Thom Yorke on BBC Radio 2

Thom Yorke visits Jonathan Ross on Radio 2 days before Hail to the Thief is out, the same week he played “Fake Plastic Trees” on Ross's television show. Ross has sung it himself, many times, from a lyric sheet while his wife learned it on guitar, reaching for the high note. A listener who teaches guitar reports that gloomy teenagers still ask him for “My Iron Lung”. The band used to get uptight about songbooks, Yorke says, where professionals paid to work out the chords get them wrong every time, and Jonny Greenwood used to get really upset. For Kid A Yorke gave out no words at all, because he was cheesed off with lazy journalists. He has learned his lesson, and Hail to the Thief will print them.

A song can take “anything from 10 minutes to 2 years”. Radiohead are too scattered to knock an album off in a week the way the White Stripes can, and their sound is simply what five people and Nigel Godrich can manage; Ross thinks Godrich looks like Eurotrash. Asked whether it has always been the same five, Yorke concedes they once had some sax players. The bad times, at the end of Pablo Honey and around OK Computer, came when things ran out of control and they stopped talking to each other, and the plan now is not to get there again.

His son Noah is two years and four months old, once Yorke has corrected himself from two months. He is a pretty good painter, and rides on his father's shoulders following a drum-machine rhythm round town. Yorke wrote “Sail to the Moon” before the boy arrived, in the midst of the first panic of becoming a father, and plays it live to end the visit.