Radiohead on Montreux Jazz festival

Radiohead talk to the camera at the Montreux Jazz Festival a few weeks after Hail to the Thief came out, and they soon turn to how badly the OK Computer years went. Good audiences, fascinating places and travelling well should have added up to a fine life, and didn't. A hit works on egos, Americans pointed at them as the “Creep” guys, and to survive it they shrank into themselves until they stopped talking to each other. Everybody lost confidence, one of them says, and he felt it worst. Playing to people brought it back.

Thom Yorke built Kid A around the idea of hiding, which he took from electronic music, where nobody has an identity unless someone sings. Singing it on tour got him back to the microphone, and so did sessions with PJ Harvey and Björk: he and Björk sang their duet at the same time, and he watched her sing it.

Glastonbury, a week earlier, laid the ghost of a 1997 set none of them enjoyed, and Michael Eavis, who runs the festival, let them camp on his lawn in a big teepee. Before a show there is a ritual now: the setlist, an hour and a half of soundcheck, then three or four hours too tense to eat. With Yorke giving so much on stage, one of them says, the rest have to avoid feeling like “a tin of sardines” opened every night, and it helps when the night is one of two shows in Florence beside a school on its last day of exams. They made Hail to the Thief to catch a band playing the best gigs of its life, and the nerves have gone; now if a song “falls apart for three bars you're not sort of thinking oh my god everyone's going to hate us”. None of them wants to be playing “Creep” in their fifties, and a new Yorke song still feels like the cassettes he sent them from university in Exeter.