Thom Yorke on XFM

Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien take John Kennedy through In Rainbows on XFM's Exposure, the week the album reaches the shops on CD. Work began properly in October 2006 at Tottenham House in Wiltshire, a derelict mansion that had been a home for recovering heroin addicts and a prep school, with holes in the floors and rain through the ceilings. Nigel Godrich never once told them it wasn't good enough before Christmas. “He knew it wasn't good enough but he let us realise it wasn't good enough,” one of them says.

One of them pictures the long break after their record deal ended, about a year off, as a traffic jam on the Oxford ring road, the shopping in the back, on the Friday afternoon of Glastonbury 2005, with a national station running a poll of who listeners wanted to see there and him wondering what it was he actually did. That clash between the job and home life, he says, is what the record is really about.

“15 Step” is basically one take, nearly untouched. The fuzz on “Bodysnatchers” is a guitar through a late-1960s Motown mixing desk Godrich found in Los Angeles; Yorke started the song watching the original Stepford Wives and took the title from a Victorian ghost story about bodies dug up and sold. Somebody's phone recording of the first “All I Need”, in Chicago, was on YouTube 40 minutes after they came off stage, and it became one of their reference points. Yorke wrote its words in 20 minutes on a rare day he got to rehearsal early. “Faust Arp” was the first thing he and Jonny Greenwood finished after months apart, sitting in Jonny's garden.

Yorke calls the lyrics psychic dumping, written fast without thinking about what sense they made, and of all their records it is the one he can least explain. He and Godrich wanted “Videotape” to open the album until their manager warned that people would hear it and give up; it is the song he is proudest of. Asked whether the opening guitar of “Jigsaw” nods to “Paranoid Android”, Yorke says “I think it's more that I only have about three ideas.” To one of them the song is eleven o'clock on a Friday night in a pub, everyone just paid, the moment before it all turns nasty.