Thom Yorke names “Videotape” his favourite Radiohead song on Radio 4's Today

Thom Yorke was the guest on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Wednesday morning, 2 January, and named “Videotape”, the last song on In Rainbows, as his favourite of everything the band have made. Personally speaking, that's my favourite thing we've ever created because it has the inexpressible substance going on behind the specifics of the song⁴, he says. He had wanted it to open the album. I wanted to put it first until someone pointed out that if we did that everybody would turn it straight off⁴, he jokes. The song came together in spite of Yorke, he says: the others took the reins, and in the end they stripped it right back.

The CD of In Rainbows came out on XL in Britain on 31 December, after a download-only release in October at whatever price the buyer chose, and “Jigsaw Falling Into Place” follows as the first single on 14 January. Yorke calls it rubbish to read the download as the band saying everything but the internet was finished. An object still matters, and he points out that 80 per-cent of people still buy physical records so we'd be stark raving mad to not address that, you know?¹

Asked about web reports that 2 million people downloaded the album and 61 per cent paid nothing, he calls them nonsense. Only the band know how many did. It feels wrong to say exactly what happened. But it's been a really nice surprise and we've done really well out of it.²

He also talked about this year's touring. In December Colin Greenwood posted the findings of the Best Foot Forward study, which measured the carbon cost of the band's last two tours, on Dead Air Space, the band's blog. Yorke says there are a few things they can change, though the biggest factor is the obvious one, a mass of people travelling to one place. He has thought about going by sea. Two weeks riding in freight containers would be greener, he says, but a liner like the Queen Mary is actually worse, being heavy and so fast. What the band will do is travel between shows by bus, where the normal protocol in the rock business is to fly in and fly out every night.