Thom Yorke

In Japan, Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien are asked what they had been doing in four years without a record.

They took 2004 off as a band, started again in early 2005 rehearsing and producing themselves and getting nowhere, spent 2006 touring and still not getting far, began recording properly that autumn and did the bulk of it in 2007.

Yorke puts the way In Rainbows came out down to his objection to what he calls the sausage machine, where months of work, bashing his head against something, end up pressed into the same shape as everything else and racked alongside it. Wanting to do things differently was, he says, a fundamental reason to keep the band going at all. A physical object in shops still mattered, he adds, because not everyone has the internet or knows how to use it.

The second half drifts into touring memories, among them a festival outside Tokyo in a round arena that Yorke likens to being inside a cauldron, and an earlier show in the south of Japan during the OK Computer years that has stuck with both of them.