Radiohead on MTV News

At the Barcelona premiere of OK Computer, Thom Yorke is anxious and funny about it. It would have been wonderful for the accountants, he says, if they had simply carried on in the manner of The Bends, and as usual they ruined it because they were somewhere else by then. A fan had told him to his face that they were disappointed not to be getting a second Bends, which is exactly what the band set out to avoid.

He spent a sleepless week trying to sequence the record into a shape that would make it more acceptable, sending the others tape after tape of running orders while they declined to speak to him, until he accepted that it simply demanded effort, and remembered that every record he loved had demanded the same.

“Paranoid Android” was built after they had been listening to a Beatles track assembled out of unrelated sections. They decided to try the same, recorded separate pieces and stuck them together.

The cartoon character in the video was cast, he explains, by watching the films while drunk and recognising himself in them.