Thom Yorke on BBC

Thom Yorke tells Desert Island Discs that an artist has to be prepared to torch it at any moment. He does not mean vaults of abandoned material, but feeling unsure of where he is going, and the moment an artist repeats himself because that is what people want, it is over.

What he chases in the studio is a hit in the pharmacological sense, an elation that can sustain him for months or years. He concedes how precious that sounds, then says it is simply what he has done with his life. When it arrives it is close to visual for him, a colour or a shape or a movement, which he had assumed happened to everyone.

He talks about his eye: the childhood operations, the last one that went wrong, and the surgeon who told him he would never fly in the RAF but could be made to look right, at the cost of never closing it properly again.

Among his records is Neil Young's After the Gold Rush, bought young and still able to stop him, and he remembers how strange it was later to be asked to play a benefit for Young.