Radiohead on MTV

MTV sits the band down in 2001 with viewers' questions sent in by email and QuickTime, and the tape runs on through the adverts into a Virgin Megastore broadcast. One question puts it that Radiohead are the only major-label band allowed to take risks this size, and asks why. OK Computer selling four and a half million copies gives them leeway, one of them says, but nobody who sells that many has to go into a studio and play around with noise. They had talked about records like these before they were signed, and next to what they listen to, Kid A and Amnesiac are pretty mild. Had they wanted to be obscure they would have done a much better job of it.

None of them really enjoyed the last American tour, in arenas at the end of OK Computer, one of them says, though there were moments. Now one of them would rather be Miles Davis, back to the audience, listening to the band. Thom Yorke tells a fan that the revolving doors of “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” came from a corridor like Alice's in Wonderland, a place he stayed in his head for six months, dreading every door. The odd spellings on Amnesiac's track list are down to an old typewriter, a hurry and, one of them says, never having learned to type. OK Computer's only concept was its title, and hearing it called a concept album is “frankly terrifying”. The new studio is a bomb site.

Their advice to the band of 1991 is not to record “Pop Is Dead”. Jonny Greenwood had the SETI program, which listens for broadcasts from space, running while they were making a record; one of them copied the Voyager probe's music list into a notebook, and one read Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles halfway through making it.