Thom Yorke on VIVA

Thom Yorke talks to VIVA's Fast Forward at a festival, the interviewer in wellingtons. Finishing Hail to the Thief was a nightmare, he says: the recording was spontaneous fun, then the mixing went wrong and he had to start thinking about the British press. He loved the record, hated it by the end and cannot listen to it again, though playing it live gives it back to him. The songs, he says, are beamed to him on a certain frequency.

After OK Computer he heard other bands imitating Radiohead and found the sound self-indulgent, and he came to see that many of his problems were outside him, not inside. He argues his generation has cut itself off from politics while governments hurl it towards oblivion, and says the title just states the obvious: the most powerful country on earth is run by someone who stole an election. He was scared of the trouble that would bring, and is relieved there has been none. His favourite piece of political doublespeak is “regime change”, which is called war.

He remembers a protester in San Francisco, the weekend he played Neil Young's Bridge School benefit, naked but for a model missile, and a rare protest in Los Angeles during the mixing. Blaming one man rather than the system, he says, is a trap. He keeps cynicism away by thinking about politics for about ten minutes a day, and is listening to Liars and Modeselektor.