Thom Yorke on WBCN

Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood sit in with the presenter Nick Carter at WBCN the night before their North American tour opens at the Tweeter Center, a show the station will broadcast. Asked how he got back into the guitar, Yorke says he plays more piano than guitar on Hail to the Thief, which is a joke, as he knows three tricks on the piano. “I did buy one of them chord books as well,” he says.

They wanted computer work on this record and didn't do it, and Yorke found it incredibly frustrating to set out to make one record and end up with the total opposite. Setting out to be different is no answer either; do that, one of them says, “then you're just going to sound the same”. Nigel Godrich was at his best this time, they say, handed finished songs instead of watching them learn their equipment, which was part of the trouble with Kid A and Amnesiac. Greenwood says he and Yorke often start recording a song with opposite ideas of how it should end up.

Asked by a listener which kitchen utensil they would play in concert, they settle on the fridge, for its very quiet sounds heard over a long time. Greenwood's best place to fly a kite is Port Meadow in Oxford. Stanley Donwood had been in his space at their studio that morning, painting a cow, marked up like a butcher's chart with the companies that won the contracts to rebuild Iraq, and Yorke says he shouldn't have said so. The first idea for this record's sleeve was erotic topiary, hedges cut to order and photographed, which Donwood never did.

Setlists are made two or three hours before a show. They played “Creep” in Japan with five minutes' warning, and Yorke likes singing it now, “because it's like doing a cover”. Requests help, as long as it isn't “Coke Babies” or something as obscure, which they simply cannot play. Since a radio on stage picks up the local stations, they will try tuning it to WBCN tomorrow night, while the station is broadcasting them.