The Smile crash their own album playback in London and take questions

Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner turned up unannounced at the Prince Charles Cinema in London's Leicester Square on Thursday 18 January, the first night of the Wall Of Eyes, On Film run. After the programme they took the stage for questions, with the presenter Edith Bowman as host.

The audience heard the whole of Wall Of Eyes in surround sound, more than a week before its release on 26 January. When the album's eight tracks had finished, the screen read “What's this then?” and an orchestral piece nobody had heard began. Yorke later said it was called “Tiptoe”, though not whether it belongs to the album or will come out some other way. The evening also premiered a silent film of unseen studio footage and Paul Thomas Anderson's video for “Friend Of A Friend”.

Someone asked whether recording at Abbey Road had put the Beatles in their heads. We fucking tried not to! I mean we were in Abbey Road, but it's like, 'Let's not do that, eh?'¹ The tuning sweep halfway through “Bending Hectic” is there because the song wanted it, Yorke said, and he called Abbey Road the best studio in London and said the band had used it on and off since the 1990s. For Greenwood the Beatles link is often a reason to stay away. He remembered the band once being turned out for a weekend so some business people could record a song, and didn't mind, since studios are struggling.

“Bodies Laughing”, “Colours Fly” and “Just Eyes And Mouth”, all played live but left off the album, will come out in time; Yorke said some are not yet recorded and others are being worked on. There are more songs but those eight just sort of fit together.¹ Skinner credited the producer Sam Petts-Davies with helping them see it.

Yorke and Stanley Donwood made the album's paintings by swapping canvases and wiping out each other's work, which Yorke called the most fun he had had in a long time. An audience member asked him about the fear of showing work. At art school, I was kicked out of painting just because everyone said, 'You're shit, get out!' – which was fair enough, I really was.¹ He went missing for three months, he said, and came back better for it.