Thom Yorke on MTV

Thom Yorke, cut together for MTV in the autumn Kid A comes out, says that after OK Computer he felt like someone in one of those 1970s film scenes who walks into a room of mirrors reflecting each other, until there are thousands of him. The band had worked together so long that they needed to go away and rebuild, and to break the cycle of nine months on tour. He enjoys playing live, but he likes writing and recording more, because those are what will last. The empty house he bought came with a ghost, and a lightning strike wiped a minidisc he had filled with songs and half-formed ramblings. The ghost was trapped in the plaster, he says, and left when the plaster came out.

The 30-second blips came from realising that “shooting videos was basically making long adverts”, so the band made adverts and were honest about it. He writes now by taking things people bring him on a laptop, playing them loud in his room and singing along. Their producer holds a meeting every day at midday, a bit of civilised Englishness that has gone by the evening. The name Kid A is what a sequence happened to be called when he found it by accident on a simple sequencer. “I cannot get my head round the fact it's number one in America at all,” he says; the band had a glass of champagne and looked at each other.