Radiohead on XFM

Ed O'Brien, Colin Greenwood and Phil Selway come into XFM to answer listeners' emails at the end of a short run of shows that started in Dublin and finished at Shepherd's Bush. Dublin was forgiving; Belfast was a bad show and a reality check. At Manchester, Thom Yorke said “happy birthday Phil” into “Everything in Its Right Place”, Jonny Greenwood sampled it, and it carried on through the song, and then the whole audience joined in. Asked if it brought a tear, Selway says, “I think that was the smoke on stage actually.” In Edinburgh O'Brien gave out the Celtic score from the stage, forgetting the people at home taping the match.

The set is picked over lunch, on whatever they fancy that night. They remember asking for U2's setlist on the PopMart tour and being shown a laminate; Bono, they say, needed ten shows' notice to change it. For the new record Yorke sent them three CDs, from laptop electronics to acoustic versions of songs from the past three years, and they lived with them for two months. The songs stopped being his once they rehearsed them. At Ocean Way in Los Angeles, a room hung with photographs of Sinatra and Judy Garland and full of German microphones from the 1940s, they booked 14 days and worked 13, a track a day, and had fun in a studio for the first time. The confidence came from having done the hard part on Kid A and Amnesiac, and one of them calls Kid A “probably the most pure record that we've made”.

O'Brien stopped his online diary once he knew people were reading it, because a diary written self-consciously is not a diary any more. Glastonbury in 1997 was “the most terrifying experience of our playing career”, and this time they would like to enjoy it. Selway probably won't run another marathon, he says, because running that far isn't natural; he ran the year Paula Radcliffe first did, and came in after her. Their six-album deal with Parlophone is done, with no complaints, and what they want from the next one waits until the touring is over.