Thom Yorke on Triple J

Thom Yorke tells Triple J's The J-Files, recorded while Radiohead were in Sydney, that the band have pulled out of the Grammys, where OK Computer is up for album of the year. “They said that we weren't good for the ratings so we said okay,” he says, and the offer to present somebody else's award instead served no purpose he could see.

He doubts there will be another album before 2000. If they don't try to rejoin real life now, he says, they will carry on and turn into monsters. Recording OK Computer again would sound dreadful, because a song has one right moment. They were bored of “Let Down” by the time they cut it, his vocal was a nightmare and it only got done because the others were less bored than he was; a year on, he likes it.

For “Paranoid Android” they asked Magnus Carlsson, whose Robin cartoons were on constantly while they finished the album, and he played the song on repeat all day, wrote down what he saw and faxed it over. The “No Surprises” video is by Grant Gee, who has been following the band around. One earlier script had an aeroplane toilet whose flush was an ejector seat, a good idea for the wrong song. Gee's idea frames Yorke's head in a helmet filling with water, like a goldfish bowl on a television, and he really was under for a minute, with a stuntman to train him. “There was no way of cheating it.” Carlsson wants him to voice Robin, which suits a man who cannot remember lines.

Of the records that changed his life, Prince Buster's “Madness” is what he puts on for a hangover. James Lavelle, who runs the Mo' Wax label, sent him Dr. Octagon's “Blue Flowers”, which makes him cry with laughter. Tom Waits has aged disgracefully and writes better songs than ever, the way jazz musicians do. “Rock musicians get worse,” Yorke says. Neu!'s ten-minute “Hallogallo” is for driving fast with the volume up, and a Tindersticks song from Curtains is “like an emotional black hole”.

The last is Charles Mingus's Town Hall Concert, a session so chaotic the record ends in booing, and the only one since Bitches Brew to make him see things.