Thom Yorke on CBC

Thom Yorke is in Montreal at the start of a North American solo tour, and admits that performing without a band took a long time to get used to.

The format began as an experiment, closer to an electronic DJ set at rave-style shows, and they worked out fairly quickly that a room full of people on ecstasy was not the best place to get the point across. Moving into theatres turned it into something else.

Now there is no band behind him, only machinery run by himself, Nigel Godrich and Tarik Barri, which he calls odd and then, once he had got his head round it, liberating. He enjoys confounding what an audience expects once he has nothing as wholesome as a guitar round his neck.

He used to expect studio recordings to be as raucous as the live shows, and would try to get sufficiently out of it to reach what he thought of as the zone before singing, then wonder why it had not worked. All of that, he concludes, was wasted time, because what he was chasing only comes from being present.