Thom Yorke thinks the Kid A leftovers may be the better record

Radiohead recorded enough during the Kid A sessions for two albums, and Thom Yorke tells David Fricke, in Rolling Stone's People of the Year issue, that the unreleased half may turn out better than the record they put out. It could come out as EPs. He has played one of the songs to Björk, and says the leftovers go two ways. One is like very broken machinery. The other is really fat and dark.¹

Kid A went in at number one on the Billboard chart with no videos, no single and three North American shows. Yorke now regrets the secrecy before its release, when there were no advance copies and critics heard it only under supervision. In retrospect, I think that was really stupid.¹ The album was finished three or four months before anyone could hear it and was locked away while the band toured. Live versions of the new songs went round on Napster all the same, which he thought was brilliant.

He cannot listen to Kid A now and does not want to. Ed O'Brien's early idea for it, a back-to-the-roots record, Yorke vetoed. Kid A is like getting a massive eraser out and starting again.¹ The title was the name of one of the band's sequencers. “Everything in Its Right Place” was the first song he wrote after a spell of writer's block, and the first thing he wrote on a baby grand piano he had bought for his house.

Asked for the best thing about his year apart from the number one, Yorke picks three weeks at his house by the sea, swimming in the Atlantic every day.