Ed O'Brien on BBC Radio

Ed O'Brien crosses London to see Gary Crowley on BBC London Live on a Tuesday night, the week Kid A is number one. “Anyone Can Play Guitar” takes him back to the £4,000 van they bought with their advance, fitted with old Rover seats and a bulkhead. It had been a News of the World van, which he admits was not very PC, and they covered the name on the side with backstage passes. They toured Britain in it for a year and a half, eight of them, driving home after any gig south of Leeds. In Ireland the relatives turn out: every time they play there, the guest list reads something like Richard O'Brien plus 23.

The story that began in Q magazine, of him wanting three-and-a-half-minute pop songs after OK Computer, he calls bollocks; it was one idea among many, mulled over while rehearsing for an Amnesty show. Kid A feels to him like their Pablo Honey, the band learning the studio again, and on Nigel Godrich he is plain. “He is the sixth member of the band.” Live, “Everything in Its Right Place” has become a band piece, with Jonny Greenwood sampling Thom Yorke's voice and O'Brien sampling Yorke's keyboard. On Kid A nobody's role was fixed: two or three years earlier, asked which band they wanted to be, they would all have said Massive Attack, and they took up that production-team way of working. “Idioteque” is probably his favourite song on the record, though he still runs out of a record shop the moment it plays one of their songs.

He got through the interviews in Meeting People Is Easy on a couple of spliffs, stoned most of the time. For “The National Anthem” Yorke and Jonny, deep in Charles Mingus, booked an eight-piece jazz section and stood in the room conducting it, egging the players on for four hours.