Ed O'Brien

Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway are caught by a TV interviewer straight after a Friday night show in 2001 and walked down a corridor while she asks. Does Thom Yorke get a sore neck from two hours of head-shaking? Those muscles are well developed by now, they say, after a good few years of it. The night before they had seen Janet Jackson, the polar opposite of what they do, part Bambi one moment and dominatrix the next. The nasty looks on stage have gone, replaced by winking, and the touring pace is laid back, a day on and a day off. Yorke, one of them reports, is the band's clothes horse.

Kid A and Amnesiac divided people, and an extreme reaction either way is what they wanted. Nick Hornby had written in the New Yorker that he wanted them back on straight pop tunes. Fair comment, one of them allows, since the records take a few listens, but he would rather Hornby went back to writing about football. Asked what world they want to live in, one of them wants one where the people making what we buy are not ripped off and free markets are not the be-all and end-all. They admit they were not good at talking to each other for a long time. The tour runs to early October with nothing planned after, though they will consider six months of dance routines if a choreographer gets in touch.