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Two dozen more songs are in a vault, Thom Yorke tells the Guardian
About two dozen more songs were recorded alongside Kid A, some of them more guitar-based and already being played live, and when asked about them Thom Yorke laughs it off. They're in a vault!
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He was talking to Lauren Zoric for The Guardian's Friday interview, in a café on Cowley Road in Oxford, ten days before Kid A comes out on 2 October. When OK Computer was finished, Yorke says, he was very ill, after about ten years of going one way without being able to stop, and getting better took a while. The others were affected too, if less badly. I was a complete fucking mess
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For the first time there was no record company deadline. Before moving into their own studio in Oxfordshire in September 1999, the band had three attempts at writing and recording that year, in Paris, Copenhagen and Gloucestershire. Yorke wanted to take them away from writing songs as such, to work more like programmers and end up with sounds and textures. All he had were fragments, such as “How to Disappear Completely”, first played live on the 1998 tour.
Nigel Godrich, their producer since The Bends, did not at first see why they wanted to move away from what they were good at, but trusted Yorke. I think he thought I'd lost my marbles
1, Yorke says. You can't just sit in a room together and play in one way for the rest of your lives and expect it to be wonderful.
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Yorke denies that Kid A is a joke at the audience's expense; he always wanted what he made to end up on the high street. It arrives, as reported in August, with no single. In place of videos, which Yorke calls cheap TV adverts, there will be i-blips, short clips with snatches of the album to download from fan sites and the record company's site. The blips are adverts for the band, he says, and openly so.
This year he went on the May Day protest in London, and he is glad to have got involved with Jubilee 2000 as a mainstream face of resistance to the IMF and the World Bank. The night before the interview someone called him a champagne socialist, and they had a row.