Ed O'Brien on XFM

Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway talk to Paul Anderson on XFM before Radiohead's third and last night in their tent in Victoria Park, a week before Kid A comes out. The tent answers the arenas of their last British tour; Wembley Arena, one of them says, is a cavernous hall. Tickets cost £25 against the £18.50 an arena show would charge, because without a venue's sponsorship that is what it costs to carry 60 people and break even. Radiohead toured Europe in the summer mainly because of a handwritten invitation from Scott Walker to play his Meltdown festival in London, and fitted other dates round it. The urge to tour had come back at the end of last Christmas's webcast, when they sat round the tree and bashed through “Knives Out” on acoustic guitars.

OK Computer, O'Brien says, was in many respects a live album, most of it played together in a room, so this time they had to stop doing that. Thom Yorke, listening to Warp records, drove the change and was the first to kick against anything that sounded too much like Radiohead. Selway's drumming was cut up into loops. At one point Nigel Godrich split them into two groups for two weeks in which nobody could touch a drum or a guitar, and one of them reckons a fifth of what came out was good and the rest utter rubbish.

“Everything in Its Right Place” didn't work as a band in Paris or Copenhagen. Then Yorke and Godrich took it into a room at Batsford House in Gloucestershire for an evening and came out with the song that opens the album. After six months of work, O'Brien was delighted that “something great has come out of it and you haven't contributed to it”. “The National Anthem” is older. Its rhythm track is two years old, and one of them remembers rehearsing the song in early 1994, when it sounded too much like Kitchens of Distinction.

On the Q story that the band split over melodic songs, O'Brien remembers them agreeing, while rehearsing for the Amnesty show at the end of 1998, on three-minute pop songs as the antidote to OK Computer's prog side. Another album's worth is done, with “Knives Out”, “Dollars and Cents” and one they call the Egyptian song already in the set. Yesterday, Selway says, they held the finished Kid A, artwork and all, which at points last year had seemed very unlikely.