Thom Yorke walks off at Torhout, then talks to Vox on the beach

Radiohead's set at Rock Torhout in Belgium on 5 July ended during “Paranoid Android”, when Thom Yorke made a sarcastic speech about “special people” and walked off. His monitors were failing, the set was being cut two songs short and the pit was full of industry guests and photographers. There was no encore. Stephen Dalton was there for Vox, and near midnight he sat with Yorke on a beach for what the September issue bills as his first substantial interview on his own in two years.

Torhout was 30,000 people in deep mud. During “Lucky” the mud-throwers stopped and moved forward. The band went back to their hotel in Ostend, but Yorke stayed on at the site, where his bus got stuck in a mudslide and was pulled out by a tractor.

Colin Greenwood says Glastonbury) a week earlier nearly went the same way. After four songs his and Yorke's monitors failed, the lights went down and floor spotlights blinded Yorke. Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien talked him out of leaving, and the encores were played without monitors.

But if we'd done that a year ago, we would have definitely left the stage - and our career - in ruins.

Colin Greenwood¹

The OK Computer sleeve signs off with “We hope you are OK. Thankyou for listening”, and Yorke says he typed it at the very end. It looked to him like an email, a hello and thanks to someone not heard from for a while, and he means it.

It was the very last thing I did and I was really, really, really drunk.

Thom Yorke¹

He calls OK Computer a record about impotence, the anger of finishing a book or a television programme that leaves him wanting to change things, with no way of doing it. While it was being made he was reading Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes and Will Hutton's The State We're In. He meant it to be more objective and happier than The Bends, which now embarrasses him for how personal it is. He calls “Airbag” and “Paranoid Android” joyful. The “Paranoid Android” line reviewers took as aimed at them was about people at a party he went to.

Colin remembers “Fake Plastic Trees” being recorded after the band saw Jeff Buckley at the Garage. Yorke sat down and played it three times, then burst into tears, and that take is on the record.

Jonny says “Airbag” began with Colin and Phil Selway wanting it to sound like DJ Shadow, and it missed. Colin says one idea behind “Paranoid Android” was DJ Shadow crossed with the Beatles. Yorke is now to guest on Shadow's next project, with no plan beyond a big studio, Shadow's decks and sampler and one microphone.

Massive Attack look set to remix the whole of OK Computer. Writing for a fourth album has begun. Yorke expects it to be quicker to make and more direct, out before the millennium. The feature ends with the band answering ten critics' lines about the record; to “The world's most important, innovative band”, Selway adds for this week¹.

Torhout, 5 July 1997