Thom Yorke on NY Times podcast

Thom Yorke talks to Jon Pareles of the New York Times while Radiohead are in New York, playing new songs with no album and no label, shortly before The Eraser comes out. After the band's last show, at Coachella in 2004, there was no record company and no deadline, and the relief soon turned. With no end point, it began to do their heads in. He lost his confidence in all of it for about a year. “I used to bore my friends stupid in the pub.”

The Eraser grew out of sounds he had built up on his laptop, which Nigel Godrich made him isolate and tidy until they became songs, and a lot of it is him trying to pick himself up off the floor. It annoys him how polite his voice sounds when the words are acid, but Godrich won't let him rough it up. “Well, I'm sorry, mate, but that's what you got.” Yorke has made his peace with it as the trumpet he was given.

The band got going again when they left a studio that was going nowhere to rehearse for a tour two and a half months off, four or five hours a day, with nobody self-conscious. “It felt like being 16 again.” Playing so much unreleased material every night is the point, and they know a gig has gone well when the new songs sound better than the old. He doesn't mind crowd recordings of the new songs going round online; without the internet, he thinks, “it would be complete murder”. He has no wish to fight a record business he thinks is collapsing anyway. A band that wants money should take out a bank loan and license its records, he says, and nobody should be signing six-album deals with a major.