Thom Yorke on WHYY-FM

Thom Yorke tells Terry Gross on Fresh Air that “Creep” was the first vocal he came out of thinking he might do this for a living. The Eraser is out that week, and Gross takes him back through Radiohead, by way of a school band that rehearsed endlessly and hardly ever played a show.

Money from The Bends bought them portable equipment of their own for OK Computer, and recording became part of writing. They could not physically play “No Surprises” as slowly as it wanted, so they used the old Beatles trick of recording faster and slowing the tape, and he sang over the strung-out result. Gross points out the pitch would shift. “Being in concert pitch has never been a problem for me,” he says, since he has no idea what it is.

He talks plainly about depression, destructive and creative at once, and says he discusses it in public because he is tired of music being called depressing. “What, you don't get depressed? What, your whole life is roses, is it?” By the end of the long OK Computer tour the songs had gone stale, and rather than fake it he would stand and stare at the audience for half a minute, which he knows was an insult to people who had paid. The honest thing, he says, would have been to get on a train and go home.

He was born with one eye shut and had five or six operations, the last of which went wrong, and he admits to being a bit of a psycho as a child, throwing other kids around. His ear for electronics came from DJing at college every Friday, where a request for the Pogues might get a Warp record played loud enough to clear the floor. “Idioteque” was Jonny Greenwood's idea. Yorke took 40 seconds from the middle of a 50-minute DAT Jonny made one afternoon in their studio, cut them up and wrote the song around them. The opening piano on The Eraser is Jonny's chords too, caught on a £20 dictaphone because Yorke could not work out what they were.