Radiohead on France 2

Radiohead talk France 2's Trafic Musique through the road to Hail to the Thief, in English, over pictures of the band. One of them remembers being sure in 1987 that they were the best band in the world, with no record deal, until Pablo Honey showed them otherwise. By the end of OK Computer they were playing good shows and travelling in comfort and getting no fulfilment from it, and it was Thom Yorke, he says, who led the way out and refused to go back.

Yorke spent art school troubled by where art sits: to him most of it is irrelevant, where rock music matters to some people because it is mass-produced, with no aura of an original. A very uptight interviewer once opened by calling the record his Guernica, and he thought it the best thing anyone had said to him, though he doubts Picasso sat down meaning to make a protest. “I wanted the music to make you forget about absolutely everything that was going on,” he says, but the words would not let him. Bob Marley's Uprising showed him that an angry record could still be listened to without a thought for its politics. He had come to dislike his own voice, and straight after the tours for Kid A and Amnesiac, sessions with Björk and with PJ Harvey made him feel better about it. In the studio this time he spent whole days saying nothing but yes to what excited him, where before it had all been no. His dearest ambition is a record that “gets played in a club and everybody jumps up and just goes yeah”.