Thom Yorke on Crossbeat magazine

Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich talk to the Japanese magazine Crossbeat about Atoms for Peace, and Yorke explains the name through his father, a nuclear physicist who walked around Imperial College in the late 1950s with test tubes of plutonium and no protection, because nobody then knew it was dangerous. That naivety, with the darkness underneath it, is one of the big reasons he chose it. The words carry a kinetic energy and a serenity he likes as well.

After he stopped working as a physicist, his father would still go to Sellafield to see the spent fuel rods racked up inside, and come home worried. Yorke has close friends, environmentalists, who see nuclear power as the only way out of global warming, but he hopes Japan follows Germany in giving it up. Britain cannot underwrite the disposal of the waste and no company will build the stations, he says, and the industry's lobbying tries everything it can to make it look viable. “Personally speaking I think nuclear power is dead.”

Neither of them warms to the word supergroup. “Does that mean my laptop's part of the super group?” one of them asks. When an earlier journalist offered Cream as the ultimate supergroup, they had to admit they don't really like Cream. They had thought of Amok as playful, kids running around, until someone from Holland told them it described Indonesians running amok under Dutch occupation. For the magazine's Japanese readers they say they had a lot of fun at Fuji Rock and hope to come back next year.