Radiohead on BBC London

Ed O'Brien, Colin Greenwood and Phil Selway sit in with Gary Crowley on BBC London 94.9, after two nights at the Shepherd's Bush Empire, with Hail to the Thief out on Monday 9 June. Selway remembers Pablo Honey as a nightmare in which he froze in the studio. One of them says the studio is “a very honest mirror to where you are”, and the racket of the rehearsal room did not survive it. Colin found the MTV cameras at the second Empire show hard to see past, the lights dimmed for television.

O'Brien gives each record an hour of the day. The Bends is Saturday night before going out, OK Computer a warm summer evening at ten, Kid A four in the morning, when the metabolism has slowed down. One of them heard The Bends again a year ago, driving from Oxford to London, and was struck by how punky it was; they were recording it at RAK Studios in 1994 when Blur's slick Parklife came out, while they tore their hair out and turned the guitars up. Their first London show, as they remember it, was further back: a pay-to-play night at the Rock Garden in Covent Garden in 1988, where the only way to get a soundcheck was to pay for the video. There were eight of them in the band then; the other three, one of them says, went off to proper lives and careers.

Hail to the Thief is where O'Brien thinks they found their swagger, and caught it on tape for the first time at the end of “Go to Sleep”. Thom Yorke brought in sparse songs written over two years, the band spent six weeks arranging them, and they met a Christmas deadline. Nigel Godrich took them to Ocean Way in Los Angeles, where they did a track a day; “Sail to the Moon” took about eight run-throughs in two hours. The worry about Los Angeles was coming home riding a Harley with long hair. Radiohead TV carries the spirit of their studio webcasts, with films sent in by fans, one of them Ed Holdsworth's for “Sit Down. Stand Up”.

The title came from a Michael Moore book, and people keep asking if it is an anti-Bush album. Radiohead do not pin their colours that way, one of them says, “we're not single issue people”, though George W. Bush is one of those they should rightly fear.