Thom Yorke on Reactor 105

Thom Yorke tells Rulo David of Reactor 105 why the fight with Spotify matters to him. What excited him about In Rainbows was a direct line between musicians and their audience; now Spotify wants to be the gatekeeper, and the major labels back it because it lets them resell their old catalogue. “It's about whether we believe that there is a future in music,” he says. What passes for the mainstream is the last gasp of the old industry, “a last fart, you know, desperate fart of a dying corpse”. He recommends Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget, which he bought without knowing what it was about because there is a Kindle on the cover.

He has been in Radiohead since he was 16 and is 44 now. “I've been doing it longer than I haven't,” and after that long it starts to feel like a weight on his shoulders; Atoms for Peace let him go back and choose to enjoy it. At their first show, in the tiny Echoplex club in Los Angeles, Flea ran round behind him like a maniac, and they only understood what they had when they watched the video of it. He wanted Flea because Flea plays bass like a lead instrument, which Yorke tried to do on The Eraser, and Flea was one reason he took up yoga. He hates jamming, which to him is stretching before the gym. For Atoms for Peace's album Amok, Joey Waronker and Mauro Refosco scored out broken beats from his laptop, and copying a machine made them play differently.

During Kid A he watched Jonny and Colin Greenwood get into modular synthesisers, and nobody in Radiohead said a rock band couldn't do that. “Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses” grew from Jonny's bass riff, and Yorke and Colin had a great time making it. Colin is a great programmer who throws everything away, so someone has to be there to record it: he never presses save. With Jonny, Yorke made another track, resampling strings Jonny wrote for There Will Be Blood until they sounded like a huge bassline.