Ed O'Brien on The 11th Hour

Dave Fanning asks Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien on RTÉ 2 about In Rainbows and what leaving EMI actually meant, in one segment of a longer conversation.

Asked what the plan was, Yorke is blunt that there wasn't one. They saw a cliff and wanted to jump off it, and the next trick was nobody's idea yet. He sets the chaos of the 1960s and 1970s labels, people with too much money and no idea what they were doing but genuinely inside the music, against a company now run by venture capital, where a record is a product and nobody is pretending it will change anything.

Fanning pushes the idea that pay-what-you-want humanised them, and that the band's name started turning up in places it never had, including arguments about what a piece of art is worth. Neither of them claims it was designed that way.

After OK Computer had shifted several million, the label commissioned market research into who it could be sold to next. Yorke and Stanley Donwood got hold of the document, found it absurd and used it as artwork.

It closes on the Kid A period, and the trips to Paris and Copenhagen to work out what to do next.