Radiohead on Hail to the Thief interview CD

All five members of Radiohead talk through Hail to the Thief, track by track, for the label's promotional interview CD. They chose the title well before the record came out into what they call a charged moment, and say sensationalism is not their style. To Thom Yorke it names the rise of doublethink and intolerance. The other title, The Gloaming, is in the artwork, but calling the album that would have done the music no justice, because it sounds bright and full of energy.

Yorke handed the others three CDs of demos in February 2002. They rehearsed, tried the songs on stage in Spain and Portugal, then spent a fortnight at Ocean Way in Los Angeles, where Nigel Godrich set the rule of a track a day. Tracking took seven weeks, against months for OK Computer and years for Kid A. “2 + 2 = 5” was the sound test on the first morning and would have been thrown out as too silly had it been anything else. Phil Selway drummed in a booth he likens to a broom cupboard, off a big 1950s room hung with photographs of Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.

“Where I End and You Begin” started years earlier on a QY70, a cheap sequencer that looks like a calculator, during a three-day Land Rover trip through the Negev desert that Yorke and Jonny Greenwood took with their partners. “The Gloaming” grew from a locked-groove tape loop of Jonny Greenwood's. “I just thought it was the most amazing thing that Jonny had ever written and I just said I'll have that,” Yorke says, and he played it driving country roads at dusk. “I Will” was first rehearsed in 1998 for an Amnesty International show and beat them four times in the Kid A sessions; one version, played backwards, became “Like Spinning Plates”. Yorke calls it a love song and “the angriest thing I've ever written”.

“A Punchup at a Wedding” grew partly from a review of their Oxford show, one of the biggest days of his life, that tore into the audience as white middle-class students. He has read nothing written about the band since. “There There” did not work in Los Angeles, and when Godrich played him the finished mix he cried for ages. “I just thought it was the best thing we'd ever done.”