Thom Yorke on BBC 6 Music

Thom Yorke brings Steve Lamacq a pile of records at 6 Music, starting with Sonic Youth's “Cool Thing”. He bought Goo around 1990 and played it at the student disco where he DJed, at about quarter to two, to clear the floor. No one record filled the floor, with PE students asking for the Pogues and ravers from town sitting on the speakers. “I used to throw beer at people if they got really bad.” He wouldn't DJ now; he can't keep up with the vinyl, and it winds him up.

Radiohead have played four weeks in the US this year, and Bonnaroo, with about 80,000 people, gave him the biggest buzz he'd had in years, because the crowd knew the new songs from phone recordings put on YouTube. Yorke keeps asking Jonny Greenwood to play guitar solos at the band's shows this year, and Jonny keeps saying no. The band will record the new songs for the rest of the year in places he won't name, and there are caravans. The Eraser is dedicated to his daughter, Agnes. Talking about fatherhood makes him uncomfortable, but he thinks men pretending they aren't dads is deeply unhealthy. Global warming handed him the finite future the bomb gave his generation as children: “I didn't sleep very much for a few months until I sort of worked out a way of dealing with it.” One way was the record.

R.E.M. pulled him out of heavy metal at 13; the Michael Schenker Group was where he drew the line. His first gig was Joan Armatrading. The best he saw in Oxford was Siouxsie and the Banshees, with Siouxsie on crutches, and he has lately got to tell her so. The worst was New Order, a band he loves, who played 40 minutes and told the town why they never came. He and Stanley Donwood have gone out a couple of times as Sunday painters, once on Dartmoor with only purple and black, and a woman who stopped to ask them the way left very quickly.