Thom Yorke on Radio 1: “We were the Beatles – for a week”

Thom Yorke, Jonny and Colin Greenwood and Ed O'Brien answer Evening Session listeners' questions on Radio 1 tonight, Wednesday 20 December, from 8pm. Steve Lamacq took a bag of the questions to Oxford and had the band draw them out and put them to each other. Phil Selway missed it for the birth of his second child.

Looking back on October, when Kid A went to number one in the United States and several other countries in its week of release, Yorke says We were the Beatles – for a week.⁵ He says the band had simply moved on with the album, and that only journalists ever ask about annoying the fans. When people said we were being difficult – that freaked me out actually.⁵ O'Brien says the phrase “wilfully perverse” has stuck to them.

The interview follows last week's session, the band's first for Radio 1 in three years, which gave Lamacq's show four reworked Kid A songs, one a night. NME reported that a brass band was brought in for “The National Anthem”.

The best venue they have ever played, Yorke says, was a Roman amphitheatre in the south of France, about 3,000 people, where he could see every face. O'Brien's best live band in the world is Asian Dub Foundation, whom he watched from beside the bass bin at their Radio 1 show in London. Jonny finds the guitar too old-fashioned to be exciting any more, though he notes that people declare it dead every eight years.

One of the questions is whether Kid A is Leo Blair, the Prime Minister's baby son. It isn't; Selway's first son is called Leo. Yorke says the name started as nonsense and ended up being about the idea that we're giving birth to the lifeform that will inherit the earth after we destroy it in about 50 years⁵.

The session on air