Sook-Yi Lee: We're back with Radiohead, minus Jonny – Colin, Phil, Thom and Ed.

Thom: Hello!

Sook-Yin: Hey! So... [crowd cheers] You guys have this album – [holds up advance copy OKC] that's not the artwork – but it's coming out in stores on June 17th, OK Computer. So it's a slow tempoed album, but it's not necessarily easy listening.

Thom: No.

Sook-Yin: There's a lot of sounds in there, there's no three-minute pop songs. Your first single is a six-and-a-half epic without a chorus...

Thom: [crack's up] It's nothing but choruses! Twelve choruses... euuooo... Yeah, you're right.

Sook-Yin: Where you trying to push the parametres of pop music in this?

Thom: Oh, no, I hope not. [groans, head in hands] Everyone tried that in the 70s and it went wrong, didn't it?

Sook-Yin: Fusion...

Thom: Peter Gabriel was all right, when he had the big flower in his head. Um... not really, no. We had three songs and we didn't know what to do with them, so we put them into one, with 'Paranoid Android'. I dunno, I think it's a pop record. It's just you can't... first listen, it's got a different atmosphere to it.

Sook-Yin: Yeah. What were some of the things that influenced you, that helped in the atmosphere of the album?

Thom: Well, the place we recorded at was pretty influential. I mean, we had all this material anyway, but it made the performances really weird. It was quite... haunted. It was a haunted house.

Sook-Yin: Another haunted place?

Thom: Haunted house!

Sook-Yin: Didn't you record last time in a haunted place?

Ed: Yes!

Thom: Oh, yeah we did!

Sook-Yin: With the older woman, who slept in your room or something like that?

Thom: That's right! Yeah, yeah, yeah...

Sook-Yin: And she had passed away...?

Thom: That's right...

Ed: She used to play billiards at night with us, as well.

Thom: Yeah. And I couldn't look in the mirror... yeah, that's right, in the mirror, yeah yeah... well, there you go, you see. I have to find a haunted house every time we do an album, so I can not get ANY sleep and get really freaked out.

Sook-Yin: So then, you weren't purposefully trying to make something different, but it just ended up sounding different in terms of other music that is out in the mainstream.

Thom: Just because of what we were listening to it was different. We had that thing where we were sort of embarrassed to be a guitar band, really. So we were trying to go down different areas all the time. The sort of things we were listening to were like, classical stuff, and soundtracks and shit... not really guitar bands, at all. Bored, bored, bored of guitars.

Sook-Yin: Yeah, do you think the guitar band sound is pretty much...

Thom: It's really... it'll always be exciting to plug in a guitar and just go 'kliaaooonngg', like at the beginning of 'Electioneering' on this album, you know. But... it's a false sense of worthiness, which has now become a marketing ploy, as you probably know working in a video/music place.

Sook-Yin: It's a safe formula to rely on. I dunno, Frank Zappa... I heard something where he was talking about the death of culture, how everything... popular music regurgitates what's happened in the past and how the death of culture comes when that reminiscing and that regurgitation happens faster and faster, so you're regurgitating what happened last week, and then up until yesterday, and then.. when that point...

Thom: I think that's happening now. And I think that, actually, now it's happened it's really good, because everyone can do what they want. It's just a shame that record companies don't have the foresight – or the insight, or whatever – to just go off and find new stuff. I mean, in Britain at the moment it seems... I dunno about elsewhere, but it seems that everyone is just going off in random directions, and I think that's really exciting, and we were kind of doing that on each song. It was, 'Okay, which way shall we go this time? I know, let's go down and try emulate Miles Davies (and get it really, really, badly wrong)'.

Sook-Yin: And by doing it wrong you come up with something else.

Thom: Exactly, yeah.

Sook-Yin: More like your own sound.

Thom: All that, yes. Oh, yes.

Sook-Yin: Do you feel like you have found a Radiohead sound then?

Colin: [shakes his head]

Thom: I think that we found one when we did The Bends and then we blew it, with this one.

Sook-Yin: So that's up for grabs, that's always a continually changing thing?

Thom: Yeah, that's up for grabs. It's up for everybody else to rip off now!

Sook-Yin: Mmmh. Well, the first album, it was sort of guitar-oriented and more straight ahead, more straight ahead rock 'n' roll. With The Bends you had that, sort of, isolated hypochondriac feel... [Thom nods vigorously while Ed laughs] In this one, are you feeling, Thom, that life is better? Or you're talking about broader things?

Thom: I was... [Ed still laughing] You've got him now! That's it, he's off now. Uh... with this one it was... I didn't feel the need to delve deep into my inner psyche man, 'cause I'd kind of done that and I thought it would be... there was just nothing interesting to write about down there! The interesting things were the things that were whizzing past me at high speed, and the high street, and on trains and everywhere else. It seemed... everything had this energy about it, and like I was plugged into the mains and was just feeding off it. Standing in shopping malls and just watching people go by, or being in bars and watching people, just being a witness. Someone said I was like a witness on this record, and that's my favourite way of putting it, now.

Sook-Yin: Yeah, yeah... hanging out in the mall...

Thom: Yeah.

Sook-Yin: Watching people... Okay, we'll be back with Radiohead, we're going to take a look at a video from their last album. This is 'Just', back with Radiohead in a bit!

Thom: [after a pause as the camera pans out, looking at the fans] There's not one male..!

[clip of 'Just' video]

Sook-Yin: Their third album, OK Computer, is gonna be in stores on June 17th. So, OK Computer... are you fellas proponents of technology and computer technology?

Thom: It's kind of a fear-based craze, really.

Sook-Yin: Is it?

Thom: Yeah. It was... we'd bought all this stuff and had to use it, and we used to walk around the studio going 'OK computer!' [waves arm], like you would if you...

Sook-Yin: "Go!"

Thom: Yeah, "GO!", and it wouldn't do anything.

Sook-Yin: Yeah.

Thom: So there was a lot of that really, heh.

Sook-Yin: Do you feel that computers can bring about people, can bring about a community? Can they bring people closer?

Thom: [violently jerks his head at the others]

Ed: Um... heh. I think that... the best thing about computers, as far as I'm concerned, is the e-mail thing, the whole thing on the internet. But... I don't want to spend like, six hours a day in front of the computer, personally. That's not my idea of fun. I'd like to actually go out and have a drink with someone, so...

Sook-Yin: Mmh... so it seems like people either really feel like they're being really honest on a computer, they can really their innermost feelings, or they've got a pseudonym. They're totally writing a fictional character.

Thom: Yeah, we had this thing, when we were doing the album we used to go and sit on the Radiohead chat sites, like at four in the morning, and we'd constantly be saying, 'No, no! We are in the band, really! Really!' And people never believed you, because there'd be eight other people saying that they were me, or something. Really does your head in after a while! In the end you give up and pretend to be somebody else. [whistle blows in the background] It's the police! [everyone laughs] And... yes.

Sook-Yin: Well it seems like when you dial into the website, the Radiohead website... a lot of bands these days, with websites, just have really mundane kind of like, information about the band. But what you have there is interesting...

Thom: We have no information...

Sook-Yin: Heh! Little information – tangible information – but what you have is interesting. Philosophical rants and short stories and excerpts from books you've been reading. [To Colin] Have you checked out your website?

Colin: Our website? Um... well, yeah! It's good, yeah! A lot of it was done at the same time as the record was recorded, and that's the exciting thing about it. It was done in real-time with the recording of the album.

Sook-Yin: So you guys put the information into the computer?

Thom: Yeah, Stanley Donwood, the guy who does the artwork with us, he does that as well. But the cool thing is, we just do it when we feel like it, really, rather than... The thing is, what's good about it is, now we've set up a list of other sites that you can go to and the other sites have all the information that you need.

Sook-Yin: That's right.

Thom: 'Cause they know all the lyrics before I do!

Sook-Yin: The sites that other people create for you?

Thom: Yeah! We were doing the album, and people already had the track-listing for it, and we hadn't even recorded the songs! So... When we started it, you know, we just thought, 'Well, there's no point in putting anything of any consequence or value on it, we may as well just do it like a dumping ground for all our thoughts. So that's what we do, really.

Colin: Yeah, it was cool to use this technology and computers, in such a way that you got lost in the website, 'cause there's all the links, all jumbled up. So there's not like a logical progression, so you can actually lose yourself in the site.

Sook-Yin: You also have some quotes from writer Raoul Vaneigem?

Thom: Oh yeah.

Sook-Yin: Do you know him?

Thom: Yeah, yeah... oh yeah that's right, yeah. He's a Situationist, apparently.

Sook-Yin: A Situationist... The bit that you have on him there is, he's talking about losing yourself in cities, not being able to ground yourself.

Thom: Yeah, yeah.

Sook-Yin: What is a situationist? 'Cause you were talking about that before.

Thom: I'd sort of... [car swerves in distance,

Sook-Yin: That's the police...] bleh... I mean, the Manics [Manic Street Preachers?] knew more about it than I did... well, Richard [possibly Richey James Edwards, who was known for his love of literature] did anyway. I don't really know... I'd sort of, spent a long time reading about it, lots of people told me about it at art college and I just never bothered reading it. Then I went and found this great bookshop in London, in Camden, where they just have racks and racks of books on it, so I'd start buying them. My favourite one is 'The Revolution of Everyday Life', by Raoul Vaneigem, and that's the one where... it just changes the way you see when you... changes the way you live, in a city. Forever. It changed the way I live in the city forever. Being pretentious for a moment, but then, this is music television so why not!

Sook-Yin: That's okay, pretention... Well I don't even know if it's pretentious, either.

Ed: It's not pretentious...

Thom: Well I dunno, you're talking about books. I'm not talking about who I... anyway.

Sook-Yin: Well, it strikes me... what you do, too, is use popular forms and... you could have done a really mundane, boring rock 'n' roll website, but what you're doing is injecting, you're sort of subverting that form and putting other things in there, and I find that's kind of...

Thom: Well, it wasn't as calculated as that! It's just, we figured there was no point... [shrugs]

Ed: We had a mundane, boring rock 'n' roll website.

Thom: Yeah, we took it...

Sook-Yin: And you were bored of it?

Thom: Yeah, we just said to the record company that 'There's no point in this. Look at all these other independent sites, that have all the lyrics. We don't know what they are, and they do! So what's the point?' So...

Sook-Yin: Well you're gonna be also doing 12 songs... you have 12 songs on the album, and 12 music videos to accompany each song.

Thom: Yeah...

Sook-Yin: So, what was the thought behind that?

Thom: OK Computer is a very visual record, and there was lots of images going round my head all the time when we were recording it. It was an idea that was muted by someone called Dilly, who does all our video commissionings and stuff, she's the one who's always finding people for us to work with. It's a pretty crazy idea, pretty expensive, but if it works it'll be amazing. I mean, our inspiration, really, in a sort of weird way, is the 'Stop Making Sense' thing [concert movie by Talking Heads], when they did it as a B-movie and it was actually shown in cinemas. The idea is to actually show it in cinemas as a finished piece of work when the album is done and has been going for a while.

Sook-Yin: Right, to have a series of videos, almost feature-length film, many little things?

Thom: Yeah, but we can't afford to do it ourselves so if you know anyone with like, a million dollars...

Sook-Yin: Yeah, 'cause that would be very expensive thing to do but I'm sure you know a lot of people that would like to put together something for you.

Thom: Hopefully. Yeah, I hope so.

Sook-Yin: The first video, 'Paranoid Android', what's the background there? These are two existing comic book characters...?

Thom: Yes... Magnus Carlsson does this cartoon called 'Robin', which we were watching a lot when we were doing the record and was really... just the character, was... I just used to watch it and go 'That's me! That's me!' Especially that bit when...

Sook-Yin: Which one is Robin?

Thom: Robin's that one with the hat in the shower. Um...

Phil: Who looks remarkably like Magnus Carlsson himself...

Thom: Yeah, he does, yeah...

Phil: Uncanny...

Thom: There's just something about it, you know. I think that something about the 'Robin' cartoon was generally really sum up how a lot of people feel now. I know it sounds a bit deep but it's not supposed to be.

Sook-Yin: You're so afraid of being deep! You don't want to be deep, but you are deep.

Thom: Yeah, I don't wanna be deep. I want to be... not deep. Thin. Shallow...

Sook-Yin: Heh... so, then he has a sidekick, his pal. Is he part of the...?

Thom: Yeah, Benjamin.

Sook-Yin: Benjamin.

Thom: Benjamin! He's the one that's having the fun and Robin's sort of vaguely worried about what's going on. Benjamin's just kind of like, 'I don't care..!'

Sook-Yin: And they're sort of making their way through life...

Thom: Yeah.

Sook-Yin: And stumbling along as they go.

Thom: Benjamin always gets the girls, and Robin never does.

Sook-Yin: And so, the guy that did the video, is he the creator of the comic?

Thom: Yes.

Sook-Yin: Okay... So does it reflect the song content, or did you just let him go with this?

Thom: What happened was that he... [looks at Ed] Well, you know about this, 'cause you talked to him about it.

Ed: Yeah, he said... what he deliberately didn't do is, Thom didn't send over lyrics of the song. And he basically sat in his... he lives in Stockholm, and he has his studio overlooking this main street in Stockholm and he sat there for 12 hours or something and played 'Paranoid Android' back to back for 12 hours! So he kind of got in this, I guess this string

Sook-Yin: He didn't have the lyrics?

Ed: He didn't have the lyrics.

Sook-Yin: He couldn't make out the lyrics?

Thom: Not quite, no. I wouldn't have thought.

Ed: And he said it was a beautiful sunny day, and hearing 'Paranoid Android' for 12 hours, constantly, he kind of got into this mental state, and he just saw people going by on the street, or something would happen in the street, and he'd just take it off on a tangent and write down his ideas, and that's what he did.

Sook-Yin: Right.

Ed: Which is great, I mean, you know!

Thom: The thing is, in a really, really weird way he just captured the song. The song for me was always one about... I mean, the actual recording of it, and the playing on it, we were having a really, really good, real good laugh doing it. We tend to agonise about what we're doing a lot, but that was... it felt really free, doing that.

Fan: YOU GUYS KICK ASS!

Thom: ...thank you very much.

Sook-Yin: 'You guys kick ass'!

Thom: Yew gois keek aaass...

Ed: Thank you so much.

Thom: Yeah, er... where was I? Oh...

Sook-Yin: He was able to capture it... and you feel like on another... unconscious level..?

Thom: Yeah. There's this sort of chaos, urban chaos, in the whole video, which is just totally, totally what was needed, and yet it's a really funny cartoon. I just have a good time every time I watch it! I think it's brilliant.

Sook-Yin: Well he cues into sound-like things when you talk about... when you're singing about the angel, and then the angel appears in the helicopter. And angels often recur in your lyrical themes...

Thom: Everyone has one.

Sook-Yin: You feel so?

Thom: Yeah! Don't they? I think so! [crowd 'aww's] Everyone's got one, or two...

Sook-Yin: 'Awww'! That was a nice crowd m... [Thom gags] Aww! And then he spills his guts. Um.. also there's dismemberment and it features a lot of boobs in this video. So is this...

Colin: Breasts.

Sook-Yin: Yep, breasts and, whatever, hooters.

Thom: Sex and death.

Ed: The weird thing is that some of the censors have gone out on it, and you can understand maybe censors on the dismember bit, but the thing that's caused most trouble is the nipples! The breasts!

Sook-Yin: People are more offended by the nipples than the dismemberment.

Ed: Yeah, it's funny, they are!

Thom: I should know what nipples look like! I don't have a problem with nipples, actually.

Ed: Yeah! ... [shrugs]

Sook-Yin: So you've encountered some...

Thom: Nipples!

Sook-Yin: ...problems there... aha, yeah! But you know, in Canada they just have a new law where... or not in Canada, in Toronto, that women can walk topless.

Ed: In Toronto?

Thom: Well there you go! See? So you can't possibly censor it, you see. You don't!

Sook-Yin: [to fans] You girls, would you exercise that right, though?

Crowd: Nooooo!

Sook-Yin: Right now? No...

Thom: That would have got really out of hand. But it's all good, nothing's happening.

Sook-Yin: So that was his thing, his obsession, rather than yours?

Thom: That's his... ablablabal...

Sook-Yin: [to Colin] You're not saying a lot..!

Colin: Yeah I think he's definitely working out some stuff that's his, but that's the great thing about doing this. We have a piece of music we've done, and we get to work with someone who's really talented, who's got their own ideas about it. Otherwise it would be a one-sided conversation if it was always just us! You know, the music. So that's really healthy.

Thom: I think it's the best video we've ever done. And it's great, 'cause we didn't do it. We weren't even involved, heh...

Sook-Yin: And it is a good point, that the nipples have really maybe horrified people.

Thom: 'Tom & Jerry', you know, how violent can you get?

Sook-Yin: Yep! Well, let's take a look at the video, and we hope to see you again in August.

Thom: Yes.

Sook-Yin: Radiohead, thanks a lot for coming down! [crowd cheers]