(Thom and Ed in electronics store part)

Host 1: [...] a used electronic parts store.

Host 2: Little bits and switches and things like that?

Host 1: Yeah!

Host 2: Did they like it?

Host 1: They played!

Interviewer: Who is this?

Thom: He does our lights.

Interviewer: That is your lighting guy here?

Thom: He's been in here all day.

Interviewer: Ha!

Ed: Andy Watson!

Andy: Hello.

[Clip of 'My Iron Lung' live]

Interviewer: What’s on your shirt?

Ed: [looks] Nous sommes tout… indesirables.

Interviewer: Haha, you bilingual dog.

Ed: Yeah, you know! [everyone laughs] It just flows off! Nous sommes tout… indesirables.

Interviewer: There you go.

Ed: Yeah, that’s right.

Thom: [holds up a little test tube thing ] This is where you put your specimens...

Interviewer: Specimens? All right...

Thom: Obvious thing to put in an electronics shop...

Interviewer: [laughs] Yeah they have a lot of straaange things here... hey, and only a dollar!

Thom: Yeah.

Interviewer: You could afford that!

Thom: I could. But I don't need to give anyone my specimen, at the moment...

Interviewer: No? Oh, okay.

[Clip of 'Airbag' live]

Thom: Ed's got it!

Interviewer: What's he got? Dun dun duuun..! What is it?

Ed: [holding a suspiciously phallic object] I'm not sure what it is... [everyone laughs]

Interviewer: What are you gonna do with it, though?

Ed: I don't know... I think it's... uh...

Interviewer: [laughing] What are you going to do with it?

Ed: No, no it's not what it... it's not that! It's um... it's a voltage detector.

Interviewer: Ah!

Ed: When the red light flashes it means dangerous, if it's green light, it's okay.

Interviewer: Okay! [Ed winks] Okay, voltage! Do you have any rituals before you go on stage?

Ed: Umm…

Thom: Sit on the toilet for 20 minutes?

Ed: [laughs]

Interviewer: What was that?

Ed: He said, ‘Sit on the toilet for 20 minutes’. [interviewer laughs] No, I don’t actually do that! Uh… not really. Just try and… probably the only thing is try and warm up my voice for backing vocals but it doesn’t really help anyway.

Interviewer: Do you have any rituals before you on stage?

Thom: Rituals?

Interviewer: Yeah. Besides sitting on the toilet.

Thom: Well, the tour manager always comes in and says, ‘Right, everybody ready?’ and we’ll go, ‘For what?’

Interviewer: [laughs] Do you really?

Thom: And that’s it, that’s our only ritual.

Interviewer: But I’m sure…

Thom: It’s a really, really crap joke but we kind of say it every time.

Interviewer: Oh, every time…

Ed: Someone just asked me if I worked here! And I was like, ‘No…’

Thom: Ed, do you work here?

Ed: No, I don’t, actually!

Interviewer: [laughing]

Ed: Someone asked, came up to me…

Interviewer: Would you like to?

Ed: Yeah! I love to…

[Clip of 'My Iron Lung' live]

Thom: We wrote a lot of songs when we were on the REM tour. They often sounded best when... I hate to say it, but they often sounded best in big sheds or empty stadiums, 'cause they rattle around in this really chaotic way. When we went back with the Alanis thing it was sort of similar. We had a similar thing.

Interviewer: How about the recording of the album?

Thom: Yesh.

Interviewer: Where’d you do it?

Thom: We did it in a nice big house owned by someone famous who doesn’t live there anymore.

Interviewer: Okay.

Thom: And err… it’s cool because it had lots of stone and it was very old. It’s 15th Century. And one of Henry VIII’s wives had died in childbirth there and she was kind of still there.

Interviewer: Was she? Could you feel her energy?

Thom: Oh, yeah.

Interviewer: Yeah?

Thom: The thing from it is, songs I put… like, you’re saying ‘Paranoid Android’ is a weed, we had a real laughter in the music fill out and it was really funny and we had a really good time. And the lyrics were like the opposite of that because I felt I could write the other stuff because we were having a good time with the music. So it was a liberating thing.

[Clip of 'Paranoid Android' video]

Interviewer: The video?

Thom: Huh? Oh, yeah, I have to explain the video...

Interviewer: Please do.

Thom: ...otherwise it's gonna be taken off the air, isn't it?

Interviewer: Well... [laughs] too late, I think, but okay, explain the video.

Thom: Um... okay, it's sort of chaos, but you have to watch it more than once. As you probably did. And um... well, what can I say? It's... the song was written about a character who's quite innocent and naive, yet is surrounded by all this chaos - very frightening chaos. He's trying desperately to keep himself together. And I think the video is the same thing. There's a moment in the video where he's standing on a... where Robin, the character, climbs up to the top of a lamppost and he's oblivious to all this stuff that's been going on around him. People pouring drinks on him and they guy underneath with the axe trying to hack him down and stuff, and he's just carrying on and he's in another place. He's there but he's not. That's how I felt when I wrote the song. So that's where the video works. I like the angels and the table-tennis bats, and the guy getting his limbs hacked off. It's all this sort of hysteria and panic and lying politicians and getting beers poured on you and sex and death.

Interviewer: In a nutshell! [laughs]

Ed: Look what I found... a Brian May curly guitar lead. Now this is cool! They're only... five dollars!

Thom: We should get some of them...

Ed: They're so great!

Interviewer: Plug it in!

Ed: They all had them in the 70s and 80s... and earlier.

Interviewer: Aha…

Ed: Anyway, that's very cool, I'm very excited about that.

Interviewer: The mono male?

Ed: Yeah, Mono Male, guitar cord.

Thom: That's me...

Interviewer: [laughs] Is that you?

Thom: Yeah, I'm a mono male. [walks over to another shelf] RF female…

Interviewer: Arf female?

Thom: And ACA… male. I'm a two way splitter [points], as well.

Interviewer: Are you!

Thom: Yeah.

Interviewer: Oh okay... what about you?

Ed: I'm obviously a three way splitter. [points; everyone laughs]

[live clip; clip from 'Paranoid Android' video]

Thom: You know if you drink ten cups of coffee, and then you have to talk to somebody, and you're saying absolutely everything that you want to say, and it's like noise and... it's like being in a room full of television screens? I feel like that a lot of the time. Most of the time.

Interviewer: It's the age we live in, it's the shortened attention span. Info overload.

Thom: Yeah. So that's what I mean. That would be what... the short attention span, yeah. The 'attention span of a gnat on speed', as someone tells me.

Interviewer: [laughs] Yep!

Thom: Mee-mee-mee-mee-mee! [imitates crazy gnat on speed in the air]

[clip of 'My Iron Lung' live]

Thom: It's interesting... in the 80s, one of the best exports in Britain were lightweight weapons, and explosives and torture implements, like cattleprods and...

Interviewer: Ah, okay.

Thom: That was one of our most lucrative exports.

Interviewer: Hm. And what would it be now?

Thom: We haven't got one now!

Interviewer: [laughs] You'd better find... It's Radiohead!

Thom: Ah, yeah, right. Us and Oasis and Blur and...

Interviewer: Oh, oh, right!

Ed: The Spice Girls.

Thom: The Spice Girls, oh yeah.

Interviewer: Spice Girls...

[clip of 'Lucky' live]

Interviewer: What's the difference between karma and luck, do you think?

Thom: Ah, yes, you see. Well, they're both onrr... rrr... on the record… rrrrrr. I felt pretty lucky when we were doing the REM thing. And then... um... you're constantly sort of trying to fight with... trying not to be nasty to people, heh. I mean I've always been really bitching about every body and I'm trying to stop because there's no point, really. There's other things to bitch about. And bitching about other musicians and people like that is totally pointless.

[clip of 'Lucky' live]

Interviewer: It's hard to keep your mouth shut, sometimes, though.

Thom: It is, rather, yes. But then...

Interviewer: Especially when you're in public.

Thom: Yeah and... you've got to remember that everyone is like... fighting for this tiny little bit of space, you know. And at this particular moment we've got that little space, but it'll be someone else next week. So... the karmic wheel, man.

[clip of 'The Bends' live]

Thom: But there's nothing in it!

Ed: Well, no, but it would have... there would've been something in it. You know, the guy standing there on the side of the...

Thom: [points] "Point of Impact", "Rollover", "Unknown", "Total Loss"... what's "Total Loss" mean?

Ed: It's uh... [??]

Thom: Bye then. [waves]

Interviewer: Okay, bye!