Thom Yorke of Radiohead talks to BBC World Service

BBC Radio DJ Steve Lamacq presents a four-part series, The Radiohead Story, starting on Monday 21 April on BBC World Service.

It tells the story of the band from their early schooldays in Oxford, through to their latest recordings.

All five band members, including enigmatic frontman Thom Yorke, tell their story.

There is also a rare opportunity to hear key moments from the band's career from the BBC archive.

Talking to Steve Lamacq Thom Yorke said:

On the album's title

"The others felt very strongly about it (Hail to the Thief) as a title. I mean I really, really struggled. I couldn't think of anything that really seemed to work for ages.

"I think partly because the artwork for the record, what Stanley did was he used all these words and stuff that he'd seen in LA and all these notes that I had scattered around the place so everything was words . . . everywhere I looked and titles and phrases so I was a little bit paralysed when it came to thinking where the album was coming from.

"But they were really into it because its this crazy jubilation about it - this Emperor's new clothes thing about it, like whey hey isn't this marvellous in a kind of pure blind panic written on their faces I guess. I ‘m not quite sure, but it seems to work for me."

On the new single from the album There There

"It made me cry when we finished it actually, I blubbed my eyes out. Then I went to LA and Nigel played me the mix and it just made me cry, I was in tears for ages, I just thought it was the best thing we had ever done.

"There was something about it, I loved what he did with the guitar sound and the way he mixed it and just the way it is really jubilant to me that song in a funny way.

"Also at one time I thought it was the song that we were going to lose which I was really upset about because the melody stayed with me for about four months without going away which is really unusual as it doesn't take me long to get bored and I really never got bored of this song."

On the critics

"Basically I don't read anything that anybody writes now about us at all, cause I just can't anymore, and the main reason for that was that I happened upon by accident basically a review of an Oxford gig which was just like one of the biggest days in my life obviously for all of us.

"Whoever this person was just tore it to shreds, but they couldn't think quite how to tear us to shreds really so they tore the audience to shreds and just basically said who are these people, a bunch of students, white middle class, which is not the case at all.

"But what's the point in arguing, but this person managed to totally and utterly ruin that day for me forever and it shouldn't have done and I should be big enough to ignore it and there was a lesson there which I've learnt now, but I just didn't understand how someone, just because they had access to a keyboard and a typewriter, could write off an event that meant an awful lot to an awful lot of people and there be no answering back, no nothing, that was it, the end of the story.

"Obviously that happens all the way through your career if you choose to do this for a living or stand in front of a stage you're asking for it, that was the most upset I've ever been about anything ever written even right from the beginning."

On his emotions

"A good place to put anger is in music, better than a lot of other places."

On Radiohead's working practices

"Sabotage I think is very important in the way we operate. I think we are unhealthily paranoid about complacency to the point where it is just silly and I am delving into complacency on this record anyway, simply by just sort of saying we are going to let this happen now, i.e. I am not going to sabotage absolutely every single moment of every single day like normal, which I think went down quite well with the others funnily enough.

"But I think it just happens anyway, I think that part of the creative thing for us really is that if something has happened in the past we can 100% guarantee without fear of contradiction that it will never work again. So don't even go there and if you do go there it is purely by accident - so that's all right then!"

On the decision to sign with EMI

"Everything was a horrendous learning curve. I don't know what happens now, but when we signed to a major record label there were lots of independents and the independent thing was very strong and signing to EMI was a bit like okay, we are going to have to spend the first three years apologising for this anyway, which was fair enough, but the joke about it at the time was that we knew that most of those independents were either being signed up and a lot of them were being bought or went under and really we thought that what we were doing was pop music anyway and we didn't expect we could attain that sort of integrity or whatever the hell.

"We basically didn't want to get into a discussion about it so it was like, oh well, okay we'll sign with a major and actually we had a good thing going with EMI.

"The way that these things pan out it was extremely stressful because, like any band when they sign, we were incredibly naive and didn't understand how these things worked and didn't understand, I didn't understand when I was getting very personal attacks very quickly within the music press, I kind of didn't get it.

"I know I've got one of these faces that people want to punch but I can't help that, but it was a bit odd, it just took a while to get used to that idea.

"We were really paranoid of falling into traps, of falling into a hole and never getting out again and we had only just started.

"Then the creep thing happened, we were in America and everyone was all over us like a rash and we were doing the most horrendous press and promotional things, which I really don't think there is any point in doing."

On creative difficulties

"The fall out from that was horrendous, we got to the point where we scrapped everything and started again because we were just so messed up, we didn't understand, that was only a couple of years later, we just could not work out why we had got into this, it ceased to make any sense to us.

"You talk about the songwriting and we were doing it but there was no life to it. We just didn't understand why we were doing it, it was really weird, it was like someone had nicked it off us or something."

On participating in a Drop the Debt protest

"A few years ago Drop the Debt thing just stuck with me when we went to Cologne. I've talked about this before, how all these nice old ladies and Quakers and stuff were protesting at the G7 or 8.

"We handed in this petition with millions of signatures to Schroder at this thing in Cologne and there was a protest that turned into a riot back in London, but somehow the British press were just writing it up as if all these old ladies and Quakers were somehow anti-capitalist lunatics and it was all part of the same co-ordinated protest, which was just nonsense.

"The whole thing was just written up so badly and everyone was ignoring the fact that it was millions of people's signatures on this thing and it just stuck with me how utterly powerless people are to represent what really goes on if people elsewhere see a nicer, more convenient story to be written another way if they can write off the wishes of millions of people in a split second editorial decision, which I feel is immoral."

The series of four programmes starts on Monday 21 April on BBC World Service.

The return of Radiohead to the Glastonbury Festival next month will be the chance for the band to exorcise the ghosts of their last time they played there.

In 1997, Radiohead, widely-acclaimed for their exceptional live performances, arrived with the recently-released OK Computer being declared by critics as one of the greatest albums ever.

But the performance did not go as they had hoped.

"Ninety-seven felt very much like we had a huge spotlight on us at the time," bassist Colin Greenwood told BBC World Service's Music Feature programme.

"OK Computer had just been released and had been received very well, and we suddenly went from standing to being at some sort of enforced speed in a very short space of time."

'Two-month comedown'

A glut of technical problems struck as they took the stage, and the band admit the set was only held together by vocalist Thom Yorke and drummer Phil Selway.

"Everything broke on stage," guitarist Ed O'Brien told Music Feature.

"It turned into the worst concert and the worst night of our lives, basically.

"I don't think we ever wanted to play a concert again."

The band admit that the following OK Computer tour was a disappointment, as they were "emotionally drained" following Glastonbury.

"It took us two months to get over, basically," said Greenwood.

"It's like having a massive hit of a drug for 24 hours, and then having a two-month comedown afterwards."

Millstone

Radiohead's touring began as an opening act for a now forgotten band called Kingmaker at various small UK venues in 1992.

To cut hotel costs, on most nights they would drive back to their homes in Oxford in a small van.

The money began to roll in after their song Creep became a huge hit in America.

But on touring, they found the song to be a millstone.

"When you do get a pop hit in America there's a certain type of person who comes along to the show," explained Ed O'Brien.

"It's a terrible generalisation but it's true.

"At our first gig in America in Boston, [after] we played Creep fourth on the set, 25 percent of the people walked out."

People were only going to the gig to hear one song - so a change in approach to gigging was put in place in time for the second album The Bends.

"When we went back to America for The Bends it was like we were starting again," O'Brien said.

"We started right back in the clubs and did exactly what we had done in the clubs in the UK and Europe and just toured smaller places."

Live challenge

After five of these tours, Radiohead had acquired a much bigger following. Soon they were playing Glastonbury, in 1994 as Britpop was taking off.

"We were on the NME stage, we were between Oasis and Blur," said Greenwood.

"What a line-up - it was like the Champions League.

"That felt quite significant for us. What were we doing there?"

From there Radiohead's reputation as one of the greatest live bands - save for the 1997 problems - was established.

But they faced a new challenge after recording their fourth album Kid A, a studio-based project in which most of the recording was done by band members individually, separate from the rest of the group.

This meant playing the songs live would present an enormous challenge.

"I think it's fair to say when we were recording it we really didn't know if we were ever going to play live again," Selway admitted.

But he said it was the challenge of working out how to perform the songs that encouraged the band to go back on the road after the OK Computer tour.

"The songs from The Bends and OK Computer were actually Xeroxed copies when we played them live," he said.

"It's exciting to have that flexibility in what you're playing.

"It had to be completely different for us to go out again."

Testing songs

The tour changed pace, with relaxed schedules, and venues were to be interesting, rather than "warehouses".

Thom Yorke's voice was recorded and played back during the live set while he sung over it to tackle some of the difficulties of transferring Kid A to a live set.

But for latest album Hail To The Thief, Radiohead have taken the reverse approach - they have tested the songs live, in Spain and Portugal, before recording.

"For the last couple of years we have really enjoyed touring," Selway said.

"Everything's set up for us now so that we do concentrate on those aspects of touring that are interesting.

"That's definitely reflected in this record."