Radiohead headline Glastonbury, their first English date since OK Computer

Radiohead headline Glastonbury, and Stuart Bailie points out in this week's NME that it is their first date in England since OK Computer came out. Phil Selway remembers how long they were off the road before this year.

It's been a long time for us. It was the longest we haven't played since we were signed.

Phil Selway²

Ed O'Brien says rehearsals started again two months ago and felt odd for about an hour. Bailie's case is that the band are unpredictable on stage. In Barcelona in late May, Jonny Greenwood laid a new riff over “Planet Telex”, a nod to The Fall and a private joke for his brother Colin; The Fall's Craig Scanlon was in the crowd, asked for “Creep”, and got it.

The preview follows Bailie's cover feature of a week earlier. In Belfast on 20 February, with the album's mix just finished, the band collected the Hot Press award for the best international live act to play Ireland in 1996. U2's Larry Mullen, sitting next to Colin, told them to keep having fun while things were going well. In New York on 7 June they opened the Tibetan Freedom Concert on Randall's Island with a half-hour set. Thom Yorke, who is not talking to the British press, introduced “The Bends” with a speech against McDonald's, Disney, Holiday Inn and other companies doing business in China.

Much of the feature is about the making of the record. At Jane Seymour's house near Bath, Selway set up his drums in the children's room, and “Airbag” found its shape once he cut up a tape of his own playing. O'Brien says producing themselves was much harder, with nobody to point out what was wrong. Jonny is open about where the strings came from.

Well, we stole a lot of Polish composer Penderecki's string ideas.

Jonny Greenwood¹

The last chord of “Climbing Up the Walls”, he says, is 16 violins playing a quarter-tone apart.