Colin Greenwood on CuttingInterviews.com

Colin Greenwood tells CuttingInterviews.com that the rough mixes of Hail to the Thief going round the internet are the wrong ones, rough mixes of the Los Angeles sessions that the band's producer made in February, and the band are unhappy because they will confuse people about the record. “2 + 2 = 5” was the single the band wanted, a firework sent up into the sky, as he puts it, where “There There” is a slower thing that builds over five minutes. They set out to make short songs this time, and the first single turned out to be the longest on the record.

The jokes on this record are shorter, with quicker punchlines, than on the two before, “hence the title”. Kid A and Amnesiac put space between Radiohead and the stadium success promised after OK Computer, which they never wanted. Songs that audiences on the road did not take to stayed off the album, which makes it a democratic record, and the two and a half weeks in the studio afterwards were like having a photograph taken of each song. “We Suck Young Blood” is meant as an afternoon horror film for children, Nosferatu with Punch and Judy puppets.

He will not have the title read as a dig at George Bush alone. Look at the cover, he says: its words are signs from West Hollywood, the ones Stanley Donwood, who painted it, saw there. The title, he says, is about “the theft of people's space and people's time”, and about their privacy and human rights. It is louder and more colourful than the record's other title, The Gloaming. People in power, he says, are using the idea of terrorism to curb civil liberties and get neighbours reporting each other to the police. A friend of a friend in Chicago, he says, has an Iranian-born husband, an architect, who was cleaning out the ditch at the back of his garden when a neighbour rang the police, and the FBI held him for two or three days.