Thom Yorke on Fora.tv

Thom Yorke talks to Fora.tv at the Copenhagen climate summit, where the interviewer picks him out as the only man in red trousers and nearly the only one not in a suit. He came with a friend from the campaign for Britain's climate bill, which Yorke helped launch and which became, he says, the first such law anywhere in the world. It burnt him out for a while, and this is the first time he has got back into it. Political life gets no more stale than this, he says, and he is completely out of his depth.

What stuns him is the G8 feel of the talks, with texts drawn up in the background and pushed forward, which reminds him of the riots at the Genoa summit, the summit in Scotland and Seattle. He can't help thinking it is because “they're all of a certain age, they've been in politics too long, they're all men and they're not getting out enough”. The hopeful thing is that the leaders came at all, under pressure from the people at home. People will not get what they want, he thinks, but nor will the leaders fob anyone off: if what the leaders draw up this weekend is empty, people will smell it. “It shouldn't be a spark, it should be a fire already.”