Radiohead on MTV

MTV catches Radiohead on a run of small warm-up shows before Hail to the Thief, this one in London, “therefore we're terrified”. A whole tour of warm-ups felt natural after the studio, going from six or seven people in a room to a few hundred, and one of them calls the shows their pre-season friendlies. The new songs had been on the internet since they toured them the summer before, so after the first night people knew most of them. The tracks that leaked from the record itself felt more of a shame, because that was not how they wanted the album heard first.

They made it the way they worked as teenagers playing village halls around Oxfordshire, taping rehearsals and taking them home to decide what worked, then two or three months of rehearsing and two weeks of recording. One of them has not felt this kind of energy since The Bends. With six albums and the B-sides to choose from they change the set a lot, being “contrary buggers” who will not play the jukebox, and “Fake Plastic Trees”, which had started to feel like trotting out a greatest hit, means something again. The posters the band put up for the record copy the signs tied on with string along the drive from their studio into Oxford, offering a fortune for a day's work, and in Los Angeles someone took them for auditions to find new pop stars.

Thom Yorke keeps his politics in the music. Someone gave him a tape of an interview with John Coltrane, never printed, in which Coltrane says he got into politics for a while and decided to channel it down his horn, and that is how Yorke feels. Becoming a father has coloured his view, much as he used to hate people who said so. “The people in charge globally are maniacs,” he says, and in 50 years his son might have nothing to live for.