Radiohead on MusiquePlus

Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood talk to MusiquePlus in Montreal, the night before a show at the Metropolis and their first visit since the end of 1995. A good part of the tape is the host in French. The tour has been lopsided. One night they played to 600 people after arriving with an articulated truck and three buses, and they have also played Glastonbury and a show in Dublin with Massive Attack for 38,000. At Glastonbury, they say, the job is just the soundtrack to all the excesses going on, and it was like Apocalypse Now.

They were terrified releasing OK Computer, after a year and a half agonising over every note. Most of it, they say, was accidents, setting out to do one thing and finding that what happened instead was what they wanted. “Paranoid Android” is three and a half songs, and though they like to claim they cut the tape together, they played it live a year before recording it, when it was much longer. Asked about a report that Greenwood was bored with guitars, they point to glockenspiels and strings, used for the first time. It was recorded in a very haunted house near Bath, and the plan to make a film of the album is up in the air because it is incredibly expensive, which they had not figured on when they started, and they are looking for the money.