Thom Yorke on BBC 6 Music

Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien sit down with Steve Lamacq on 6 Music six weeks after In Rainbows went out as a download. On release day, they say, they stayed at home and hid. O'Brien bought ten discboxes for £400; Yorke downloaded it for nothing, since paying would only have moved money from one pocket to the other. Their management first wanted a download with no CD at all. Nobody outside their families knew, and copies were destroyed or kept off computers and out of cars. “Every record that we'd done for ages has been leaked and why not just leak the bloody thing yourself,” Yorke says.

Eight weeks with Nigel Godrich before Christmas 2006 were not good enough, and the turn came on the second day back in their own studio, when they cut “15 Step” live in a day. Part of those weeks was spent at Tottenham House, an empty pile that had once been the seat of Lord Cardigan. Rain came into the atrium, they slept in a caravan each in the grounds, and the joke when they left was that all they had got out of it was the reverb. “Bodysnatchers” is close to a live take from there.

“Nude” waited ten years because, Yorke says, “I used to hate the way I sung it”. The new “Reckoner” is not the old song at all: he wrote a second part, then another, and the original left the building. Dropping “Down Is the New Up”, with what one of them calls Phil Selway's best drumming, was the hardest decision, and “Jigsaw Falling into Place” was the last song to make it. The title In Rainbows was there as soon as Yorke had the line in “Reckoner”, and when he tried it on O'Brien, O'Brien loved it at once, which was as well, since Yorke was not budging.

Asked for the moment he would live again, Yorke picks Glastonbury 1997. He could hear nothing on stage, and after six or seven songs he told O'Brien he was off. He was talked into staying, and afterwards he was pushed round to the front of the stage to see the crowd. “The whole world went upside down. It's been upside down ever since.”