Radiohead on Spinner

Ed O'Brien and Colin Greenwood sit in the dining room of a lodge in Park City, Utah, during Sundance, where they had been playing songs from Amnesiac before its release. The talk comes from Radiohead at Ground Zero, a 2001 US promotional CD hosted by Chris Douridas. O'Brien took up snowboarding two days earlier, which he says amounts to taking up falling over.

Amnesiac was being called a parallel album because it came from the same 18 months of recording, and both insist it is not a collection of outtakes. They spent weeks at a time trying to build one running order that held all of it and could not make it fit. That is how there came to be two records, and not a double album they did not want to make or an audience they did not want to tax.

O'Brien goes further and says some of it is the best work they have done, naming “Pyramid Song”. Thom Yorke played piano and sang while Phil Selway played drums, both captured at once in a single take, with strings added afterwards and very little else done to it. The idea came from Egyptian mythology and the crossing of the river of the dead.