Thom Yorke: “Just reading the papers makes you feel extreme”

Thom Yorke tells Caitlin Moran of The Times that much of OK Computer, out on Monday, is about disaffection.

You don't need drugs to make extreme music. Just reading the papers makes you feel extreme.

Thom Yorke¹

He talks of switching on the television to irons and fridges, and of watching a Conservative MP cheer when someone threw eggs at him. “Electioneering” he calls an incitement to riot. “Climbing Up the Walls” goes back to his time working in a psychiatric hospital as Care in the Community came in, which he calls one of the scariest things that has happened in this country.

On the same pages David Sinclair reviews the album and rates it above The Bends, and Moran notes that “Paranoid Android” went into the chart at number three for all its six and a half minutes.

Work on the record began in a near-deserted valley outside Bath, in a house where Yorke felt an odd presence; he laughs that the horrible wallpaper in his room may account for some of it. Jonny Greenwood says the others got quite drunk, while he gets drunk only on New Year's Eve. He wonders whether the band have reached their peak.

Most bands start going rubbish around their fourth album, don't they?

Jonny Greenwood¹