Radiohead on Multishow

Ed O'Brien and Thom Yorke talk to Brazil's Multishow after the Rio show and on the day of their next one, the first time Radiohead have played South America. The surprise, O'Brien says, is that they are here at all, after dreaming of it for so long. They are playing most of In Rainbows, and in Mexico, where the CD never even reached the shops, everyone seemed to know it anyway. One of them picks “Videotape”, which was so hard to get right that he had to be removed from the studio for it to happen. Andy Watson, with them since 1993, built the lights around new technology that uses about 30 per cent of the power of a normal rig. The Portuguese the Rio crowd heard in the middle of the set came off the radio, which they tune live every night; in America they sometimes land on terrible country and western.

Yorke's meditation room backstage is for clearing his head before he goes on. Michael Stipe, when Radiohead toured with R.E.M., walked on stage without even warming his voice up, and Yorke tried that and found he needed the exact opposite. Sharing a stage with Kraftwerk takes them back to being 14 at school, and they have been comparing studios with them after the shows. Shy men in front of thousands? What one of them really finds hard is sitting on the beach in Rio with his white body.