Radiohead on MTV Japan

Radiohead answer viewers' questions on MTV Japan, put to them by a host who has lived in Japan for about 15 years and whose mother comes from Kagoshima. The first is what they had for breakfast. Colin Greenwood had nothing, having got up late. Why only one record every two years, when Japanese artists put out one or two a year? Because they are lazy, comes the first answer. The real one is that a band who only record and tour run out of things to write about very fast, so in between they try to get a life.

“Paranoid Android”, the single everywhere, was the song they thought would not work. It is four songs in one, written in sections across the year and a half of recording, each part a contest to match the one before. Asked about soundtracks, after “Talk Show Host” on the Romeo + Juliet album, one of them says a lot of OK Computer is the soundtrack to a film that was never made. “But we're going to make it, that's the idea anyway.” In a second, shorter clip they say their attempts at happy songs came out sounding like shampoo adverts, and that “Paranoid Android” ran to about nine minutes on stage before it was boiled down.

Thom Yorke names Michael Stipe as his biggest influence; another of them, for a laugh, names the man behind the puppet Spit the Dog. Meeting heroes has been reassuring, because they turn out still to be fans: R.E.M., for one, are huge fans of music, and over dinner R.E.M.'s Peter Buck quizzed them about These Animal Men, an English punk band hardly anyone knows, whose record he owned. It gets strange, though, when Buck tells an interviewer that R.E.M.'s “Undertow” is a sort of Radiohead song. One of them puts his sense of melody down to a poor sense of smell. Another sees colours, and most of this album was white, but a mucky white, the white you get when you blot out typing on a page.

The last question is what the man says at the end of the “Just” video. They pass on an internet rumour about a message hidden four minutes and three seconds into “Street Spirit”. “If you really want to know what he says at the end, learn to lip read,” one of them says.