Thom Yorke on RTÉ 2fm

Thom Yorke talks to 2fm in Ireland as Hail to the Thief comes out, and says the title began with a story on PM, Radio 4's evening news programme, about an earlier president who bought his son an election; the son was called the thief. PM ran it just after the first claims that the Florida votes had been rigged. He admits he is terrified of what will happen when they take the record to America. The record itself, he says, is more about his son's future than the absurdity of the moment: how little say anyone has over it, from Kyoto to Iraq.

After Kid A and Amnesiac, with too much staring at computer screens and building things from bits, they wanted performances, people in a room making things happen on the spot, and booked two weeks in the studio to start. Computers were used, but whoever used one had to switch it on in the same room as the guitar and the piano. Fatherhood has lightened him up, and he enjoyed singing again; he hears the record as more joyful, even shiny.

On Jubilee 2000, the debt campaign, he calls Bono an extremely persuasive man who could walk into any room and get results. “My trouble was I was a little bit too happy to shout at them,” Yorke says. He believed the IMF and the World Bank had to be dismantled, which could not be said inside the campaign. Global economics is his bedtime reading, and he knows it can poison his songwriting.

When the family moved to the countryside he grabbed the old Beatles records and was struck by how short they are, even the weird ones, and “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”, he says, “blew my head off”. “Exit Music”, written to order for Romeo + Juliet from a clip of about ten minutes of the film, was him trying to do a Johnny Cash prison song. The next record, he thinks, may get made over the course of touring this one, and might sound nothing like it.