Radiohead on BBC Radio 1

Steve Lamacq plays tracks from Amnesiac on his Radio 1 show with Thom Yorke, Ed O'Brien and Colin Greenwood in the studio, and three fans in the studio asking questions of their own. One, a first-year graphic design student, has brought Amnesiac artwork he made from one quote in an interview and from a film about a man losing his memory who writes on his arm. Another asks why they did not split up. Nearly splitting up has been there ever since they signed, one of them says, and it is a good thing, because it means “you don't carry on doing it for the wrong reasons”. The other answer is that the studio time was booked and they would have paid for half of it anyway.

Teased for coming out of his shell, Yorke says the aftermath of Kid A was “a real shock to the system”. Swapping guitars for computers was the easy part, one of them says; the hard part was working out what everyone would do instead, since sitting in front of a laptop all day waiting for something to happen is not much of a musical life. Another describes a crisis of confidence in music itself while those records were made, when nothing moved him and every sound he made was rubbish, and the thrill now of picking up a guitar again.

“Knives Out” was in the set in Barcelona but did not fit on Kid A, and someone in the room did not like it anyway. They would love to record “True Love Waits” as something other than a song on acoustic guitar, but every time they start a version they end up with a different song, and the attempts fill a section of their tape store. Official live recordings, like Pearl Jam's, appeal, but some poor person would have to sit through the lot and pick the good ones. Next time, one of them says, it would help to go in with “a rough clue what we're gonna do”.