Thom Yorke on BBC 6 Music

Steve Lamacq talks Thom Yorke through Amok, the Atoms for Peace album, on his 6 Music show; diaries meant it was recorded just over a week before it went out. On a scale of trauma this one barely registers, Yorke says, against The Bends, when they ended up miking a bicycle wheel, or the mixing of OK Computer. He asked Flea and Joey Waronker by email one Friday afternoon, having told himself he would only go ahead if they answered that day, and they did within a couple of hours. The first gig, at the Echoplex in Los Angeles, was like a bomb going off. After a short tour with only an hour of songs they did a jam, “which is against my religion”.

He let the lyrics settle the way the music did, without pinning anything down, after a lifelong hang-up about how David Byrne wrote Remain in Light and how Michael Stipe always worked. At karaoke he does Satchmo, though not today. For a producer's commentary on “Ingenue”, he tells how he worked on the groove at a tiny studio in his house on the beach in the south-west, one ear on the telly, then two days later decided it was whack and erased it. A month on, playing a keyboard riff over a copy, his partner jumped out of the bath and told him not to change a thing. Nigel Godrich put it together in a couple of hours and Flea added the bass. Lamacq first heard the album on a packed Northern line train and thought he might faint. Yorke is already working on something of his own, more electronic but with humans in it.