorke on MusiquePlus

Thom Yorke talks through records he chose rather than the one he was promoting.

Björk comes first. She is the only pop artist he finds inspiring at that moment, for her voice and her invention, and for getting better over a long run, which he says very few manage. He envies her for making albums as a child; at 12 he would have wanted nothing more than to be handed a tape recorder. She said hello to him at a television show the week before, he mentions, adding that she was only being civil and that he had no idea what to say back.

Miles Davis's Bitches Brew was a gift, played once and rejected. He came back to it much later in an airport and found it extraordinary, then took months more to start listening properly. Kind of Blue still leaves him cold, and he prefers a Cecil Taylor record that sounds to him like a cat has fallen onto the piano.

R.E.M. can still make strong records a decade in, he thinks, because they have no fundamental belief in their own wonderfulness and keep a sense of humour about it.