Thom Yorke traces “Paranoid Android” to a night in a Los Angeles bar

The words of “Paranoid Android” came to Thom Yorke at five in the morning after a night out in Los Angeles bars, he tells Ken Micallef in an interview published on 17 August by Launch, the online music magazine. It was between touring The Bends and recording OK Computer, and Yorke found himself surrounded by people who wanted something from him. Trying to sleep afterwards, he kept hearing their voices.

We'd been rehearsing the song for months, but the lyrics came to me at five o'clock that morning.

Thom Yorke¹

The song, he says, is about chaos, and only later did he find out where he had been. It turned out to be a notorious, coke-fiend place. But I didn't know that.¹

Micallef talked to Yorke and Jonny Greenwood together in a New York hotel. Jonny says little, and Yorke at times covers his head with his hands or pulls his sweater over his face, but he goes through the album's songs one by one.

“No Surprises” is a bid to get back to normality that fails. It grew from his fixation with plastic boxes and bottles that cannot be thrown away, which took him to landfill sites.

All this stuff is getting buried, the debris of our lives. It doesn't rot, it just stays there.

Thom Yorke¹

The crashes in “Airbag” come from never knowing, each time he gets into a car or a plane, whether he will get out again.

On “Subterranean Homesick Alien” Yorke admits he would love to be abducted, and points out that swapping the word alien for ghost makes the idea far less hysterical, since everyone believes in ghosts. His own life stays out of the lyrics this time. He finds it offensive for a middle-class white boy to sing about how miserable he is, and says he was taking in what was around him instead.

Jonny explains the loops. The band made them on tape rather than with samplers, following the Bee Gees, who measured every drum beat to exactly the right length before making a loop. Tape loops sound better cause they're more elastic¹, he says. An old Mellotron gave them the album's choir sounds.

Asked whether OK Computer is uplifting in the end, Yorke says it is. The album finishes somewhere other than where it started, with no resolution, which upset him at first and which he now likes.