Thom Yorke on 93.1 XRT

Thom Yorke talks to Marty Lennartz of Chicago's 93.1 XRT in Nashville, the day before Radiohead play Bonnaroo, and admits he knows nothing at all about the city's music; Elvis Costello could tell him more than he needs to know, he says, and then asks for that bit to be cut. Most of the talk is The Eraser, out on XL on 11 July, which he made with Nigel Godrich because he needed someone he trusted to push him. Godrich, he says, can make things sound “fat and shiny whereas I just make them sound like they're exploding”.

He is wary of calling it a solo record. A lot of its beats and sounds were made over the years in the Radiohead studio and gathered on his laptop, and the one coherent piece of music he started with was a set of chords by Jonny Greenwood, which he sampled and rebuilt into the first track. The songs came out of doodles, to his surprise, and to finish the lyrics he had to go and learn to play them. Godrich wanted the voice up front and the record small, true to the little box it came out of. Telling the band was the part he was “absolutely dreading”, and he found them relieved; the others even seem up for trying to play it live.

Radiohead are playing eight or nine new songs a night, and “they're all over YouTube plus my silly dancing”. They went round in circles in the studio for ages, and as soon as they decided to play in front of people everything came into focus in about seven weeks. Godrich is coming out on tour with them for a while, to hear the new songs as someone arriving cold, since what works on stage will not necessarily work in the studio. Told that the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago, where they play next, was built by Louis Sullivan in the 1890s, Yorke's reply is that they forgot to knock it down.