Radiohead on Le Réservoir

Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien are in Paris for French television, and only the two of them are due on stage that night because the full rig was too much to carry.

Making Hail to the Thief, the band told themselves to work fast, think about it as little as possible and play as they had been playing live, which Yorke describes as new for them. Nigel Godrich pushed for Los Angeles, and Yorke's first question was what it would cost, though the studio sold him.

He does not accept that the record is a deliberate swerve back to directness after Kid A and Amnesiac. It sounds more direct because it was assembled faster and differently, chasing a captured performance instead of editing and re-editing.

At one point he ran into the control room after a take to ask the length, was told five minutes fifty and cut two minutes straight away, because the whole record was held to the short pop songs he grew up on.

He also refuses to call it a Bush album. What it is about is far more widespread than one man, he says, and can be seen scrawled on walls across New York.