Thom Yorke on KCRW

Thom Yorke and Nigel Godrich take over the ten o'clock hour of KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic as Atoms for Peace, with a run of DJ sets that start slow and peculiar on Charles Mingus playing a Duke Ellington tune. James Holden, whom Yorke calls an idol of his, comes next, and later a piano sketch of Yorke's that Godrich told him to play and that he does not remember writing. The swearing on the records slips past them more than once, and they apologise to anyone offended.

Yorke DJed at college and danced himself silly, then found himself in a guitar band. They travel with a laptop interface now, after a 3am show in Berlin that began with 20 minutes of plugging the decks back in in the pitch dark, which one of them likens to defusing a bomb. The wildest nights were a bar inside a crashed plane at Glastonbury, with room for 30, and Plastic People in London with Kieran Hebden, from 11 until five, where “you get these waves of people coming in on different drugs at different times of the night”. The tour will play the Atoms for Peace album Amok and Yorke's solo album The Eraser, and a few weeks of rehearsal in Los Angeles, working out how to play Amok at all, have taken them from ten songs to 25.

Asked which he loves more, DJing or dancing, Yorke says dancing. He made the “Lotus Flower” video with the choreographer Wayne McGregor as a kind of conversation, and was not self-conscious at all until the next morning in the edit suite. “I watched it and I spat my breakfast out,” he says; it was like seeing himself naked for the first time. The hour ends on a remix of “All I Need” that turned into a new song nobody has heard.