Thom Yorke on Triple J

Triple J's Top Shelf reaches Thom Yorke on a morning when Heathrow has been shut by a terror plot, and the presenter suggests the state of the world is where The Eraser comes from. Yorke gets twitchy when it is put that way, though he admits he is obsessed by things like infrastructure collapse, and he keeps his fingers in his ears about reviews. Making it away from the band was the point. “I don't feel stuck inside the Radiohead thing anymore,” he says.

He took it to XL rather than EMI on gut instinct, since it was made out of everyone's sight. Radiohead have no deal and, for now, do not care. “We haven't run out of cash yet so when we do we'll be calling.” Promoting one record while making the next got confusing, and he caught himself finding the same chord progression in both; he will not try to wear two heads again.

“And It Rained All Night” goes back to a major flood he was caught up in, which he will not describe, and to a downpour in New York with raindrops so big the streets were awash by morning. He will not explain the lines of “Black Swan” either. Fatherhood fed the record only in the sense of worrying that his children have no future.

If The Eraser wins the Mercury Prize, the £20,000 goes to Friends of the Earth, and the band will wind him up about the kiss of death. He stands by refusing to meet Tony Blair, given the government's line on nuclear power, and when asked why he does not run for office himself, he says he is a musician. What disturbs him most is that people his age do not care, and he blames politics, which is now “the job of administering for corporate interests” rather than representing the people.