Radiohead on Spinner

Chris Douridas talks to Ed O'Brien and Colin Greenwood for Spinner.com's Ground Zero, in the dining room of a lodge in Park City, Utah, during Sundance, where they had just played four songs from Amnesiac. One of them took up snowboarding two days earlier, or as he puts it, took up falling over.

Amnesiac came from the same 18 months of recording as Kid A, and they insist it is not outtakes. They spent a week working from four in the afternoon until eleven or twelve at night on the Kid A running order, trying to fit these songs in, and couldn't make an order work. They didn't want a double album either.

One of them calls “Pyramid Song” probably the best song they have recorded. Yorke sang and played piano while Phil Selway drummed, in one take, and then strings went on. The idea came in Copenhagen, where Yorke saw a museum exhibition of Egyptian tomb art, people being ferried across the river of death, and went back and wrote the song at the piano. They had an amazing version on DAT they couldn't use and spent months piecing it together again.

Strings had been off limits because guitar bands use them to sound like “November Rain”. With the new songs sounding cinematic and the band at Sundance, the talk turns to film: a big-budget film is not for them, but working for a director who has the final say appeals. “No one ever does that to us nowadays.”