2000

Two weeks of electronics only are meant to stop the band repeating themselves, and one old song already sounds new.

Three summers after they headlined the Pyramid Stage, Radiohead are staying in the studio, and the festival's organiser says the new album is running late.

Ed O'Brien's studio diary calls it an amazing day, and the opposite of the strings session for OK Computer.

A song the band meant to share with message-board readers has gone astray, and by the second day the talk has turned to bootlegs.

Ed O'Brien wants these evenings to show a band nothing like the gloomy young men people take Radiohead for, and this one ran for four hours.

One song is close to finished and sounds like one of the best things on the record so far, while another is costing the band a week of trial and error.

Ed O'Brien thinks bass players will hardly believe what Colin has played, at the end of a week that also saw a song from last summer's rehearsals come together.

The band say they said yes because they are Scott Walker fans, and that they are not ready yet for anything big.

The band have spent over a year on the most straight-ahead song they have done in years, and Ed O'Brien thinks he knows why.

An evening of the band as DJs on their own site, and at the end of it a new song NME says is meant for the next album.

The songs are down, which leaves the mixing and the running order, a part of making a record Ed O'Brien says the band have got badly wrong before.

Some of the 18 summer nights have sold out, so the band have released more tickets for every date except their one British show.

The record Radiohead are about to tour will be a short one, with a lot of music held back, and the band already have the next one in their sights.

With the album being sequenced and titled, one of the band says outright that he is won over by it, days before they go back on stage.

The weather has taken the second night of the band's first run of shows since December 1998, and no new date has been set.

The small Italian shows and the autumn tent are one idea, Yorke says, a way of keeping the music at the centre for the people who follow the band.

The band's first shows in 18 months have been rained on in France, and the people around them say this tour feels nothing like the last one.

Talking until 3am after the comeback show at Arles, Colin tells NME the band never want to wait so long between records again.

The songs nobody has heard on record yet are settling into the set, though one of them still gives the band trouble.

The band's only British show of the summer leaned on songs nobody can buy yet, and left out the one everybody knows.

The fourth album finally has a name, a release month and half a tracklist, and two of the summer's live favourites are not on it.

Most of the record is already familiar from the summer shows, but Colin Greenwood says some of the album versions do not sound the way the songs do on stage.

A month after asking fans to lobby Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, Yorke has turned on the world's richest leaders for leaving Japan with the debts still standing.

As a court orders the file-sharing service to strip out copyrighted music, Radiohead tell the record companies to learn from it instead.

Two months before it comes out, the album's odd name gets an explanation from Yorke himself, and a popular theory gets short shrift from Jonny.

Seven weeks before release, the press in America and Britain have heard the new album, and the first reports have the band deep in electronics.

Radio stations will pick their own tracks and short clips will stand in for promo films, as the band step away from the usual album campaign.

The cover of the new album is out, put online by the band themselves five weeks before the record reaches the shops.

Before the new album's sessions began, Yorke gave up on melody and the guitar, and Ed O'Brien says the rest of the band had to learn to live with it.

America's first public chance to hear the new album came in a cinema, with a queue at the door and a film that had nothing to do with the record.

The Kid A campaign is coming to the sites fans already read, fan pages and music papers alike, with the album itself to follow.

The record Radiohead have let only a handful of people hear, once through on headphones someone else controlled, can now be downloaded by anyone with a modem.

Ed O'Brien's picks for Rolling Stone run from recording software to Spain, and come with a promise of less time on the road.

One bidder gets to hear the new album at home before release, and the money goes to the charity behind the Tibetan Freedom Concerts.

Ten days before Kid A comes out, Yorke talks about falling apart after OK Computer and why the band stopped writing songs the old way.

With the big labels in court against Napster, an EMI label puts Radiohead in front of the file-swappers, though without a single song to download.

The label behind Autechre and Aphex Twin thinks a good deal more of Kid A than NME's own reviewer does, two days before the album is out.

On the eve of Kid A, Yorke talks openly about the collapse that followed the last world tour, and about how hard the new record was to make.

Brent DiCrescenzo moves OK Computer down a place in his own rankings, and says the usual ways of judging a rock record are no use here.

In the week of release, the press cannot agree whether Radiohead's turn away from guitar songs is the bravest thing they have done or an indulgence.

The last European stop of the autumn tour came in the week Kid A came out, and the two critics who wrote it up could not agree on the new songs.

Greenwood plays down the stories of a troubled record, telling Toronto's NOW that the Kid A songs were all written before the band arranged them.

Fans shut out of the New York and Los Angeles shows blame a website that could not cope, and the company tells the band to play bigger rooms.

Three weeks after Kid A, another new record with Yorke's voice on it reaches the shops, and his songs are the ones being pushed.

The follow-up to Kid A needs only a running order, and fans may have it in their hands early next year.

The next album is already recorded and due in the spring, Variety hears, with a full American tour to follow.

Three weeks after the album came out, the argument over it has spread from American student papers to Turin and Buenos Aires, and the critics are no nearer agreeing.

Selway answers a review that finds few hooks on the new record, and explains why the band set out to take themselves apart and start again.

Yorke follows a month of headlines about the hidden Kid A booklet with a line on his page of the band's site that shows only to those who go looking.

The news reached Radiohead in New York, on the day of their first American concert in more than two years.

Anyone who missed the park shows in Cheshire can now hear the middle night from start to finish, unreleased songs and all.

The man behind the Kid A artwork shows how the paintings became the sleeve and the short films that stand in for singles.

Answering journalists on a site the band have set up for the purpose, Yorke welcomes Napster as the record companies' comeuppance.

After two months in which the band each told a different story, the record that follows Kid A has a season to aim at.

The verdict comes from fellow musicians, asked over a whole year who had shaped them most, and Bono was among those who named the band.

Two months on, American magazine editors and critics try to explain how a record with no single and no video ended up splitting its listeners.

Britain's promise to cancel what poor countries owe it does not impress Yorke, who argues the debts owed to the big lenders will leave some of them worse off.

In what Rolling Stone calls his only big American interview of the year, Yorke looks back on a number one album he no longer wants to hear.

Days after their Kid A songs went out on the radio, the band answer the people who listened, and talk about being called difficult.

Before the Kid A year is out, two of the band say the follow-up is being finished in Didcot and the tent is going to America.