Radiohead

Thom Yorke talks through The Eraser in Oxford on a Monday. Radiohead had stopped about two and a half years earlier because it was getting boring, and he wanted to get stuck into things he had been mucking around with that fitted nowhere else. Calling it a solo album would mean he had walked away from the band, which he hadn't, and the others told him to go and get on with it. Calling it a side project would make it a doodle, and with Nigel Godrich he went for it properly.

The first sketches came from a tiny cupboard at home and a laptop on the road. The record was made by the sea in summer, at Godrich's studio in London with a cocktail bar next door, and at Radiohead's own. Before Godrich arrived there were a few weeks of Yorke asking himself what he was doing, with only half the technology working. At the end of Hail to the Thief, he says, the band had lost all their confidence and gone home to forget what they had done. The title came from Stanley Donwood's artwork, made while they were looking at German expressionism. The title track is perhaps the earliest song, he says. Its crunchy piano chords are Jonny Greenwood's: Yorke taped him on a dictaphone left on top of the piano, built something else from them and didn't own up for about a year.

An IPCC report and its graphs of global temperature sit under the record. “The Clock” came from the anger of watching heads of state shuffle bits of paper and promise to do something while the growth figures came in. “We can't have endless growth,” he says. “And It Rained All Night” was written on a laptop through a sleepless night in New York, with rain the size of tennis balls.