Radiohead on MTV

Radiohead talk to MTV in the summer of 1997 about what being in a band does to you. One of them says it is like a club that keeps you a child, and finishing OK Computer was where they did a lot of growing up. The first record was made in three weeks by people who didn't know what they were doing and never expected anyone to buy it. Living with it for two and a half years left them almost unhealthily sure that everything they make is bad, and by the end of OK Computer they could see so many holes in it that they had to stop.

They rehearsed “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” for months without getting anywhere, then stood back at the end of a second day in the studio and found it had made itself. The best moment of all, for one of them, is when Thom Yorke sits down with an acoustic guitar and plays something like “Exit Music (For a Film)”, and nobody yet knows what to put on it. Recording used to be a chore until halfway through The Bends; now the studio and the stage are as exciting as each other.

“Our videos are not works of art, they are promotional tools used to make money,” one of them says, no different from a car advert, though Jake Scott's pitch for “Fake Plastic Trees” made them proud. The lyrics are funnier than people think, and “Paranoid Android” is a joke, with Yorke as a voyeur in a fairly hideous bar in Los Angeles, which is where the Gucci piggy line came from. At the big outdoor shows the crowd becomes a sing-along mob, and Yorke's effort to reach each person in it is, one of them says, “one of our strengths and also one of our great weaknesses”.