Thom Yorke on TMF9

Thom Yorke tells TMF9 that Kid A was written the way electronic music is made, by producing a pile of material and then editing it. Radiohead started recording before they knew what they were doing and passed ideas round the studio, and even his vocals came from singing a lot of things and keeping whatever plainly worked. A week spent generating stupid noises now counts for as much as writing a song. Halfway through “Idioteque” the track runs backwards into a winding guitar noise, and that section, the centre of the song, is what set him writing the words. Until the five of them agreed that working this way was all right, it brought out everyone's insecurity about their part, which he calls the most destructive thing a band can have.

There are no videos, because the good directors have all been bought up by large companies to sell banks and mobile phones, and no singles, since the only people who buy them are kids with no clue what the songs are about. Of the ideas in Naomi Klein's No Logo, the one that interests him is the corporate invasion of public and private space, because it is how he feels generally, as a man who shouts at a television he chose to switch on. Music channels exist to sell the adverts in between, and “the future of rock is in those dodgy compilations you get advertised on these channels”, the ones with REO Speedwagon and Queen on them. Studio gear is cheap enough now for anyone to make any kind of noise, the way punk once allowed, and the only people still worrying about the future of rock are a few old journalists. As for why the record has so little guitar, Radiohead stopped listening to guitar music because it no longer excited them.