Thom Yorke on BBC 6 Music

Thom Yorke is Tom Robinson's studio guest on 6 Music's evening sequence, the week before Hail to the Thief comes out. Yorke puts the band's melancholy down to his voice, which would sound sad on a four-on-the-floor track at 168 beats per minute. Robinson calls Phil Selway the band's secret weapon, and Yorke agrees. Selway had done his back in before a gig a couple of days earlier, and the difference was really scary.

“2 + 2 = 5” was cut as a test the moment they got to the Los Angeles studio, at three in the afternoon, the band on their fourth coffee with nothing to eat. “It was kind of like a joke song,” he says, and he never expected it to make the record. They had two weeks there at a track a day, in a studio where the Beach Boys had worked, and hired matching Minis with Union Jacks to drive in. A song, he says, is “a little bit like videotape”, recording one moment, and if you miss it the song may not make sense to you again for years. They are still struggling, he says, with why they wrote “Lift”. Before the sessions he sang with Björk, whom he calls a fantastic musician and totally terrifying.

He calls politics and music a very poisonous mix and tried not to write about it, but it got into the record anyway. “Punch-Up at a Wedding” started with a review of a show that, finding nothing to slag off, slagged off the audience as students instead, and he no longer reads anything written about the band. “A Wolf at the Door” he calls “just a series of nightmares”. When music is good, he says, “it's got love in it and it's got sex in it”.