Thom Yorke tells Greg Kot why he puts his panic into the music

Thom Yorke has been waking at four in the morning with panic attacks about the heat wave in England, where people have died of heat exhaustion. He told Greg Kot so by phone as the band arrived in North America for the tour, in an interview that has now gone out on U-Wire through the University of Oklahoma's Oklahoma Daily.

Asked whether becoming a father has made him more or less hopeful about the world, Yorke says that, being prone to depression, he distrusts his panic attacks and the gloom they cast over the future, a delusion depressed people share. Still, he finds it hard not to worry. Those who set environmental policy have no idea of the consequences and do not answer to the people who put them in power, and while the band were making the album he kept thinking things could not go on as they were. The anxiety is not with him all the time, though, and is no more than most parents feel.

I just choose to put it all in the music, because I don't want to get locked up.

Thom Yorke¹

The band were tempted to repeat their 2001 show in Chicago's Grant Park, one of the highlights of that year, but did not want simply to repeat something they loved, and nobody in Chicago stopped them. Instead they played Alpine Valley Music Theatre in East Troy, Wisconsin, on 23 August.

On the last tour they tried to avoid corporate advertising, corporate boxes and Clear Channel venues; before this one they were told that if they objected to corporate advertising they could not play anywhere. That's normally called blackmail.¹ Quitting would only have hurt the band and the people who wanted to see them.

They will not license their music for adverts, because people's own associations with a song are precious and the money never justifies taking that from them. File-sharing, Yorke admits, has sort of helped, spreading the word when radio is so narrow. He blames the industry's slipping revenue on the quality of what it sells.

The energy he gets from music is like that of a march or a protest rally. His first experience of a crowd was a rally against tuition fees in his first year of college, where mounted police charged and people were hurt. He does not believe in violence, but a crowd that feels the same way about something is powerful. A show, he says, leaves people feeling for a while that everything is in its right place, emphasis on temporarily¹.