Thom Yorke

Thom Yorke talks to Matt Pinfield on 120 Minutes, mostly about videos, which he makes no claim to understand.

The band's approach, he explains, is to stay out of the way: find the director, encourage them and give them as much free rein as possible, because he does not know enough about it and has no eye for it. He gives a dry gloss on what the films on Seven Television Commercials, the compilation then out, actually are.

For “Paranoid Android” his only idea was a memory of a scene in Being There, where a man in a limousine flicks channels with an outsized remote and lands on something as bright as children's television. The collision of that with what is happening around him is what made sense of the song. How anyone turns that into a film he leaves to someone else. While finishing the album, he and Stanley Donwood watched the resulting animation on repeat every night.

Massive Attack were originally going to remix the whole album, until their manager pointed out they had a record of their own to finish first.