Thom Yorke on BBC Radio 4

Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien take John Wilson through In Rainbows on Radio 4's Front Row, before the CD comes out on New Year's Eve. They recorded in a crumbling country mansion where nobody worried about damage, because “it would be difficult to smash it up any more than it already was”. The songs had been road-tested and they expected to get them down quickly, but they turned out not to be as good as they had imagined. “Nude” is ten years old and never fitted together until Colin Greenwood came up with the bassline that opens it, which for some reason makes it easy to sing.

The pay-what-you-like release was never meant to rattle anyone's cage, they say. They were out of contract, it got the music out without months of waiting, and calling it the end of civilisation would be tilting at windmills. The hardest part was explaining it briefly without it turning into an essay, so in the end they scrapped every attempt and just said pay what you like. A fan who paid 20p would not offend them, and the survey saying two thirds paid nothing is nonsense. The one thing they would change is having the site only in English.

They miss the people at Parlophone. To the old EMI's credit, one of them says, it kept Radiohead on a very long leash for a very long time, as it had Pink Floyd and Queen. EMI's new owner, Terra Firma, is a private equity firm, and one of them says such firms see music as stock to buy and sell on. “If anybody's responsible for devaluing music it's them.”