Thom Yorke on CBC

Thom Yorke speaks to CBC from its Montreal studio at the start of a North American tour with Anima. Playing without a band took him a long time to get used to. The show began as a DJ set at raves, until they saw that a crowd on ecstasy wasn't the best place to make their point. In theatres, with the machines run by himself, Nigel Godrich and Tarik Barri, it became something else, and he finds it liberating. In Houston the bass bins weren't under the stage and the computer running the main loop flew off its stand into the audience, just as he was telling off someone who wouldn't stop shaking a luminous tambourine.

Godrich was John Leckie's tape operator at RAK Studios, and when Leckie took a couple of days off the band made some B-sides with Godrich and hit it off, so at the end of the record they were making with Leckie, Yorke took Godrich aside, and it went from there: the first thing Godrich did was build the portable studio they made OK Computer on. Yorke only grew comfortable with his own voice at the end of OK Computer. Before that he would get really out of it before he sang, to get into the zone, which he now calls wasted time, since being in the moment is the point.

At Madison Square Garden Radiohead played pretty much a different set each night, drawn from what he puts at 66 or 70 songs on that tour, and halfway through some of them he wonders who wrote it. Of going back to Toronto, where the drum technician Scott Johnson was killed when scaffolding fell on him in 2012, he says they know who is responsible, and he hopes the silence the band stood in when they played there is “our last word on the subject”. He was at the Royal Albert Hall for Jonny Greenwood's new piece, and was so proud of him.