Thom Yorke on MuchMusic

Thom Yorke and Phil Selway sit in at MuchMusic on the day Radiohead play Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, and their worries for the day are getting up and not throwing up. When Q's readers voted OK Computer the best album ever, one of them says, Ed O'Brien came home with his friends, put on Revolver, number two in the poll, and walked round the house saying “number two”. His friends did not get the joke. A poll like that is a way to fill ten pages of a magazine, and it leaves them uncomfortable.

They are a better unit now, with less fighting, and they never listen to their own records, except a B-side they have to relearn. They know every tiny sound on OK Computer to the point where it drove them mad; a novelist, one of them says, would not sit reading his own book every day. One of them cannot meditate, so playing is what clears his head. Big shows swing between the most amazing experience on earth and facing a mob, one of them says: the only bands he has seen do them well are R.E.M. and U2, and having all those people in your head is not easy, “and anybody who says it is is lying or on drugs”.

Holding his breath for the “No Surprises” video took two days of rehearsal with stunt people, and Yorke calls it the most terrifying thing he has ever done. Music videos are an art form, one of them says, “but they're also sadly television commercials”, and their new videotape of seven of their videos is called 7 Television Commercials. After one more week of touring they take four months off, having had no life for six years. Selway, asked if he feels understood, says never, but he is only 30. Yorke believes in an afterlife and carries Sogyal Rinpoche's The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying on tour. Selway remains sceptical.