Thom Yorke on MusiquePlus

Thom Yorke and Phil Selway talk to MusiquePlus about Kid A, which will have no singles. “Singles are completely whack and they smell,” Yorke says, and the charts are no place for Radiohead beside a young American whose name he gropes for before landing on Britney Spears. They lost interest in playing guitar, a fundamental stumbling block for what was a rock band, and stopped working up songs five to a room. People went off alone and brought things back, and the pieces were edited together on computers like a film, where putting one chord beside another changes the whole plot.

Kid A began in Paris, which felt like a washout at the time, and Copenhagen, because the builders were six months late with Radiohead's own studio, which they only moved into last September. Then they rented a mansion from a lord, with 300 rooms, 200 of them shut since the Second World War, and rats, broken furniture and dust sheets. It affected them badly, yet it was where the record started coming together. The house was near an air base, and every night at midnight the bombers flew out over the house in a long procession down the valley, coming back at six while the band were still up. Only at the end did Yorke realise that a lot of the record was about Kosovo.

Getting nowhere with his words, he had a friend buy him a magician's top hat, cut up everything he had written and pulled the pieces out of it, keeping what worked. “Idioteque” came from always wanting to write a disco tune, one that would sound like skyscrapers falling down. When a journalist told him he didn't get what it was trying to say, Yorke told him, “I'm not trying to say anything, that's the bloody point.”