Thom Yorke on NME

Thom Yorke talks to NME for the first time in five years, a few weeks before Amnesiac comes out, sitting in the sun in the courtyard of his management's office in Oxfordshire. Sylvia Patterson writes it up for the 19 May issue. He just got sick of holding grudges, he says, and the people involved have all left. Kid A was never meant to be avant garde. Guitar music just wasn't turning them on, and he misses it now. Halfway through, the tape runs out, to his delight.

“Knives Out” is not a goodbye to the music industry. It is partly the businessman who walks out on his wife and children, and partly the thousand-yard stare of someone close to you who is going to die. Yes, it took 373 days to record songs that were straight-ahead all along, because they lost their nerve and had to be “arse about face” with everything else first. The sessions nearly split the band, over the running orders among other things, and the fame after OK Computer did his head in. Asked why he still makes music, he takes 19 seconds. “Personally speaking, I have to use music to sort things out. Because that's what I do.”

He tells of handing in the Jubilee 2000 petition in Cologne, and of coverage that lumped the debt campaigners in with violence in the City of London while not one reporter talked about debt. The guilt he once called his driving force he now says was a joke. He has a son, Noah, and a house in Dorset, and is not taking himself so seriously any more, because he hasn't the time.