"Stanley said a great thing," O’Brien recalls. "He said, ‘Kid A is like you pick up the phone, you call somebody, and there’s an answering machine on the other end. With Amnesiac, you get through to that person. And you’re engaged in the conversation."

• Ed O’Brien [Rolling Stone #869, may 24th 2001]

“It’s nice when people talk to you as if you’re a human being, rather than as if you’d just landed from another planet. We’re fallible, this is fallible, sometimes we’re shit, sometimes we’re not. We want to kind of mellow it all out a bit. Just chill the fuck out. And, amazingly, people seem to have totally understood. When “Kid A” came out, one of the things that scared the shit out of me was having to deal with all that again—what happens when people talk to you and want something. There’s a certain sadness to it— people who project so much onto another person. It’s upsetting. It’s disturbing. It’s so nothing to do with that person at all. I’ve been through it myself. I am a fan of R.E.M., of Michael Stipe, and so I was absolutely terrified of meeting him, because I projected so much stuff onto him when I was a kid. So I totally understand and respect why people do it. Now Michael and I have quite a good relationship. Making friends with your idol makes you realize how fucking important it is to stay on this side and never go to that side.”

• Thom Yorke

“I used to share a room with Ed on tour until he refused to. I kept on waking him up at all hours of the morning. So I had a room to myself, which was a shame because Ed’s very entertaining. He talks in his sleep — actually, it’s more like sleep shouting. He starts having conversations that you just wish you could hear the other half of. He sometimes does accents, too. He once came out with this thick Irish brogue, started shouting, ‘HELP! THE BUILDING’S ON FIRE… AND TERRY WOGAN’S UP THERE.’ It was hilarious.”

• Colin Greenwood

“My first french kiss… I was seven, she was my first girlfriend. We were in the playground and we promised to get married straight afterwards. But then I moved away from Scotland, where I lived, and never saw her again… she probably doesn’t remember me at all, but I remember her. Her name was Kate Ganson, and her dad had a great Lotus car”

• Thom Yorke

“I’m quite into listening to music and not doing anything else. I remember when I was in my late teens just getting rid of lots of records, realizing I only ever listened to them when I was reading, or watching TV, or doing something else. I didn’t really like them. It’s the same feeling you get when you’re doing compilation tapes for somebody and you’re actually doing it in real time and you’re listening to it and two minutes into something you think, ‘I don’t really like this. I don’t think this is that good.’ You reappraise it in a way. So, that’s kind of how I listen to music, I suppose.”

• Jonny Greenwood

interview

• Interviewer: The subject matter of the film Bodysong got me to thinking if things like art, sex, or maybe even just getting drunk are about the closest we tiny humans can come to big galactic things. Or, maybe good music and art is just good and I’m trying too hard to make it something else.
• Jonny: [Long pause] I think when [music’s] good and it’s really affecting, then it’s stupid to be embarrassed about it—about how good it is. You know, there’s a certain Tom Waits song that whenever I hear it I, you know, it just…it makes me talk in this inarticulate way that I’m using now, it’s so good. It seems to me quite disingenuous to be embarrassed about it. I think it should be ambitious and good music does deal with life and art and all these wonderful things. I used to be ashamed talking about it, but now I just think it’s fraudulent to pretend otherwise. I don’t even know what I’m trying to say. You just sound like you’re being passionate about it and I agree with you. I don’t know how else to put it into words. You’re the journalist, you should know. I’ll leave it to you. If you could hash that out by tomorrow, that’d be great.
• Interviewer: Are you giving me homework?
• Jonny: Yeah, keep it short—200 words. By tomorrow, please.

"This phenomenological bent may be familiar if you were once grabbed, startled, or terrified by Radiohead’s music. Most fans, I suspect, don’t gradually warm up to the band. Instead, the conversion is sudden and drastic. You probably heard OK Computer or Kid A and were struck by something vague yet powerful and real—as if Radiohead presented sounds and rhythms from a hidden, subliminal soundtrack that plays just beneath the surface of life. Before I discovered the band, I thought these sounds were subjective and private—the particular sound of my own brain, I figured, humming, popping, and stuttering through life. But when OK Computer plays, my neurons seem to hum along with music they have always known. However you try to describe it, Radiohead makes sense almost immediately—musically, despite complex time signatures, and emotionally, even though the words are often obscure and drenched in sound…Do you know that strangely menacing-yet-beautiful, scary-yet-uplifting sound the world makes? You’re not alone."

• Radiohead and Philosophy

“A good piece of music is like knocking a hole in the wall so that you can see out on another place you didn’t know existed. If your consciousness is not constantly evolving somehow or other and you just keep going round the same room again and again, then you’re sort of trapped - and every good piece of music - or art or writing - stops you feeling trapped. Maybe that is what religion is as well, I don’t really know. But it’s not really escapism, that’s the point."

• Thom Yorke

"I think the most important thing about music is the sense of escape. But there are different ways to escape. I think escape is sort of like coming to a show with ten thousand other people and responding to that moment. Sharing that moment—that’s escape. Wherever the music came from originally is secondary to what’s happening at that moment, how the music sends you somewhere else. That’s the important thing."

• Thom Yorke

“The records that you keep with you are the ones your life has stuck to. I think your favourite records are like your own tape recordings of the things that happened alongside them.”

• Thom Yorke

“The coolest thing you could possibly do throughout your life is to do- make your own decisions because you’re not bothered about what anybody else thinks. I mean not cool is subscribing to peer pressure from other people. The whole point is that as you leave your teenage years, you will discover this. At the moment you’re being heavily marketed to- at the moment you’re under a lot of pressure to fit in with your friends and stuff but that disappears very rapidly. What you eat, what you wear, what you listen to, how you behave; these are all things that are up in the air. Um, but the last possible reason you should choose to end up doing this or that, is because you’re worried about not looking cool.”

• Thom Yorke

“Thom Yorke is weird, sort of. But you’ve met weirder. He’s mostly just an intense, five-foot-five-inch 34-year-old who wears hooded sweatshirts with sleeves too long for his limbs, and this makes him look like a nervous kindergartener. He doesn’t appear to have combed his hair since The Bends came out in 1995, and his beard looks undecided, if that’s possible. But here’s the bottom line: He’s nice. Not exactly gregarious, but polite. He is neither mechanical nor messianic. And this is what everyone seems to miss about him - and Radiohead as a whole: They may make transcendent, fragile, pre-apocalyptic math rock for a generation of forward-thinking fans, but they’re still just a bunch of guys.”

• Chuck Klosterman

“I play the piano a lot at the moment. I don’t know, I’m a bit low on hobbies. I used to do lots of photography…I don’t know. What do I do? What do you do? I just generally worry about things, I think? And daydream ideas for programming.”

• Jonny Greenwood

“Jonny literally wrote on each key ‘first this one’, ‘then this one next’, and ‘next this one’, and ‘this is the last one’… a monkey could do it!”

• Colin on Jonny making sure he could play ‘Idioteque’.

“One of the things I find most offensive about what people say about our music is when they say it’s depressing. The reason I find it offensive is… that—to me—implies that to suffer from depression is like being subnormal, or that it’s a stigma, which it shouldn’t be, because there are an awful lot of people that suffer from depression. And it shouldn’t be like… an ultimate swear word. I really have a problem with people who dismiss art or music on the grounds that it’s depressing, because a lot of creative power is from that feeling.”

• Thom Yorke

“On the day I said to them, ‘You know when you’ve been in a traffic jam for four hours and if someone says the wrong thing to you, you’ll just kill ‘em, you’ll fucking snap and probably throttle them? You’re like this -” he holds a palm millimetres from his face - “with everybody and any tiny spark and you’re going to go off, and you’re in the midst of two or three hundred other people who are in exactly the same thing. I wanted them to play like that, like, this fucking close to going off, lynching or killing, it’s like a mob just about to spark off. Jonny and I were conducting it, and we ran through it a few times and people started to get ideas, and it was such a great day!” he beams. “I broke my foot, actually, because I was jumping up and down so much. It was great! The bit at the end was my favourite bit, because they said. ‘Well, what are we going to do at the end?’ And I said, ‘I’ll go, 1-2-3-4 and you just hit whatever note’s in your head as loud as you possibly can.’ And that was just the best sound you’ve ever heard!”

• Thom on recording The National Anthem

“The most important grammatical tic in Radiohead lyrics, unlike the habitual lyrical “I” and apostrophic “you” of pop, is the “we.” We ride. We awake. We escape. We’re damaged goods. Bring down the government, they don’t speak for us. But also: We suck young blood. We can wipe you out anytime. The pronoun doesn’t point to any existing collectivity; the songs aren’t about a national group or even the generic audience for rock. So who is “we”? There is the scared individual, lying to say he’s not alone—like the child who says “we’re coming in there!” so imagined monsters won’t know he’s by himself. There’s the “we” you might wish for, the imagined collectivity that could resist or threaten; and this may shade into the thought of all the other listeners besides you, in their rooms or cars alone, singing these same bits of lyrics.”

• Radiohead and Philosophy

As Yorke puts it, ‘What happens is before you become a dad, people take you by the shoulder and tell you it’s gonna change your life. And you’re like, Oh really? But what they should be doing is grabbing the back of your head, pummelling it against a wall and telling you, “It’s! Gonna change! Your fucking life! Forever!”’ He rolls back laughing, but it’s clear he means it. (Later, as we walk back towards the hotel, Yorke spots his partner Rachel, who is visiting further up the pavement with two-year-old Noah. ‘That’s my son!’ he exclaims, breaking into a run. Noah does the same – ‘Daddy!’ – and when they meet, Yorke barrels the child up into his proud arms.)

interview

• Thom: It's like being trapped in one space. Like one point. And you can't go backwards and you can't go forwards and you can't go in any direction. You're absolutely trapped in one particular space in time, and you can not move on. Because I use music to move on, to progress through life. So when I lost that, I lost the ability to progress. Or anything. So, you start to lose the ability to interact and it becomes like a vicious circle.
• Interviewer: So you're sitting there at home all the time doing nothing or is it-
• Thom: No, it's just every time you to go to a piece of music or read a book or go for a drive in your car, you're constantly thinking that you're trapped. You're stuck. You're like a full stop, and you'll never be anything else. I think the only way that you deal with it eventually is you just forget about it. You choose to not have a problem about it. You choose to go and see your friends and go out and get drunk and enjoy life and just forget about it and just wait for it to come back.

“Everything should be tried at least once, except incest and country dancing.”

• Jonny Greenwood

"I’d like to think young people don’t really believe Facebook and Twitter is better than sitting in a forest at dusk listening to the sounds."

• Thom Yorke

“As soon as I say this, everyone will take the piss. It’s just, I think… part of me is always looking for someone to turn around, buy me a drink, give me a hug and say it’s all right… because I just go off on one. For days I can’t talk to people. And it shocks me because I’m still doing it. I want to be alone and I want people to notice me — both at the same time.”

• Thom Yorke

"You can’t go anywhere with Thom without him having a laptop and headphones on. It’s been like that for years, and he’s still doing it. We drove to London yesterday and he had his laptop out and his headphones on for the whole journey. That’s what he’s like. Always filling notebooks, too…"

• Jonny Greenwood talking about Thom - Mojo, february 2008

"Thom’s got really broad shoulders. When you see them go down, boxer-style, that means he’s really enjoying it."

• Colin Greenwood talking about the 93 Feet East show in London - The Word, june 2008

“I started going out with this girl and I wanted to impress her so I pretended I’d been vegetarian all along… and I immediately felt a lot better, a lot healthier. I was concerned, as many people are, about that ‘you’re not going to get all the things you need in your diet, you’re going to get sick all the time’, but the exact opposite happened to me, so I never looked back. It was never a problem straight off.”

• Thom Yorke

“Thom Yorke, who writes most of the songs, is compact, boyish, and impish; he has a lethally quick mind and a subtly powerful charisma. Ed O’Brien, almost a foot taller than Yorke, has the jutting jaw and floppy bangs of an actor in a period war movie; he is suave and direct and seems to have rolled in from a different posse. Jonny Greenwood, a lanky figure with unruly black hair, is more cautious than his brother Colin, but when he starts talking he excitedly involves himself in dense, Victorian sentences, biting clauses out of the air. Phil Selway is bald and sweet-faced, and talks in a gentle voice. He looks like the nice, ordinary one, but he often has a trace of a wicked smile.”

• The New Yorker (2001)

“The more you absorb yourself in the present tense, the more likely that what you write will be good. Especially in this f–king town, where everybody’s sitting in front of their desks for far too long, endlessly sweating over words that don’t ever get heard. People are obsessive in this city and work becomes an end in itself. The polar opposite of that is Michael Stipe, who absorbs himself in other people and the life around him, and that’s where he gets his ideas. I’m not like that, but I absolutely understand why he does it. Neil Young claims he writes lyrics and doesn’t go back to them. If he does, he says, the worse they become. But that’s scary. I mean, ‘Faust Arp’ is the exact opposite of that, pages and pages and pages and pages and pages and pages until eventually, the good ones stick.”

• Thom Yorke on Faust Arp

“It’s a very strong bond in there. And it’s not like a group of friends, it’s not like a group of colleagues. It is much more akin to a sibling relationship where you have all these common experiences. There is I suppose an underlying trust in it. But you’re actually all quite vastly different people within that as well. But, as a lot of siblings find, there is a kind of a shorthand in the way that you work together… Going through formative experiences together. We’ve been through a few of those and it dates right back to when we were all at school together, so you’ve been through all those big life changes together… Going from effectively being boys, to toying with the idea of being adults, and at least sticking probably at being mostly boys again… I think that just as in a family, you know each other on the whole very well. I think that’s the same case here. You know how to gauge each other. You do that quite intuitively. In that sense, even though you go through these quite intense periods together; actually there needs to be something intuitive at the base of that. To actually make sense of those times and actually still maintain that kind of a true sense of what the band is.”

• Phil Selway

interview

• Spec: With such a large young-adult fan base—who will be the future leaders of the world—do you think music will influence these future leaders? And how specifically would you like to see Radiohead’s music influence them?
• Colin: I don’t think music influences people in a direct-action kind of way, but it does help to shape tastes and perhaps that has a part to play in growing up. If we make people think, then we’ve achieved something.

“But what people might not know is that they are so great in person. All five of them, and everyone in their enormous crew, were all so sweet to us. They really supported our music. If one of John’s pedals got busted, someone from their crew would immediately offer to help. Someone from the band watched us from the side of the stage almost every night. Phil brought us cupcakes. Jonny brought us champagne and offered to play on our album, until he heard some rough mixes and said it already sounded done. Jonny did our light show in Amsterdam. He even used the strobe light which wasn’t allowed. Ed asked us how we got our guitar tone, because he wanted to steal it. When Radiohead had a night off in Dublin, and Deerhoof had our own show in a small club, how did Thom spend his free time? He came to our show and danced like crazy. Colin kept taking our picture and posting pictures of us on Radiohead’s website, and he’d imitate Satomi’s dance during their show. Jim Warren, who does their sound mix, said he’d be happy to do ours as well and went and studied one of our albums to research what we wanted our mix to sound like. I do not expect this sort of treatment from any band, let alone a band on the level of Radiohead. They are disproving every truism about how famous people are supposed to act, and that taught us a beautiful lesson.”

• Greg Saunier, drummer of Deerhoof, on touring with Radiohead. 2007

“The whole tour was like that. They each went out of their way to make you feel at home. And such jokers, I mean you couldn’t get them to be serious if you tried! In L.A. our dressing rooms were particularly far apart, but Phil made a special trip down to the basement to deliver us some cupcakes. When Thom thanked Deerhoof on stage, Colin would always start jumping around in an imitation of Satomi [Matsuzaki, Deerhoof vocalist]’s dancing. In Amsterdam I noticed Jonny quizzing the lighting designer during our soundcheck, and later during our show I noticed the lights were going crazy with all manner of strobes and nonsense. Yet everything was perfectly timed to our music. It was Jonny back there in a hoodie secretly doing our light show! In Dublin we had a day off and decided to book our own Deerhoof club show. After soundcheck we happened upon this vegan restaurant, and who was sitting there but Jonny and Thom, who invited us to join them. Radiohead’s Irish tour manager had drafted Jonny in to play a traditional Irish music concert at some pub, and in turn Jonny had drafted Thom in to watch it. When we mentioned that we had a show tonight too, Thom turned to Jonny and said that’s it, he’s going to ours instead.”

• Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier, on touring with Radiohead during the In Rainbows tour

“This is somehow God’s will? All this? It’s God’s will that we sit in traffic? It’s God’s will that millions of people are gonna die this year because of some outmoded economic policies? No, it’s not! It’s like some deranged sacrificial altar, the high priests of the global economy holding up these millions of children each year, like [arms aloft] ‘We wish to please you, oh Gods of free trade!’ It’s like… give us all a fucking break! If there is a Devil at work, then he rests in institutions and not in individuals. Because the beauty of institutions is that any individual can abdicate responsibility. The assumption that we’re all utterly powerless, that’s the Devil at work.”

• Thom Yorke

A confession… I spent the afternoon lurking like a deviant in Sheffield’s HMV, watching people buying our new record. Ugg. This is, of course, utterly unforgivable (not to mention voyeuristic) but, like a novelist and his readership, you wonder…who? So, with my vantage point in the ‘Easy Listening’ section, I could pretend to deliberate between two “Manhattan Transfer” albums, while surreptitiously watching the people of Sheffield listening to our album on a “listening post”, (and subsequently buying/not buying it, listening to some songs, skipping past others). A voice: “Excuse me…are you Jonny from Radiohead?” Double nightmare - how do I explain to this beautiful indie-kid why I was watching her listen to our CD for twenty minutes? AND what do I say when I follow her gaze to the Manhattan Transfer albums in my left hand?

• Jonny Greenwood in Radiohead World Service, October 1995

“The main solution is to learn how to read the media… to understand that it’s not just what they’re saying—it’s how they’re saying it, and what’s not being said; and learning how to read newspapers and how to watch television. It’s not a passive thing. It should be a very active thing.”

• Jonny Greenwood

“The good thing about working with Radiohead is that they all have different personalities, they get a lot of support from each other, and when one of them feels bad, the others readjust, gather around him. When you work so closely with a songwriter, it could become a marriage: the others end up jealous, feeling left out, looking themselves for this intimacy. Feeling protected or courted is great. When I’m not working with them, I feel helpless: it’s become a need to me.”

• Nigel Godrich

“Stephen Hawking… y’know… he talks about time, and the idea that time is completely cyclical. It’s just a factor like gravity. And it’s something that I’ve found, sort of, in Buddhism too. And that’s what Pyramid Song is about. Pyramid Song is about the fact that everything is going in circles." ... “It’s like the river of forgetfulness… It sounds like finding an old chest in someone’s attic with all these notes and maps and drawings and descriptions of going to a place you cannot remember.”

• Thom Yorke

“We still get lots of letters from teenagers – kids as well, despite the fact that I’m 36 and getting on a bit – that say, ‘I don’t understand all the other kids in my school. I’m thinking all these things and when I talk to them they don’t know what I’m talking about. They just want to make sure that they’re in with the crowd.’ If I can help out people like that who don’t feel able to participate, that’s great, because I had the same problem – except possibly the pressure to fit in is worse now than it was even then. So, I’d feel really good if there was an element of heroics there, because when I was looking up to my idols at that age that’s what I took from them, you know? That it was OK to just walk the plank and do your own thing.”

• Thom Yorke