Thom Yorke on MusiquePlus

Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood are back in Montreal for the first time since the Spectrum at the end of 1995, this time in a much larger venue, and tell MusiquePlus how much the rooms vary. In St Louis they pulled up in an articulated lorry and three tour buses and walked into what was basically a pub for 600 people; they have also played Glastonbury, and Dublin with Massive Attack. Glastonbury, one of them says, is “just about providing the soundtrack to all the excesses of happiness and drugs”, and it was like Apocalypse Now.

After a year and a half of agonising over every note, they were terrified when OK Computer came out. What pleases them most is that “Exit Music” and “Paranoid Android”, songs that felt like overreaching, worked anyway; “most of the album is accidents”. “Paranoid Android” is three and a half songs, and was longer still when they played it live a year before recording it. Asked whether “Karma Police” is two songs as well, they say no, then yes, then no: the ideas sort of run together, because you get bored with one and move on before the song has finished.

Greenwood corrects Select magazine, which had him bored with guitars. “Increasingly bored with bands who use guitars,” he says, and he has been getting into glockenspiels and strings for the first time. They meant to go to France but could not find the right space, and made the record in a house in a valley instead, “very haunted and very cut off from life and I think it shows”.