Ed O'Brien

Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien sit down with an American radio interviewer some months after The King of Limbs, which came out with no tour and no interviews. “We didn't feel like it, we didn't want to explain it.” O'Brien says they came off a long tour exhausted and uninspired, until Nigel Godrich found software that played MP3s from a turntable like vinyl. The first session ran five weeks with no idea at all, like kids in a kindergarten. It forced them to simplify and to listen to one another, which a band can stop doing.

Yorke describes “Bloom”, and nearly every song on it, as a collage of parts they each recorded and flew in against the others, edited like film, with melodies so implied that any embellishment leapt out. One of them was a good imitator long before anyone was listening and still absorbs everything, on the Lennon principle that it is not who you steal from but how.

Finishing a record kills the momentum, and playing it to other people changes how they hear it. “I think this is a no-brainer,” one of them says of The King of Limbs, and then realises it is not, which is the scary part. Learning to play it lets them back in.