Thom Yorke on BBC Radio 1

Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien sit down with Zane Lowe on Radio 1 six weeks after In Rainbows went out as a download. They had played the new songs to partisan crowds in 2006, which made a poor critical mirror, and when they tried to cut them the way they played them live, it didn't work and left them insecure. Mark “Spike” Stent, whom they tried working with instead of Nigel Godrich, was brave to walk into that and held a mirror up to a band that wasn't happening, one of them says, and they went back on the road. Sessions with no producer failed too, so they returned to Godrich, because they need somebody who can be vaguely objective.

Part of the record was made at Tottenham House, a run-down mansion with no heating that they found on a website of film locations. The standing joke when they left was that all they had got out of it was a nice reverb. “Nude” goes back to the OK Computer years, and Yorke was never comfortable with how he sang it. It had no bassline until it had one he loved, and the words suddenly made sense to him for the first time since he wrote them. Putting it out their own way has blown the cobwebs off, one of them says. “I don't feel in any way answerable to the Radiohead thing anymore.”

The management brought the pay-what-you-like idea down to the studio when the album was about 70 per cent done, and it felt right at once. “It's an experiment, how do you define whether it works or not,” O'Brien says, and Yorke never meant it as a template for anyone.

OK Computer at ten makes Yorke remember thinking it audacious, and then wanting “to get the hell out”. Last night a friend who saw footage from that tour told him how ill and unhappy he looked in it. The moment that summed it up came at his own aftershow in New York, where the man on the door “thought it was really clever to actually stand there slagging me off for 10 minutes so I couldn't get into my own after show”.

The 2008 tour should start in America in May, come to Britain in June and July, and then, they hope, go on to Japan and, for the first time, to South America.