Thom Yorke on BBC Radio 4

Thom Yorke is the castaway on Desert Island Discs, at 50 and with Radiohead 34 years in. What he chases in the studio is a hit in the drug sense, an elation that can feed him for months, and when a piece first works he sees it as a colour or a shape, which he had assumed happened to everyone.

He was born with his left eye shut and had several operations as a small boy. Promised anything he liked for the last one, he asked for a red Adidas tracksuit. That operation went wrong, and an old surgeon told him he would never fly in the RAF but could be made to look right, at the cost of never closing the eye properly. He turned it down, having decided he liked the eye not matching, and still wears it as a badge of pride. Two teachers at Abingdon, in music and in art, saw something in him, and he is convinced he would not be here without them. In his gap year he sold suits at Debenhams, telling old men the brown tweed didn't suit them. When the manager said he really didn't have the right motivation, “I said well you really don't have the right suits.” He made a demo that year and sent it, with Ed O'Brien's name on it, to a free music magazine, whose review said he sounded just like Neil Young, so he went and bought After the Gold Rush to find out who that was.

Michael Stipe, once his hero and then a friend, taught him how to make himself invisible when people started talking to him in the street as if he were Jesus. Losing his voice 20 minutes into a show in Brisbane in front of 20,000 was the worst feeling, and a reiki session afterwards added an out-of-body experience. Of his eight records, from the Labèque sisters to Nina Simone's “Lilac Wine”, the one he keeps is Talking Heads' “Born Under Punches”, “because I'm going to need to dance”.