Radiohead on MusiquePlus

Thom Yorke, Jonny and Colin Greenwood take questions on MusiquePlus, some of them from a studio audience, and Yorke traces the title Hail to the Thief to a British news story suggesting the American election had been rigged. From then on he felt the world had gone absurd and deeply crazy, and “I explain it a different way every day of the week”. The record was meant to be The Gloaming, the old word for twilight, when the animals near his home run for cover. For a while it was going to be Vote for Me, until Ed O'Brien pointed out that the only way to get elected was to suck up to corporate money.

During the sessions Yorke went to two marches against the Iraq war, in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and was amazed at their energy, which Fox and CNN simply cut out. Campaigning with Jubilee 2000, the campaign to cancel poor countries' debts, wore him out: politicians met him because he arrived with millions of signatures, then did nothing, and the papers cut out the central point. He switched off for a long time, but under the record is pure blind anger. His son Noah, two years and four months old, has made him less self-involved, though he doubts that generation can put things right in time, with about 20 years left.

He once worked as a care worker in a mental hospital. One of the things that offends him most is hearing Radiohead's music called depressing, because he suffers from depression, it should not be a stigma, and a lot of creative power comes from it. Michael Stipe looked after him when he needed it, and he is seeing him tomorrow. “I'm lucky that he's my mate.”

The recording, one of them says, was done in two weeks after two or three months of rehearsing and writing, the way Captain Beefheart's band made Trout Mask Replica. One of them remembers starting Kid A in Copenhagen in the middle of December (the sessions in fact began in Paris in January 1999, and reached Copenhagen in March), sure they were a cold northern European band who needed darkness and snow, which was nonsense; this time they wanted sunshine, and made a good record in it. In Los Angeles they hired brightly coloured Minis and drove them in formation down Sunset Boulevard like The Italian Job, and it was great, except that someone at the roadside shouted “Oh look, there's Austin Powers” at one of them. Asked whether the brothers keep secrets, Jonny says “Colin got me in the band so I'm always grateful.”