Thom Yorke on Radio 2

Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien record a morning chat with Steve Wright on the BBC's Radiohead day, ahead of the night's live set for Radio 2. Whether people paid for the In Rainbows download was a side issue, Yorke says, when every record they put out had leaked and people had broken into studios to copy hard disks. Italy was the most generous, and about 60 per cent in Britain paid something; one of them had expected at least 90 per cent and admits he was completely wrong. Asked what “Faust Arp” is about, Yorke says “I don't know, it's psychic garbage as usual”.

They were On a Friday “because it was the worst name we could think of”, and the label would not sign them until they changed it, which gave them a week; Radiohead is a Talking Heads song from True Stories, and in New York, one of them says, he and Jonny Greenwood once took David Byrne out to dinner, reckoning the two of them owed him. At school the head of music, Terry James, let them use the music school while the headmaster tried to stop them, after punk gigs there had ended with someone's arm broken and the seats ripped out. Yorke ran a club night every Friday at college, which always sold out and made the college a fortune; he spent what he got of it on records. His biggest hero was always Michael Stipe, and he tried to sing like him until he realised his voice would never be that gravelly.

They were signed because of Nirvana, one of them says: Radiohead were playing quiet verses and loud choruses, and that was the reason. “Creep” “saved our skins”, because when they came to make The Bends they were not in debt to EMI and nobody in A&R interfered. Their homecoming show in Oxford was too rainy to be the best; for one of them that was Bonnaroo, 60,000 people in a field. In America they feel a real affinity with the Deadheads, and the Deadheads' kids have taken up the mantle as well.