Thom Yorke on XFM

Thom Yorke takes John Kennedy through Hail to the Thief on XFM's Exposure, six days before the album is out. “I Will” is the shortest song on the record and the angriest thing he has written. It goes back to an obsession through the Kid A years with the first Gulf War, and the missile-camera footage of a bunker later admitted to have been a shelter full of women and children. An earlier, programmed version was a disaster, but Radiohead turned the tape over and it became “Like Spinning Plates”.

“Sail to the Moon”, words and music, was done in ten minutes. Its subtitle, “Brush the Cobwebs out of the Sky”, comes from somewhere he cannot place, he says, until he remembers: Bagpuss, Oliver Postgate's children's programme. “Backdrifts” took years of samples cut and recut, and began on a bullet train in Japan that ran into a snowdrift, the snow so deep it almost buried cars.

Yorke looked up “gloaming”, the album's other title, and found an out-of-fashion word for twilight. “In fact the only time you see it is on dodgy folk records,” he says, then tries to dig himself out. The word went with a spell of driving country roads at twilight, alone with loud music on, in a light he calls the colours of the record. The song “The Gloaming” itself, he says, he did not really realise the meaning of when he wrote it. “Every time we play it live now, I feel really strongly that it's about the rise of fascism and the rise of intolerance and bigotry and fear.”

He meant to replace the words of “Go to Sleep”, which he took for nonsense, until he read them back and found they held together; he calls them “the lyrics I'm most proud of on the record”. “Myxomatosis” is a short story cut up, the only one he has written, and at university he blagged his way on to a creative writing course to get out of reading Spenser.

The words of “A Wolf at the Door” are whatever was in the carrier bag of notes he walked around with for two days, which is why he thinks it should have been called “Bagman”. Its talk of blackmail brings him to a gagging order once served on him, indirectly, over something he cannot discuss. “Gagging orders are the most unpleasant legal invention known to man,” he says.