Ed O'Brien on BBC 6 Music

Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway join Steve Lamacq on 6 Music on the day Radiohead headline Glastonbury, 20 years after they headlined it in 1997. They are not a band who sit around every couple of weeks remembering that night, they say, and the past week and a half of interviews is the first time they have had to address it. “What we felt on stage is very different from what came back,” one of them says.

The OK Computer reissue is with XL because there is trust there; when they left EMI with In Rainbows, “we knew we were saying goodbye to our back catalogue”. “Man of War” turned up around the time of The Bends' B-sides, so by OK Computer it was already an old song. They tried it again after finishing that record, but by then they were moving away from big anthemic guitar songs, and a song that is not caught while it has its sound, O'Brien says, stops making sense two years later.

Lamacq has found a website ranking 157 Radiohead songs, with “True Love Waits” at the top and “Pop Is Dead” at the bottom. One of them thought “Life in a Glasshouse” sounded a bit like Sting doing jazz when they made Amnesiac, and is pleased now to have been wrong. Selway wanted the B-side “Cuttooth” on that record instead. The albums that hang together are the ones they all agreed on; when only three agree, one of the three has to be Thom Yorke. Hail to the Thief, they admit, was too long.

For tonight they promise a very good light show and no pyrotechnics. Glastonbury headliners are now expected to bring a special guest, to compete with Barry Gibb, and one of them offers to nip down to the newsagent for a box of 20 fireworks and let the crowd set them off in the good bits.