Radiohead on Radiohead

The difference from The Bends, Thom Yorke tells Launch, a magazine on CD-ROM, is a matter of resolution. The earlier record had an obvious and comforting one, arrived at by accident, and OK Computer refused to produce it. For two weeks before mastering he got up at five in the morning to listen, unable to find the resolution he had assumed would be there, and in the end admitted there was only trouble and no relief.

He accepted the problem instead of fixing it. Much of the record is about noise, about everything moving too fast and being unable to keep up, so the only resolution available was to slow down, which is what the closing song does and what he says he was telling himself at the time.

They wanted back the four-track mentality they had before signing a contract, where an idea gets knocked out, finished and owned, and they did not want a studio with air conditioning, A&R men and the same walls. Producing it themselves meant never having to explain it to anybody.

He keeps returning to his first school essay, which asked him to land in Oxford as an alien and describe what he saw.