Thom Yorke says the last two albums kept Radiohead together

Thom Yorke tells the Orlando Sentinel that Kid A and Amnesiac were no pose and no attempt to annoy anyone. In his words, these records are the result of a desperate attempt to keep the band together¹, and it worked. After OK Computer he no longer loved the music they were making. Carrying on down the same path would only have pleased other people, and he spent more than a year so blocked that he felt dead. Sanity, he says, matters more than being number one.

We operate like the U.N., and I'm America.

Thom Yorke¹

Kid A entered the American chart at number one but has sold about 840,000 copies there, the paper reports, against 1.4 million for OK Computer.

Yorke, 32, grew up watching the gap in Oxford between the students behind the college walls and the people outside them. The resentment is real, he says, the theme runs through the last two records, and the gap seems to him to be growing.

Chris Hufford, the band's co-manager, found it horrible watching his misery in the OK Computer years, the misery caught in Meeting People Is Easy, and calls it self-inflicted. His son Noah, born in February, has helped, Hufford says, and so has coming through the last two records with music Yorke loves. Yorke says the baby has made him less obsessive about work.

Since Noah has come along, it's like, 'I've got 20 minutes to do a drum edit. Let's get it done.'

Thom Yorke¹