Select booklet tells how Radiohead made OK Computer

Select has put out a fold-out booklet the size of a CD sleeve on the making of OK Computer, written by John Harris with photographs by Ken Sharp. It opens on a line Thom Yorke gave the magazine about the sessions. It was that feeling of being the bloke down the bottom of the shed building a spacecraft²

The band first meant to make a straightforward, optimistic pop record. That idea went quickly, but three aims held: to be fully in charge of the recording, for Yorke to write about the world outside rather than inward as on The Bends, and to get away from the usual forms of rock.

Sessions with Nigel Godrich began in the first weeks of 1996 at Canned Applause, the band's rehearsal space, on songs written while touring The Bends. They stopped in mid-March for another American tour. Back there in midsummer the band recorded “No Surprises” and “The Tourist”, the last written entirely by Jonny Greenwood. Ed O'Brien says they had meant to do it straight, without over-analysing. And then we ended up doing 16 versions of 'No Surprises' and going back to the first one. The problem is, we get bored very easily.²

The North American arenas with Alanis Morissette, from 12 August, forced them to finish songs fast. “Karma Police”, “Climbing Up the Walls”, “Let Down” and “Paranoid Android” were settled on that tour. Then the band moved their gear into St Catherine's Court, an Elizabethan mansion near Bath owned by the actress Jane Seymour, at £10,000 a week. Yorke says time stood still there. In the first week they never left the house, and walking in the gardens at night, with the music coming out of the house, he could hear vixens yowling and began to feel uneasy.

“Paranoid Android” had run to 11 minutes on the Morissette tour. At St Catherine's Court it was cut in half, and because the band could not play its sections through in one go, it was recorded in three separate parts, with Phil Selway choosing the takes he was happiest with. It became the album's centrepiece. Harris also traces what went into the songs from the band's record collections: Miles Davis's Bitches Brew into “Subterranean Homesick Alien” and DJ Shadow into “Airbag”.

After a break in October and a second spell at the house, the band had more versions than they could choose between. It could have gone on for another year. Jonny came in, in January, into the studio, and said, 'Right, that's it. We have to stop now.'¹ That left Yorke with the running order, and in the end he accepted that no order would feel entirely right.