Colin Greenwood on Baktabak CD

Colin Greenwood talks through OK Computer for a Baktabak interview disc in America, days after Radiohead's Irving Plaza show in New York, where U2, R.E.M., Madonna and Brad Pitt were in the room. Chris Blair, mastering the record at Abbey Road, told Colin the record reminded him of albums brought to him in the 1970s that a band had made with an engineer rather than a producer, more open and less compressed than The Bends. At Abbey Road for The Bends, Jonny had played “Fake Plastic Trees” on the Hammond John Lennon used, and a box room at the end of Studio 2, they say, still smells of the Beatles' reefer. It is the first record they have produced themselves, and Colin went in meaning to enjoy as much of it as he could, after the hard going of The Bends in London.

Most of it was made in an old country house in an empty valley, the rest in the rundown apple farm outside Oxford where they rehearse. Making “Airbag” taught them that “you can't write a song on an acoustic guitar and then record it and take out the acoustic guitar”. Thom had cut up beats Phil Selway played, the way DJ Shadow does, and once the guide guitar came out the song was not as good, so back it went.

They came through the years after “Creep”, he says, because they had played together since they were 14, at a boys' school he calls “creatively very very oppressive”. They started the band there to escape, with three saxophones, and played their first concert at 16, dressed in black. Jonny had to leave college in his first term when they signed. His tutor, Charlie, who once lived with Iggy Pop and turns up as a character in Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia, told him to go for it.

Magnus Carlsson made the “Paranoid Android” video by putting the song on at nine one morning in his Stockholm flat and playing it for 12 hours, writing down whatever came. In America the mermaids had to be given swimming costumes, while the politician who hacks off his own arms and legs stayed in. Asked whether the band really are as polite and friendly as people say, Colin agrees. “I'm sorry if it's really boring.”