Thom Yorke on XFM

Thom Yorke is John Kennedy's guest on XFM's Exposure in the week “Harrowdown Hill” is out as a single, with The Eraser up for the Mercury Prize. He calls it not quite a solo record because it grew from years of bits that never made it into Radiohead, and having made it he no longer feels trapped by what Radiohead are supposed to be. With their record deal over, Jonny Greenwood argued that they needed a whip cracked over them. Yorke disagreed at first and now sees the point: with five people, everyone has to be made to focus. The end of the deal blew their minds for a while, because they were used to something to kick against. “Especially me. I have to have something, even if it's the wall.”

“And It Rained All Night” began as a riff made one night in New York and met a long rambling poem of his. The vocal is the only take he did, sung while he was sure it was failing, on a night of a full moon, with breaks to look at it through a telescope until about six in the morning.

He tries not to put anger straight into songs, but there is anger in “Harrowdown Hill”. The choruses were written before Dr David Kelly, the weapons expert on Iraq, died; one day he woke up and realised the song was about it, and a close friend who knew something of what had happened talked him out of hiding that. He calls the Hutton inquiry into Kelly's death a whitewash. Singing it, he had the poll tax riots in his head, though he was not at those. “I have seen people have their legs broken by police horses in front of my eyes,” he says. What he cannot understand is why Tony Blair, the prime minister at the time, who in his view fabricated evidence to take Britain into a war, is still there. Even so, a record with this many love songs is not a political record to him. The music that excites him most mixes it all up, like Peter Gabriel's “Games Without Frontiers”, one of his top five songs ever, which sounds like nonsense over the best groove there is.

In session he plays “Skip Divided” and “Analyse” on a Rhodes, beating time on its lid, because nobody could get a piano up six flights of stairs. “Skip Divided” is about dislocation more than love, and when he sings it he pictures slick black oil, and sex.