Ed O'Brien on BBC Radio 1

Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway sit in with Jo Whiley on Radio 1 at the start of 1998 and tell the stories of the two B-sides on “No Surprises”. Selway's fan club has folded, down to two members, both of them, he says, his own pseudonyms. “Palo Alto” was made on a small digital studio in the back of the tour bus, the guitars over about two months in Europe and the drums the day after the last UK date. “How I Made My Millions” is Thom Yorke at home, playing the piano. The band were in the studio with 24 hours to finish two tracks, stuck at three in the morning on one that never made it, when Yorke said he had this thing that probably wasn't much good and put it on. They were blown away. The noise in the background is somebody doing the washing-up.

Their Glastonbury set went wrong for Yorke. His monitors failed and bright lights shone in his eyes, and only the first five songs and the encores felt good. “As a band you're led by your lead singer and your drummer,” one of them says, and if either the singer or the drummer is having a bad time, so is everyone else.

There will be no new album in 1998. Something will come in 1999, made again with Nigel Godrich. Of a couple of bad reviews of OK Computer, the one they remember was a thoughtful one, from a man worried that “Paranoid Android” would bring back prog bands with eight-minute songs. Massive Attack, met three or four times on the road, have talked over a couple of beers about remixing the whole album once their own is done. Selway's pick is a Joe Jackson track from 1979 that he loved drumming along to, sure he would never play like that.

The arenas at the end of 1997 took some adjusting to, making mistakes in front of 14,000 people instead of 2,000, and after six years with no break longer than two or three weeks they are taking the summer off. When they played the Apollo in Oxford, one of them had to seat his separated parents at opposite ends of the balcony in case the two met.