Phil Selway on Radio X

Phil Selway talks John Kennedy through OK Computer on Radio X's X-Posure, in the week Radiohead headline Glastonbury and with the album out again as OKNOTOK. For “Airbag” he and Thom Yorke spent a couple of days arranging roughly chopped beats in the spirit of DJ Shadow, and then he had to learn to play his own cut-up drumming, a habit that carried on as far as “Morning Bell”. One vivid memory of St Catherine's Court, near Bath, is standing in the garden one night with the house lit up and “Airbag” pouring out of the open windows.

“Exit Music (For a Film)” was written for Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, and he remembers Yorke at the back of the tour bus with the end of the film playing over and over. He recorded the drums alone in a spooky nursery at the top of the house, and remembers nights there with “a duvet up to my nose and lights on all night”. “Let Down”, cut at about two in the morning in a dark panelled room lit by candles, is for him the emotional core of the record. Asked about its guitar seeming to run in another time signature, he says “that's what happens when you play in a band with Jonny Greenwood.”

“No Surprises” was the very first take of anything they recorded for the album. They kept re-recording it until the takes ran, he thinks, into triple figures, then went back to the first, slowed it down and had Yorke sing over it.

On this tour they have played every song on OK Computer except “Fitter Happier” and “Electioneering”; “Electioneering”, he admits, is “not a player's favourite”. On most show days he, Yorke and Ed O'Brien write the setlist that afternoon, but Glastonbury's is settled in advance, because the television side forces their hand. “Lift” had been talked up so much that they were scared of it, a fear he dates back to “Creep”, and they never believed in the version cut in the sessions. The one on OKNOTOK is from demos made with Nigel Godrich at Chipping Norton early in 1996, which most of them had forgotten until Colin Greenwood dug it out. “That was the song,” Selway remembers thinking.