Radiohead on Chop 'Em Out

Radiohead take Chop 'Em Out through the making of OK Computer, starting with the house where they recorded it. They chose it for a ballroom where drums sounded wonderful, in a valley where time stood still and nobody could work out how to leave, and when they arrived they ran from room to room like children.

With nobody setting deadlines this time, they began by asking each other what they thought, and had to force themselves into making decisions. “I didn't put produced by, I just put committed to tape, because that was what it was,” one of them says of the sleeve. By Christmas they had 10 or 15 reels of “No Surprises” alone. Jonny Greenwood said he was bored with all this and they had to sort it out, and a week of sorting the songs on a whiteboard showed the album was already there, mostly in the first version of each song.

On the first night in the library they played Underworld, Miles Davis and Magical Mystery Tour, and one of them still hears that Underworld track's layered vocals in the middle of “Paranoid Android”. It was the first of the new songs they played to friends, and it was not meant to be weird: if they had been trying, one of them says, “we could have been a lot more successfully weird”. The song was recorded in four sections nobody expected to fit, and Nigel Godrich flew the middle in off tape by hand with the band drinking behind him. For its opening they had brought in a percussion group, and one of the players was too drunk to play and got the sack. Thom Yorke's favourite moment came after a black night trying to sleep above the control room, with only the kick drum of a tape loop coming through the floor; in the morning the others had built the song and all he had to do was sing.

They played “A Reminder” five times and came in that evening unsure they had done it at all. The computer voice on “Fitter Happier” mispronounces words musically while saying upsetting things in the neutral tone of a cashpoint. Going back to songs from The Bends in rehearsal felt like being in a dodgy Radiohead covers band. And whenever they play Manchester, the office offers Manchester United's players 23 tickets, and none of them ever turns up.