Radiohead on MuchMusic

Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien spend the first half in a used electronic parts shop, picking over components, including a voltage detector nobody can find a use for.

Then Yorke explains the “Paranoid Android” video. The song was written about an innocent and rather naive character surrounded by frightening chaos, trying to hold himself together, and the film works because it does the same. He points to the moment where the character climbs a lamp post and simply carries on, oblivious to everything being done to him below. That obliviousness, he says, is how he felt writing it.

He is fond of the film's more lurid inventions and sums up its contents, deadpan, as hysteria, panic, lying politicians and a great deal else.

He likes the way the songs rattle around chaotically in large empty rooms, and compares living with a shortened attention span to standing in a room full of television screens, which he says is how he feels most of the time.