Ed O'Brien on XFM

Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway spend Gary Crowley's XFM morning show with him in the first week of 1998. Back at Heathrow the night before, O'Brien bought Q for the bus home to Oxford and leafed through its readers' 100 best albums ever, past Pablo Honey at 61 and The Bends at number six, to the Beatles at two and, over the page, OK Computer at number one. It was “like winning the FA Cup”, he says, and he wanted to shout.

Glastonbury gave them the best and the worst of 1997 at once, and one of them calls it “about the most stressful show we've ever done”. The lighting computer crashed, Thom Yorke's monitors failed and he had white lights in his eyes all night, unable to see the crowd. At one point he said he could not go on, and the band told him to get through the three songs left. Only when they walked off and heard the roar did the night turn, and Yorke went back out and had the lights put up on the audience.

Grant Gee, who made the new “No Surprises” video, is in the studio with a camera. He has been filming them since the album's promotion began in Barcelona, for a television documentary, with Japan and Australia still to shoot, and they wanted nothing like the warts-and-all rockumentary that Spinal Tap sends up. Asked what Yorke is like at eight in the morning, Selway says “fluffy”.

O'Brien picks Echo & the Bunnymen's “Never Stop”, the record the band psyched themselves up to before their one gig a year at the Caribbean Club in Oxford, for about 25 people. He went to Manchester University because of the Smiths and arrived the month they split. Covers have never been their thing: Carly Simon's “Nobody Does It Better” was learnt in two traumatic days for an MTV slot, and of the ten or so times they have played it, they reckon they have murdered most. “Palo Alto”, a B-side on the new single, was worked up in a digital studio in the back of the tour bus, and they mean to start the next album in early autumn. One of them would rather the band made “five really great albums like the Smiths did” and called it a day before a bad one.