Radiohead on BBC Radio 1

Steve Lamacq spends an evening with Radiohead in Paris for Radio 1, two days after they arrived in France, playing seven of the ten tracks from Kid A in order. Thom Yorke says that for a good year and a half they had no idea what they were doing. The sessions began in Paris in January 1999, with an assistant engineer, Gerard, keeping some 500 DATs of the band jamming, and “Everything in Its Right Place”, six months in, was the first thing everyone agreed made sense.

Two years of writer's block left Yorke with scraps he had not thrown away, and they went into a top hat. When he did not know what to sing in the studio, he pulled lines out of it. Each line of “Idioteque” is something that “kept me awake at night for about a month”, set to a track he wanted people to dance to until their heads fell off. “Optimistic”, about the only song to get through the block, came out of political reading and his anger that everyone seemed resigned to capitalism as the answer to everything. “How to Disappear Completely” goes back to the RDS in Dublin in 1997, in front of 38,000 people, five weeks after a club in Lisbon they could not sell out.

Jonny Greenwood's job on “The National Anthem” live is tuning a radio to whatever the local stations are playing. He calls it “just stealing other people's stuff”. “Motion Picture Soundtrack” is older than “Creep”, and while John Leckie was producing The Bends he kept asking for “that crazy song”. Yorke left it as a pump organ part he felt nothing for, and came back 24 hours later to find Jonny had added harps and double basses. It is a homage to Disney, about a white lie everyone has been sold, and “it's essentially Disney's fault”.

Phil Selway's pick is a 1929 Louis Armstrong record with Zutty Singleton on drums, a history lesson from the years when kit drumming began. There will be no singles from Kid A, because none of them listens to the charts. Yorke ends the night saying they feel lucky, and “we feel like we started again”.