Thom Yorke on P3 Pop

Thom Yorke tells P3 Pop that for about a year he had serious writer's block, because from where he sat Radiohead were damned whatever came after OK Computer. In the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions an idea would thrill him and ten minutes later he would be tearing it to shreds. “All I knew was every time I picked up a guitar nothing happened,” he says. What broke it was the country round a house he has in England, which he won't place. He spent days walking there alone, the music came out of the land, and “the words were coming out of the stones on the ground”.

Live, the box Jonny Greenwood uses as a drum machine on “Idioteque” speeds up, slows down and drops out, and Yorke doesn't know why, though he guesses a voltage surge might set it off. Some nights they finish the song with an apology. The fury of other bands at Kid A shocked him. He thinks they felt threatened, the way a new Aphex Twin record makes him want to give up. The bands that moved him live were the ones who didn't care. At a radio station's promotional show in Hollywood, on a revolving stage after Oasis, Sonic Youth used their 20-minute slot for one song from Washing Machine, the room hated it, yet it was the most exciting thing he had ever seen.

The lyrics stayed off both sleeves because people would have jumped on them and misread them. The booklet hidden in Kid A, his writing and Stanley Donwood's, explains both records better, he says. The words of “Everything in Its Right Place” are wallpaper, which is why he repeats them; the ones that fly by in “Idioteque” are the ones he is proudest of. What is wrong with the music industry, he says, is that “it tends to wipe out the people that it should be looking after and it tends to look after the people that should really be wiped out”.

One of the few things that completely changed how he thought about music was Squarepusher and Aphex Twin's “Freeman Hardy & Willis Acid”, which came on John Peel's show while he was driving and made him stop the car. His son is seven months old and has made him less willing to tear things up. He is taking a break while Jonny works on a film, and for the first time he is proud to be in the band. If he chills out much more, he warns, he'll start writing lovers rock.