Thom Yorke on Triple J

Thom Yorke is back in Australia, and Triple J asks about the new material. There isn't any, he says. They are at the bit before that, noises and bits of gear and endless tinkering, and every fifth day something might come of it. Everyone is moving at their own pace and deliberately not sharing, except him and Jonny Greenwood, who still sit down with two guitars and a cup of coffee because that is the normal bit. They have fulfilled their contract with EMI, which makes it a good time to step out of the music business and watch, and a record company culling its workforce to please its shareholders does not impress him.

Asked what Radiohead have left to prove, he says the best things that ever happened to him, much as it annoys him, all involved the others. Hail to the Thief was a last try at being normal and cooperative with the press, a way of exorcising the ghost of Meeting People Is Easy, and he found not all of it could be exorcised. The interviewer last met him in 1998 and ended up in that film. At home in Oxford people are nice to him now, and in America following the band has become like the Grateful Dead.

To be consumed by one's own myth, he says, is a circle of Dante's Inferno, like Elvis surrounded by people who would fly anywhere with him for a burger. He feels sorry for the Strokes, and remembers that Michael Stipe was good to him. As for Coachella and the Pixies, he is terrified: “I didn't want to do it,” he says. “I'm not going on after them.” Radiohead do play directly after the Pixies, and he expects to spend their set backstage, puking.