Radiohead on KCRW

Radiohead tell KCRW's Sounds Eclectic, in front of a studio audience, how learning to play Kid A and Amnesiac live made Hail to the Thief quick. Techniques that had been slow and fraught in the studio could now be taken off the shelf without a thought. One of them spent more or less 24 hours straight cutting up the drums for “Myxomatosis”, which on Kid A would have had the others asking why. Nigel Godrich gives an idea four hours, and if it isn't done by then they move on. The Los Angeles fortnight, before five more weeks in Oxford, was solid work: two evenings off, and one Sunday in the desert.

The freedom of samplers and programming had frozen them at the start of Kid A, after a run on the road from May 1992 to the summer of 1998 in which a month off was the longest break. One of them remembers agreeing to Glastonbury in the OK Computer days and telling the others a few more months was all he had in him, “I'll crack up”. It took him a very long time to recover.

Thom Yorke says much of the new record is about the gap between the people who put themselves in control and the people who allegedly voted for them. Becoming a father made him think of music as a gift rather than something to be angry over, but the core of the record is anger at being powerless to change the future awaiting their children. “It's like how dare you, how dare you destroy our children's future.” Ed O'Brien called the record the end of an era because it was their first easy session, and Godrich told them it was the album they deserved to make. Now O'Brien thinks they must do something completely different, because this is “a young person's game”.