Thom Yorke on WTF

Marc Maron talks to Thom Yorke for WTF at Rick Rubin's studio, Houdini's old mansion off Laurel Canyon, during a break in the Atoms for Peace sessions. Flea was meant to join them and called in sick. Yorke was the chippy left-winger even at boarding school, and for four to six years he and his brother argued politics at dinner with their father, a nuclear physicist, and their mother would call time when it got heated.

As a student he marched against student loans. Parliament was sitting, and Thatcher, as he tells it, was furious enough to call the horses on them. On the far side of Westminster Bridge, which the police would not let them cross, Yorke and Stanley Donwood, his friend from art college who does the artwork, stood facing the riot police; then the shields parted and the horses charged, batons swinging. Reclaim the Streets showed him the other way, a parade onto a motorway in which men hidden under a giant skirt broke up the tarmac with jackhammers.

The band told EMI they hadn't a clue and asked for a van and a year and a half alone. A year in, “Creep” was a hit in Israel and then on KROQ, the Los Angeles radio station, and when the managers came asking where the next hit was, he threw people out until the band had decided to do it on their own terms. Art school had already thrown him off the painting course after he went missing for a term and came back with paintings of Jesus, which even he thought appalling. “If you're writing something and you mean it, you can't repeat yourself.”

At Abingdon, aged 11, he walked into the music room and found Thomas Dolby, then in the fifth year, among synthesisers and drum machines. For Kid A, Colin and Jonny Greenwood bought modular synths and learned them in a week. His son Noah, 12, is a really great drummer, already coming home with jazz tricks.