Radiohead on Le Réservoir

Before the show at Le Réservoir in Paris, where only Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood would play, a television interviewer talks first to Yorke and Ed O'Brien about Hail to the Thief, then to two of the others who are sitting the night out. The plan was to work quickly and not think too much, as they had been playing live. Nigel Godrich insisted on Los Angeles, and the first response was to ask how much it would cost, though Ocean Way, where the Beach Boys recorded, won them over.

It was not a decision to make a more direct record, they say. It came out that way because it was put together faster, by capturing a performance instead of editing without end. When the engineer said a take ran five minutes 50, one of them would cut two minutes on the spot, having gone back to the Beatles and found their songs were all short. “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” is just over three minutes, which is scary, because it feels like 10. The title comes partly from Dante, from people who do things so bad that their souls have gone while they are still alive, and that matters more than Bush, whose name is scrawled on every other block in New York anyway.

In the second half the pair explain the stripped-down shows, tried at an American radio station first, and the fortnight in Los Angeles at a track a day, which they had never done. Radiohead TV is meant to put the spontaneous and the throwaway back, when a video can cost a quarter of a million pounds, more than an entire record. They never really fell out, and making Kid A got them talking to each other again. As for a best-of, Yorke always wanted to call a record The Best Driving Music in the World Ever.