Thom Yorke on RTÉ 2fm

Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood tell RTÉ 2fm about the 15th-century house where they made OK Computer, which came with the story of one of Henry VIII's wives dying there in childbirth and hanging about ever since. Friends would come for a cup of coffee and leave five hours later. It had no Whitesnake gold discs on the walls, and “there wasn't the body odour of the previous band lingering in the halls, like there is usually in studios”.

Greenwood is the sceptic. Yorke is not, and stayed up till dawn most nights because he could not sleep. “I tried going to bed stone cold sober and it didn't help.” Greenwood says Yorke kept them all up till seven.

Their model this time was jazz, the Blue Note records with no overdubs, where what was played is what was kept. On Pablo Honey they spent days listening to bass drums and snares; on this record it was days of listening to takes of the same song. Touring the new songs in front of 20,000 people who did not care what they were doing got them right faster. Nigel Godrich, who co-produced the record, ended up doing the job John Leckie had done on The Bends, calming them down and telling them to stop misbehaving. By the end of The Bends, Yorke felt he could have sung about nearly anything and made it sound emotional, so here every song took a different voice.

Greenwood remembers being 15 or 16, on the way to a rehearsal, when Yorke put on the Pixies' Doolittle, played “Dead” and said they should sound like that. Asked whether there is a second Thom Yorke for the stage, Yorke says “if there was just two it would be all right”. There are eight or nine, some of them quite nice, and he is reading books on mental health, just so he knows if it ever crops up. Asked about Velvet Goldmine, Todd Haynes's film, as a project on the side, one of them says the chance to meet Bernard Butler of Suede was one of the main reasons he wanted to do it. Their part was covers of obscure early Roxy Music, with Michael Stipe sitting in the corner.