Ed O'Brien on BBC Radio 1

Ed O'Brien drops in to BBC Radio 1 a few days before Christmas to answer listeners' questions, with enough grey in his beard to be remarked on, and is frank about the new record. After a year off, the band started rehearsing in March and recording in April in their own studio, and the sessions went quickly and felt exciting. Then everyone came back from each break with the same look in the eye. “It's just not good enough.” They have had trouble making decisions, and have been talking to Mark “Spike” Stent, who has worked with Madonna and mixed a lot of records, and plan to reconvene with him in February.

It is not the end of the partnership with Nigel Godrich, he insists, only a way out of a comfort zone after ten years together, the reason you make Kid A after OK Computer. “Big Ideas”, the old song listeners ask after, is now called “Nude” and is the one song they have recorded from a board of 25 or 30, with big bass, very sparse, and a vocal from Thom Yorke he rates highly. “To be honest with you we're not very self-confident at the moment,” he says.

The plan for 2006 is theatres in Europe and Britain in May and America in June, with 10 or 12 new songs and some older ones they would not normally play. The band no longer swap Christmas presents, only cards, now that everyone has children, and fans once bought goats for charity in the band's name. Two years ago a fan site laid out how badly dressed he was, and he concedes he is the worst-dressed member of Radiohead by a long way. He is a bad drunk, by his own account, and his karaoke song is Barry Manilow's “Copacabana”. He hears Mark Ronson's cover of “Just” for the first time on air, loves it, and is confident the band will sign it off.