Thom Yorke on IFC

Thom Yorke tells IFC it took him a while to work out how to play The Eraser on his own, because it was all made on laptops. “The Clock”, sliced-up bits of guitar on the record, has turned into a skiffle tune. “I would never ever play skiffle, why would I play skiffle,” he says, but it works.

Early on, he notices he hasn't sworn yet, which is unusual for him. He sees no harm in it, and finds the gobbledegook of the news media far more offensive. The single edit of “Black Swan” drops the swear word from its key line, and he and Nigel Godrich had a laugh for a couple of hours covering it with trumpets, but he can't see why a taxi driver may say it and a song may not. He isn't doing MTV, and is quite proud of that.

Global warming, too big for any one person to grasp, runs through the whole record, he says, and he was trying “in my puny way” to deal with it. When he first got involved with the Big Ask, a Friends of the Earth campaign, lobby groups tied to the oil companies were paying the one or two doubting scientists they could find to pose as the equals of tens of thousands who disagreed. Through the campaign he has seen Friends of the Earth working behind the scenes, writing letters and hustling MPs, not “waving flags or holding big concerts or any of that rubbish”. His own trade burns a lot of carbon, down to the truck drivers who leave their engines running because the cab is where they live. Without national and international law, nothing will change.

Making The Eraser one to one with Godrich got his confidence back, and was mostly an excuse to hang out. Now Godrich is helping Radiohead work out how to record the songs they have been playing live.