Radiohead on KROQ

Radiohead come to Studio A at the Capitol Records tower in Hollywood for KROQ's Breakfast with Radiohead, after their Southern California shows, to take questions from fans in the room and play a few songs. The Hollywood Bowl felt like a small gig, one of them says, though it holds about 18,000. “Creep” was in the set that weekend; songs come and go, one of them says, and “No Surprises” went unplayed for about two years until they tried it one night and it sounded good again.

A fan in a band asks how to make it when you don't sound like everyone else. The first answer is not to suck. The second is that corporations “tend to eat themselves whole and die out”, so wait five years. One of them tells of a man who pinned him down after a show, ten years in a band and getting nowhere, who had never played his songs to anyone; without an audience, he says, you never know what you're doing.

Thom Yorke says having a son made him angry about “the monkeys that are in charge of that future”, and that for a few years he had lost sight of what the band were for until the others made it simple again. Singing with Björk and PJ Harvey, as he finished the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions, was a relief. “I did what I was told.” Would Radiohead need all five? It probably would, one of them says.

Asked which other musicians are doing truly worthwhile work, they start with Squarepusher, Madlib and Four Tet. Told David Bowie has called them the greatest band in the world, and asked for theirs, they say they are not really into bands. Yorke wants them to loosen up the way they work on the next record, perhaps releasing records in other ways to take the pressure off the album. One of them now thinks of his songs as beamed to him, like the stories Philip K. Dick, on loads of speed, believed an angel told him; he has the angel, he says, without the speed. Asked where he would be if he had never made it as a musician, Yorke says a mental home, and the host notes he does not seem to be joking.