Ed O'Brien on Strombo Show

Ed O'Brien tells George Stroumboulopoulos on the Strombo Show, by phone, how In Rainbows came to be sold the way it was. The band wanted no big advance, and they wanted to admit that every record since Kid A had leaked before it reached the shops. The management came up with the honesty box back in April and first suggested a download and nothing else, which the band thought too extreme, because their generation still wants something to hold, with artwork and credits to flick through. His own first record was Sgt Pepper, handed over by his father when he was seven. The first he bought himself, the Beatles' red and blue greatest hits aside, was ELO's Out of the Blue, with a spaceship in the gatefold. ELO was his own taste, and the others, he suspects, would be horrified.

The band lose their collective self-confidence on every record, he says, Hail to the Thief apart. At the 2006 theatre shows, Toronto and Montreal included, a loyal crowd cheered every new song, and back in the studio with Nigel Godrich the songs were not up to scratch. Bands get a window of ten or 15 years, he reckons, and “there was a general feeling that this was possibly our last record”. Thom Yorke's lyrics struck him as the most personal in years, the words of a man of 37 or 38. Jamming all night, as the Rolling Stones did on Exile on Main St, would be “so un-Radiohead”; rehearsals last three or four hours at most.

Now that the band are off EMI, the label plans a greatest hits for April and May to coincide with the tour, and Radiohead will do no promotion for it. Having waved goodbye to chart places by selling In Rainbows themselves, they saw it go to number one in Canada and America. “We could have our cake and eat it,” he says. The download figures arrived as a PDF the night before, broken down country by country, even Antarctica. Asked whether that means a tour of Antarctica, he says it is a place for wildlife and “definitely not for oil exploration”.