Ed O'Brien on BBC Radio 1

Edith Bowman plays her chat with Ed O'Brien on Radio 1 a clip a day through one week in December, and in one of them he admits the band spent much of the last two and a half years working out whether to carry on. “There's no point carrying on if you're just not feeling it,” he says. Putting out In Rainbows the way they did “has given us a huge lease of life”. They are doing webcasts, and are back in the studio playing other people's songs: the Smiths' “The Headmaster Ritual”, a Björk track from Homogenic whose name he can't remember, and New Order.

The pay-what-you-like idea came from their managers, who had heard of a Manhattan restaurant that lets diners decide what the meal was worth; the difference online, O'Brien says, is that people can do a runner. Every record since OK Computer had leaked, and the band were out of contract. Songs usually start with Thom Yorke, some fully formed and some sketchy, and get worked up in the rehearsal room they have used since The Bends, a metal box O'Brien likens to an apple storage shed. “Jigsaw Falling into Place” was the last song to make the album and nearly didn't; Yorke kept calling it a Friday night record.

O'Brien, Yorke and Phil Selway write the setlists, and before a big show the meeting can run to three hours. It tends to open with Yorke proposing nothing from OK Computer, and the others telling him not to be ridiculous, because of course they have to play “Paranoid Android”. A newcomer should start with The Bends, which O'Brien has not heard for about five years. When he last played it, in the car, he thought “wow, we're pretty good”.