Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien tell NPR how The King of Limbs was made

Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien have talked to Guy Raz for NPR's All Things Considered, in an eight-minute piece broadcast on 6 October. The King of Limbs came out in February with no big tour and no interviews, and still reached number three in the US. Asked about the silence, O'Brien said We didn't feel like it. We didn't want to explain it.² Yorke's answer was “Yeah.”

Raz sat down with them the week before, in the band's first week back in public in America: the Saturday Night Live season opener on 24 September, then two sold-out nights at the Roseland Ballroom in New York.

The band came off the In Rainbows tour exhausted and uninspired, O'Brien says, until they and their producer Nigel Godrich found software that loads MP3 files so they can be triggered from a turntable like vinyl. So, we had an initial session of about five weeks and it was really like the kids in the kindergarten². It forced them to simplify, and Godrich was keen that they listen to one another. None of them really expected the experiment to produce anything, Yorke says, let alone a record.

Yorke took “Bloom” apart on air. Almost every tune is like a collage, you know. Things we prerecorded, each of us, and then were flying at each other. It's like editing a film or something.² He is always taking in other music, and quotes the line he credits to John Lennon, that what matters in stealing is not who from but how. Nobody in the band is ever told an idea can't be tried, O'Brien says; it is tried, and kept if it suits the track.

When the record was finished, O'Brien thought it was obvious, then realised it wasn't, which he calls the scary part of making something in a bubble. Learning the songs for the stage is a backwards process for Yorke, and one that lets them exist in another way. We didn't have a clue how we were going to play a lot of it.²