Steve Lamacq: "The next track - which we're not going to play tonight, but you will be able to hear tomorrow on Radio 1 - is 'How To Disappear Completely'. Now this is one of the tracks, one of I think two songs on this album, which do actually appear to be linked to a definite time and place, and this one is Dublin."
Thom: "Yeah, well there's the Liffey, yeah."
Steve: "Yeah, there's the Liffey, in Dublin. Is it written about a certain gig or a certain time?"
Thom: "Yeah it was. (to Ed) What was that gig we did?"
Ed: "The RDS. The biggest gig we'd done, it was the week before we did... it was in '97, it was the week before we did Glastonbury, wasn't it?"
Thom: "That's right, yeah."
Ed: "And it was like the seventh gig of, you know, OK Computer, and the first gig of OK Computer, we were infront of four hundred people in Lisbon, and we couldn't even sell out the tickets in this sort of club. Two weeks later, we're in Ireland in front of thirty-eight thousand mad Irish fans, and it was... well, I mean, I always... (to Thom) I'm sure it must really annoy you, but you're like, you know, the Pied Piper of Dublin, whenever you're in... you suddenly... you know, you see... you can tell where you are in Dublin, because there's all these you know, all these people following you and you know that Thom must be round the corner because there's this like queue of people."
Thom: "Maybe."
Steve: "Does that really happen?"
Ed: "It did, yeah."
Steve: "People just following you around?"
Thom: "Yeah, but I've got a beard now, so they probably won't recognise me."
Steve: "But that's where it comes from, but it feels like at that point you don't know exactly where or who or why or how it all happened, very David Byrne, how did I get here?"
Thom: "That's exactly... well, there you go, you see, our main obsession in terms of like reference points was Remain In Light, 'Once In A Lifetime', where did I get here? How did I get here?"
Steve: "How did I get here?"
Thom: "And, erm... yeah... 'How To Disappear' was erm... 'How To Disappear Completely' was... the chorus was really like a mantra to sort of get out of things that erm... get out of a situation that just felt wrong, and it was kind of a way of putting the shutters down so you could erm... and that's what the song is for, it's for someone who's in a situation where they can't get out of it, they've got nothing to... they can't say anything to get out of it, but rather than involve themselves and screw themselves up, they keep repeating 'I'm not here, this isn't happening, I'm not here, this isn't happening, I'm not here, this isn't happening' all the time, that's what it's supposed to be about."
Jonny Greenwood: "The string parts were written originally with an Ondes Martenot, just multitracking it, and playing one part at a time. And eventually we did replace it with real strings. But in parts of it you can still hear the Martenot."
Mark Russell: "It's quite a strange orchestration, because it seems to sort of like float over the top of the song in a kind of disembodied way."
Colin Greenwood: "Well, I mean Jonny probably didn't have such a good time, but he scored the strings and played the Martenot live, didn't you, with the orchestra of St John's..."
Jonny: "I played it very badly, out of tune. [laughs]"
Colin: "...St. John's Smith Square, at Dorchester Abbey, you know, on the Thames. And it was freezing winter, was it February? And Nigel, our producer, took his Apple G3 and hard drive in and some microphones, and no tape, and recorded the orchestra and Jonny playing along on the Ondes Martenot."
Robert Sandall: "Decisions like that, which are obviously fairly radical, are they completely democratically agreed, or is there a certain amount of banging the table and 'no, we're going to do it this way', and you, for example Jonny, insisting that that'd be done? How much do you proceed by consensus, and how much by insistance?"
Jonny: "I don't think any of us are very good at 'table thumping', we seem to just stagger on in the lunacy. I mean, recording the strings was literally a case of setting up in the vestry of this church with one computer and just hoping it was going to work, you know, it wasn't exactly wrapped up in sellotape, but it was that sort of feeling, and especially doing strings when you've only got three hours."
Mark: "Had you demoed the string parts before, did you know roughly what they were going to sound like?"
Jonny: "No, no idea, and the first play through you're just following the notes, just waiting for the wrong one to suddenly poke out, which, you know, which it did a couple of times, but that was fine."
