Thom Yorke on BBC 6 Music

Thom Yorke picks an hour of records for Tom Robinson's evening sequence on 6 Music on Christmas Eve, at the end of a long year of enormous shows, and owns up to the sleigh bells on “Airbag”. With the track nearly finished he sat there a little worse for wear asking for sleigh bells, “and everyone in the room is going oh God”. They tried them, and they sounded great.

He denies a jihad against meat-and-potatoes rock; the band object only to its worthiness, and listen to more hip-hop than guitar rock. He and Colin Greenwood are Madlib freaks, and he explains why. A lot of modern hip-hop cuts a drum part up beat by beat, because software makes it easy, when “the best thing to do is to cut up whole sections of a drum rhythm”, so it breathes. Dudley Perkins's “Mama”, made with Madlib, is the most strung-out singing he has ever heard.

Low, who toured Europe with Radiohead, told him to say what he thought in America, where he had been scared to take a record called Hail to the Thief. The title barely came up. He found the country split down the middle and angrier than ever, and Salt Lake City was one of the best shows of the tour.

He heard Silver Apples at the Earls Court after-show, with Kieran Hebden of Four Tet on the decks, and from a distance took it for an outtake from Remain in Light. Felix da Housecat's record, which Yorke heard at Beck's house, where Beck was playing it to death, is, he says, the number one that should have been everywhere and wasn't. Autechre turned down his fan letter asking them to tour, saying people wouldn't get it; what they do, he says, is let the computers think for themselves, “which is a truly scary thought”. He ends the hour on Bob Dylan's “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands”, “the most angry love song I've ever heard”.