Ed O'Brien on Oxygen FM

Ed O'Brien and Colin Greenwood spend an evening on Oxygen 107.9's Super 8 indie show in Oxford, reviewing new singles and taking calls, days after Radiohead finished the music for their next album at the weekend, which they say is why they sound so frivolous. They co-produced it with Nigel Godrich, the engineer they made “Lucky” with, who at 26 is younger than them. John Leckie, who produced The Bends, was great, one of them says, but this time it was “a bunch of idiots in a studio”, the band and Godrich let loose with nobody who knew what they were doing.

They have done about eight tours of America. On one, their gear was stolen in Denver, after a show in New York and a day off. Support slots are a nightmare for a band used to playing an hour and a half, they say, trying to sort out 15 minutes for somebody else's audience. The last time they played Oxford was the Zodiac the summer before, and the local band they name first is the Unbelievable Truth, the band of Thom Yorke's brother Andy.

A caller from Aberdeen gets through to a station heard only in the centre of Oxford, proves it by naming the venue they played there, and asks whether any of them read the Radiohead mailing list on the internet. They write the W.A.S.T.E. newsletters, the band's own mailings, but the internet list is another matter. They have subscribed a couple of times, and having 90 messages land in their email is stressful. Two months ago it carried a tracklist for the album with songs they had recorded only a couple of days before.

Another caller says the music press loves a band and then turns on it, while Radiohead have always been its favourites. “Oh no,” one of them answers. One of them points out how little was written about them at all in the first two years, and that in five years they have had one NME cover and two Melody Maker covers. Signing straight to EMI, when the credible thing was a small label funded by a major, cost them a couple of years of bad press. At the end Colin says sorry that he forgot their two picks for the show and Ed remembered them, and the show plays Cameo's “Word Up” and Eric B. & Rakim's “Paid in Full”.