Colin Greenwood

Jonny and Colin Greenwood talk to Nic Harcourt for KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic, on a promotional CD that Capitol, the band's American label, issued in 2000 as Kid A arrived in America. Harcourt opens by saying he has read every other interview about the record and would like to do something else.

Very little is planned, they tell him. They are, Jonny says, very bad at manifestos. The method was the same as always: bring in the records they love, try to sound like them, then drift. He finds it faintly amazing that this ends in records they then tour for two and a half years, when there is no blueprint for any of it at the start.

Colin supplies the other half. Kid A was shaped as much by what they did not want, the touring and promotion around the last record, as by what they were listening to. He passes on Ed O'Brien's view that had they been made to produce another OK Computer they would not have made another record at all, and adds that had they made it and been praised for it in the same way, the band would probably have ground to a halt.

The instinct to stop themselves becoming the accepted version of what they do is, Jonny says, a Protestant middle-class English habit, which they then trace, cheerfully, to punk.