Nigel Godrich on BBC 6 Music

Nigel Godrich talks to Radcliffe and Maconie on 6 Music the day before OKNOTOK, the 20th anniversary reissue of OK Computer, comes out. “Lift” was at one time going to be the first single, but the songs they knew mattered most carried too much pressure and kept falling apart. That the version of “Lift” on the reissue is the one people will now hear is “kind of hilarious to me”, he says, since in some respects it was a failure on his part. They cut “Lift” and “Man of War” over the weekend of his 25th birthday, and he used to record over takes nobody liked on his 20 multitrack tapes, so only so much survives.

He was the in-house engineer at the studio where most of The Bends was made, left to do B-sides with the band while the producer, John Leckie, was away. About a year later, after a show at the Forum in Kentish Town, Thom Yorke told him they had been about to call, because they wanted him to record them in their rehearsal room. He told their manager, Chris Hufford, what to buy, and they worked in an apple store on an isolated farm with no toilet before moving to St Catherine's Court outside Bath, where he shoved the desk into the middle of the library. Godrich says he is credited more than most producers. “I made that record literally,” he says, with only the band and a guitar tech in the house. OK Computer was the start of his career: his one production before it, a power pop record for Silver Sun, came only because the label knew he was about to work with Radiohead.

On his way to the first day at the fruit farm he drove past Scott Walker on his bicycle, cap and sunglasses on, and knew him only because he had assisted on a Walker session a few months before. At the studio Yorke was waiting, holding Scott 4 and Pet Sounds.