Thom Yorke on MuchMusic

Thom Yorke and Phil Selway talk to MuchMusic as Kid A sits at number one in America with no commercial single and no official video. Yorke distorts his voice because hearing himself on the radio made him not want to sound like himself. “I would do anything frankly to not sound like me,” he says. He wasn't bringing finished songs to the studio this time, and when the recording began properly he started a new notebook with a note at the front that he was hoping for a happy accident.

Without a lyric or a vocal to respond to, Selway says, there were times when he was clutching at thin air. Yorke has a rule of reading nothing written about the record, because last time it took him two years to turn off “the critical monologue going on in the back of my head”. Half a star from Billboard, he says, is something to be proud of. He watched Meeting People Is Easy, the film of the last tour, and was “crying my head off over the whole thing”.

Moving into their own studio was a way of starting again, with the recording, the rehearsing and the artwork all in one place. Upstairs is a gallery where Stanley Donwood does the artwork, and Yorke goes up to mess about with him while the others work downstairs. Yorke wanted to stay with these people, he says, because the five of them together are far better than anything he could do on his own or with Jonny Greenwood. The words came from the notes and scraps left over, and putting them together he found one stream of consciousness running right through, which scared him a little.

The tour is over in two weeks. “If we had nine months scheduled then I would have snapped in a week.” He is definitely an optimist, finds whatever God is walking in the country in the old Wordsworth way, blown about on a cliff in a thunderstorm, and gets his solace from swimming in the sea.