Colin Greenwood on Time Traveler

Colin Greenwood talks to an American interviewer with OK Computer just out, five stars in Q and ten out of ten in the NME. It is an even less easy record than The Bends, he says, and the first they produced themselves, so the mood was stress with some enjoyment in it. Chris Blair, who mastered it at Abbey Road, told him it reminded him of the records bands made there with an engineer in the 1970s, more open and less compressed. Abbey Road has its traditions: the Hammond Jonny played on “Fake Plastic Trees” there is the same one John Lennon played.

On Monday night they played a club in New York with U2, R.E.M., Madonna and Brad Pitt in the room. Jonny, his brother says, plays up the Englishman in America, answering “how are you today, sir” with “jolly fine, thank you for asking”. When Jonny left his first term at college in Oxford to join the band, his tutor told him to go for it, a man Colin describes as the model for a character in Hanif Kureishi's The Buddha of Suburbia.

“Airbag” began with beats cut out of Phil Selway's playing, the way DJ Shadow works, and lost its acoustic guitar, which then had to go back in. After finishing “Paranoid Android” they giggled like irresponsible schoolboys, because nobody makes a six-and-a-half-minute song with that many changes. Magnus Carlsson made its cartoon after playing the song for 12 hours alone in his flat. For America the mermaids had to be put in swimming costumes, while a man in a leather codpiece hacking off his arms and legs was fine.