Radiohead on Arte

Arte's MusicPlanet 2Nite talks to Radiohead in Paris on a night when only Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood will play, the full band's gear being too complicated. Yorke and Ed O'Brien say Hail to the Thief was about capturing a performance rather than editing and re-editing. After a take, one of them says, he would run into the control room, ask the engineer how long it was, and cut two minutes, having found that the Beatles' songs were all very short. “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”, he thinks, is just over three minutes and feels like ten.

Phil Selway and Colin Greenwood, sitting the show out, are glad of a rare chance to watch Radiohead. In Los Angeles the band did a track a day for a fortnight, something they had never done. One of them describes Radiohead TV as a way to put the spontaneous and the throwaway back, rather than spend a quarter of a million pounds on a video, more than a whole record costs. Asked about a best-of, one of them says Yorke always wanted to call a Radiohead record The Best Driving Music in the World Ever, but somebody else got there first.

Of all the readings of the title, Yorke prefers an idea from Dante, of people who do things so bad that their souls are gone while they are still alive. “I've actually met people like that,” he says, in this business. The record, for him, is a conflict between fury and a tiredness that makes people give up, “and that's when idiots get in charge”. Being called one of the most important bands in the world is something he thinks about while changing his son's nappies.