Thom Yorke

Thom Yorke spends much of this one refusing the available descriptions of The Eraser.

The band had stopped about two and a half years earlier, he explains, because it had become boring and self-perpetuating, and he wanted to get into a pile of things he had been messing with that did not fit anywhere. He dislikes calling it a solo album, because that implies he had walked away from Radiohead, which he had not; the others had told him to get on with it. Side project is worse, because it implies a doodle, and this was a proper record made properly with Nigel Godrich.

The first sketches came from a tiny cupboard at home that he declines to call a studio, and from a laptop on the road, but the record was made at Godrich's London studio and at the band's. He spent the first weeks alone with technology that only half worked, wondering what he was doing, until Godrich arrived and confirmed there was something there.

Through the words runs a thread of trying to put things out of mind and failing. The environmental side was not planned. He had become involved with Friends of the Earth just as an IPCC report landed, full of graphs that went only one way.