Thom Yorke on Multishow

Multishow meets Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien in Brazil on the day of a concert, on Radiohead's first tour of South America. They had wanted to come for a long time, O'Brien says. In Mexico, where the tour began, In Rainbows was not even in the shops, and everyone seemed to know it anyway. “Arpeggi” has gone down best.

Yorke's favourite on the record is “Videotape”, because it was so hard to do that they had to remove him from the studio for it to happen. “Arpeggi” is the other, because it came from a very solitary place and he had to let everybody else make it happen. O'Brien, who lives in London, remembers playing the demo about eight times on the way home after a day's rehearsal, and coming in the next day to say it was a really important song.

The tour's light rig, built by Andy Watson, who has been with them since 1993, uses about 30 per cent of the power of a normal one. Yorke asks for a meditation room before a show to clear his head, the opposite of Michael Stipe, who on tour with them used to walk straight on without even warming up his voice; Yorke tried that and found he needed the exact opposite. Sharing the bill with Kraftwerk takes them back to being 14 at school whenever they hear “The Model”, and after one show they sat up swapping notes on how each band runs its studio.

The next record, one of them says, they will make for kicks, “at least in theory”, and the other points out that is what they said about Hail to the Thief. Three years of making In Rainbows “nearly finished us off as a band”. One of them bought ten box sets for family and friends, because the band got none free, and Yorke would happily see the back of jewel cases. They wanted the Grammy for best album, they say, and got best alternative album instead.