Thom Yorke: “When we were doing our album... [...] the overall sound and stuff could only be expressed by illustrating this album again and again. Not for any particularly musical things, just the general sound. They had two drum kits, two basses... Absolutely from another world.”

Mark Russell: “You mentioned In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew, and the way that they were recorded was they were live jams, and the records that we now know were pieced together in the editing. [...] Was there an editing element in Kid A? How were the songs actually put together?”

Jonny Greenwood: “I'm not sure we have the ability as a band to play for a great length of time and be inventive. I am concerned that it sounds very smug when we mention all these influences, and we fully realise that we can't do these things and so, just hearing that, hearing the idea of hours and hours of tapes being cut together, I mean that's something we aspire to with bands like Can, the fact that they recorded in a similar way, and Faust even, of playing together the same thing endlessly and endlessly, then cutting parts of it out. But that's something we certainly try and do as a drums, bass and guitar idea. So yeah, that does go on.”

For inspiration, O’Brien turned to the work of artists from generations past who experienced their own transformations in the late-’60s and early-’70s. So he explored the moments when Miles Davis went electric, when Sly Stone and Nick Drake found their essential voices, when the Beatles evolved with Revolver.

Ed: It’s interesting because the music that I could listen to in that time, there was a lot of silence in it—I’d listen to Fauré’s Requiem, or I’d listen to Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden or I’d listen to [Miles Davis’s] In a Silent Way. All these records, there’s a stillness in there. And for me, when you achieve a certain stillness, that’s when spirit comes in, that’s when you feel connected.

Ed: I sort of stopped listening to music in that first lockdown. I’d had enough. I was suddenly aware of this extraordinary birdsong. [...] I got the Merlin app so I could start identifying all of the bird sounds. [...] I had a microphone outside to record the birds, and I realized I wanted to make a track out of birdsong.

I was also interested in sacred music that has a transcendence within. Jeff Buckley, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis all had that same connection with the divine. I listened to A Love Supreme a lot because I wanted to understand and feel John’s connection and his strength. Spirit of Eden, by Talk Talk, is an amazing record and I leant into that a bit. But I was really interested in Coltrane. I was inspired by a lot of Brazilian jazz, people like Jorge Ben and Joyce Moreno.

At the film première, you also mentioned the period between 1968 and 1974 speaking to you recently.

It’s really interesting, particularly Charles Stepney (1931−1976), the arranger [and producer]. He worked on Earth, Wind & Fire records, the Minnie Riperton record ‘Les Fleur’. There’s something about that music – it’s beautiful, it’s spiritual, it’s psychedelic. It’s got amazing arrangements and beautiful, beautiful vocals. There was a lot of cross-pollination going on at that time. Miles Davis goes electric in that period in In a Silent Way and Bitches Brew. I love the sound of those records.