Thom Yorke on KCRW

Thom Yorke guest-DJs the third hour of KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic with Chris Douridas, broadcast from Sony's studios on West 54th Street in New York on the day of Radiohead's show at Irving Plaza, after a weekend at the Tibetan Freedom Concert. They open on “A Reminder”, a B-side. Yorke wrote it on a Sunday off somewhere near Hershey, stuck in a hotel room with nothing to do, around the idea of someone sending a song to someone else and saying: if I ever lose it, pick up the phone and play me this song back. The Fender Rhodes is all Jonny Greenwood.

Choosing what went on the album took two or three weeks of argument, and with five in the band Yorke ended up with the casting vote. “I couldn't really win, but it was many, many sleepless nights.” A tape from Baz Luhrmann asking for music for the end of Romeo + Juliet, which became “Exit Music”, kicked them into gear. Songs they couldn't decide about went out on tour, to be settled in front of 10,000 people, the kids at the front eating popcorn and not looking interested at all.

His records include Ennio Morricone, because the band aspire to that kind of atmosphere, Talking Heads' “Listening Wind” and R.E.M.'s “Begin the Begin”. He met DJ Shadow the day before, and they plan to work together, perhaps for UNKLE, James Lavelle's project. The musicians he admires most turn out to be the warmest people, he says, Miles Davis being the exception. He goes out on Bitches Brew, which the band played again and again while making the album, for its sound alone. “And it's absolutely from another world.”

When Douridas plugs the new Radiohead album, Yorke adds “new danger”, the line the Conservatives ran against Labour before the election, by now a catchphrase in Britain. OK Computer was the first thing they had for the album, a phrase they kept saying, goofy and childlike, the kind of thing you might find on a cereal packet. Douridas hears modesty in it. Yorke doesn't: “It's got a screaming paranoia to me. But then that's probably just me and the fact I haven't had any sleep.”