Phil Selway on BBC 6 Music

Phil Selway and Colin Greenwood answer listeners' questions for Gideon Coe in Radiohead's week as 6 Music's selectors, just after a tour that began in Dublin in May and ended there in December, with the bus dropping them at the same hotel. “Sit Down. Stand Up” went through more guises than anything on Hail to the Thief. It was stuck in production rehearsals until a sequence Jonny Greenwood wrote gave them an angle on it, then changed again live and again in the studio.

Glastonbury this summer was the opposite of 1997, Selway says, which was the weekend of the mud and the endless rain and of the strung-out tension in their set. Kid A, one of them says, was the hardest album to make, with everything that had built up from Pablo Honey to OK Computer working its way out, and “Dollars and Cents” grew from a jam in Copenhagen at the start of those sessions, which were meant to loosen them up. Jeff Buckley's influence, one of them says, was his band playing loosely round a beautiful voice, and Radiohead are lucky to have one of those too.

On “Everything in Its Right Place” and “The Gloaming”, with Jonny and Ed O'Brien capturing loops of what is being played, the rhythm section has to hold on. “The rhythm section sticks together, that's why I stand so close to Phil,” Colin says. Asked yet again what the man says at the end of the “Just” video, one of them answers that what he said was that people should make up their own minds. Jamie Cullum's cover of “High and Dry” is flattering, and since Radiohead no longer play it, one of them says, at least it earns them some royalties. After the EMI deal, what comes next is time off.