Colin Greenwood on BBC 6 Music

Colin Greenwood takes over part of Marc Riley's Brain Surgery on 6 Music, four hours on the road from Oxford, with Clinic playing live in Hawaiian shirts and masks because he asked for them. Since In Rainbows came out, he says, “it's like being one live gig all the time”. There was no master plan behind the release; they had been unhappy with everything leading up to the record and wanted it out. The In Rainbows CD comes without a jewel case, so as not to add to the landfill, and the credit for wasting no more plastic than needed goes to Ed O'Brien. Asked to assemble the CD's packaging in another album's jewel case, Colin sacrifices OK Computer. The clear sticker meant for the front of the case went straight on his son's bedroom door.

Nigel Godrich first turns up sitting bored in the corner at RAK Studios in St John's Wood while they made The Bends. “We used to say you think this is all rubbish, don't you,” Colin remembers. When their producer John Leckie went to Abbey Road to mix, they cut B-sides with Godrich, then “Lucky” for Help, a charity record, and earned the rope to make OK Computer with him at Jane Seymour's house near Bath, which Colin mostly remembers for her Max Factor advert. On “Airbag”, he says, Godrich accidentally wiped the brilliant bits of his bass and kept the rubbish ones. This time, with Godrich away and the band stuck, Spike Stent came in to unblock them, which showed them how much they need Godrich, who is on their side but can stand apart from the music.

Kid A is his favourite, the one that makes going back or forward hard. Asked whether “Creep” dogs them, he says no song does, because it would be dishonest to “disown something that we made in the first place”.

The tour runs America, Europe and America again, with the gear going by sea, which means two sets of equipment and more places they can play. Last week's show moved from Rough Trade to 93 Feet East across the road, where “everything went wrong for the right reasons”. It was a club again, all of them grinning, and Colin got to watch his brother Jonny slash through “The Bends” and “Iron Lung”, songs they wrote for rooms like that. At the ATP festival in Minehead he was meant to DJ, but bunked off to hear seven new Portishead songs, and if the record is as good as they were live it will be his record of the year so far.