Ed O'Brien on MusiquePlus

Ed O'Brien and Colin Greenwood tell MusiquePlus why Kid A has blips instead of videos, which cost a fortune and “take up so much emotional time, worry, blah blah blah”. Two teams fed Stanley Donwood's and Thom Yorke's paintings into LightWave and made clips from ten seconds to two and a half minutes, with the band choosing the people and little else. The little bear that keeps turning up in the blips came from drawings by Donwood's children and his blown-up technical drawings of screw heads. Videos may come back once they are inspired again, perhaps a long-form one with John Landis, dance sequences and puppets.

“Idioteque” began with Jonny Greenwood's machine, which “looks like a telephone exchange”, and a digital audio tape (DAT) of an hour and a half of him playing with it, which Yorke edited on his Mac. A sample on the tape, which they first took for Jonny's own, turned out to be from Paul Lansky, a professor of music at Princeton, who has offered Jonny a place. Yorke and Nigel Godrich finished “Everything in Its Right Place” in one night in the end studio of a big house in Gloucestershire, after the band version failed, and Yorke tried out the words in one evening at the end, the opposite of how they used to work. “Motion Picture Soundtrack”, by Yorke's account, was written before “Creep”, and John Leckie kept urging them to record it for The Bends. “Lift”, one of them says, was played at every gig of 1996, and they had never recorded it.

The horns on “The National Anthem”, Yorke and Jonny's nod to Mingus, came back to play it on Saturday Night Live last week. They are proper musicians, one of them says, unlike Radiohead: “there's too much showbiz to what we do really”. “Optimistic” embarrassed them because it bridges OK Computer and the new record so plainly, and one of them calls it possibly the weakest song on the album. The bit at its end comes from a Paris tape, recorded over by accident and still there.