Ed O'Brien on 89xradio

Ed O'Brien phones Dave and Chuck's morning show on 89X, the Detroit station, in the week In Rainbows reaches number one on Billboard, only Radiohead's second in America. The band heard two days ago while rehearsing in their studio, and Phil Selway put the champagne on ice. In America the record went out through TBD, a fledgling independent label, and its first proper release has gone to number one.

He explains the honesty box once more. They were out of contract with EMI, their last three records had leaked anyway, and nobody in the industry had ever turned it round and asked the punters what music was worth. “We used to do home taping when we were kids,” he says. He is 39 to his host's 35, and he puts the difference down to a generation who grew up on hard drives and don't expect to pay. Quincy Jones told an interviewer the genie was out of the bottle, and O'Brien agrees; it would be terrible to criminalise those listeners.

Asked to squeeze in a night at St Andrew's Hall, he remembers playing it on their first two American tours, finishing at 11 and loading out their own gear in a city that in 1993 looked shabby round the edges. “It scared the hell out of us,” he says.