Thom Yorke on BBC Two

The Culture Show opens by asking Thom Yorke why he is so miserable, a question the interviewer's friends wanted put to him. “I have a certain sort of voice that can make things sound worse than they are,” he says. Asked whether OK Computer is the best thing Radiohead ever did, he says people used to say The Bends; give it five years and it may be Kid A. The Eraser was made alone because it was all programming, and five people gazing at one screen would have been dull.

“Harrowdown Hill” is about David Kelly, the weapons expert on Iraq: the lies about going to war in the first place, and one man who became the focus of a terrible energy. Yorke doesn't mind writing about things that may be seen as political, but he doesn't call it political music, only what is in front of him. Music is like mathematics to him, patterns that help him understand what is around him and get through the next day. Fame, he thinks, brings no real influence. “I think people are perfectly capable of making their own decisions and God help them if they listen to me.”

The song he would like to be remembered by is “How to Disappear Completely”, “because it's the most beautiful thing we ever did”. Other than making music, what Radiohead do on the internet is by far the most important thing for them, he says, and the unofficial sites are more on top of what the band are doing than the band are. The most fun is a webcast, which he likens to pirate TV: the band on one screen, thousands of people talking about what the band are doing on the other. New songs filmed on phones and put straight on YouTube have an energy that has nothing to do with Sunday supplement critics. Fans used to send nutty things. Now they tell him he should put a verse back in, and sometimes they're right.