Colin Greenwood on KCRW

Jonny and Colin Greenwood talk to Nic Harcourt on KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic just after Kid A came out in America, between four songs from the record. There was no manifesto, one of them says. They brought in their favourite records, tried to sound like them and drifted along. “Everything in Its Right Place” mattered because for once they left a song sparse instead of camouflaging it, and it had to open the record. Nigel Godrich didn't think much of it at first, until he and Thom Yorke stayed up one night in a rented country house and remade it on the Prophet keyboard, and Godrich scratched the sound waves with a scrubbing tool in Pro Tools.

“The National Anthem” goes back to a four-track demo Yorke made at school when he was about 16. It was cut as a B-side in the winter of 1997 and judged too good to use as one. For “Idioteque” Jonny built a drum machine out of old synthesisers, white noise and filters, with a record playing at random on top, a compilation from an old competition for electronic composers. Yorke cut the results into sections, and a sample of that record stayed in the song. When they tracked down the composer of the sampled piece to ask permission, he turned out to be a professor of music at Princeton, and he came to the show the night before.

During a webcast from their studio, Yorke rang a fan in San Diego who had put his number on the bulletin board, and the fan was entirely unimpressed. British reviewers, they say, wanted a Travis record. “Motion Picture Soundtrack” is played on a harmonium from 1850s West Virginia, bought when the studio where they made Pablo Honey closed down, and it is on “Thinking About You” too.