Ed O'Brien on BBC Radio 1

Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien talk to Radio 1 on the day the band played a matinee for 200 people at the BBC, and tracks from it go out between the talk. Yorke says he takes everything else that happens to him, puts it in a bank somewhere and opens it when they go on stage. O'Brien, teased about the grin he wears through a gig, says that if he opens his eyes at all it is usually to avoid tripping up or to find the guitar someone is handing him.

Pay what you want was a joke and an afterthought, Yorke says; the point was to be the ones who leaked In Rainbows. He spent a day with Stanley Donwood writing essays on the music business for the website, and threw them all out when Mel, who runs W.A.S.T.E., the band's merchandise operation, said just tell people to pay what they want. Writing still means him and Jonny Greenwood going round each other's houses, because posting ideas has never worked. O'Brien remembers Yorke bringing “House of Cards” to the second week of rehearsals with a kind of opening line he hadn't written for a while, and says the record taught him that accessibility is about 80 per cent the vocal.

“Creep” was an accident, Yorke says, and it taught them that “accidents are obviously what we want to be doing”. He switched off from the fuss after OK Computer, when “people were following me around saying very peculiar things”. To O'Brien, “Creep” was a blessing in disguise, because it meant The Bends had to have 12 singles on it. When Kid A went to number one in America, a man from Billboard asked how it felt to have the weirdest number one there ever.

Jonathan Ross has asked them to do Eurovision, and when they said they would only do it if they won, one of them thinks, that was probably when interest in the idea ended. Asked what they are listening to, they name Burial, the new Portishead and R.E.M. albums and MGMT. One of them recommends Mr Hopkinson's Computer, a laptop left on stage to play on its own, whose robot “Fake Plastic Trees” makes him cry.