Andrew: "So this is Thom talking to me about the strange business of people sifting his lyrics for meaning, and the Stanley he mentions early on is Stanley Donwood, who co-designs the sleeves for Radiohead.

Thom: "What I'm more interested in is how they respond to those lines, like 'House of Cards' for example, you could at it on lots of...like Stanley, to him it was about fear of the future. It wasn't a love song at all, he wasn't interested in the love song bit, it didn’t mean anything to him. He was like the denial bit, denial as in denial of what's gonna on, you know, when you really do get in conversation with people, it always surprises me what they're getting from it. But the whole point is that if you write lyrics intending for the meaning to come across in one way then is not art, you know, it just a speech or a rant. Writing the words was a struggle because no matter how many times I want to sit down and write stuff, if I don't have any instruments in front of me, you know, I'll fill up notebooks but usually I'll use 5% of that whole notebook, maybe like 1%, maybe like 4 lines or a stupid idea for something else. The best lyrics simply come out of a particular moment when you've either written a song or you're playing it with the band or you learnt a different way of doing it. Like when I was doing The Eraser, all this stuff had been sequenced and I was having to go away and learn to play it on the piano or guitar in order to finish the lyrics, because I had to have that spontaneous feeling...

Andrew: "Right...

Thom: "...of getting up in the morning, I write lyrics first thing in the morning now, getting up and hammering it out and getting a new line every few days.

Andrew: "That's slow, a line a day.

Thom: "Man, if I do a line a day, I'd be blissfully happy. It’s all about averages, isn't it?

Andrew: "Yeah.

Thom: "Because you'll go for 4 months with absolutely fuck all, bashing your head against the wall and then you'll get an entire tune in five minutes.

Andrew: "Hmm...

Thom: "There's this one song I've got at the moment that we worked on and on, we haven't gotten anywhere with it because I haven't got the lyrics for it. That's another interesting thing, if the lyrics aren't coming, the music won't come. It'll stay in this place and it will either come out or it won't, you know. But I know this tune is really great and I know people will really identify with it because it's chronically simply but it's the chronic simpleness of it which means I can't fucking do it. But it's one of those things that I'm just gonna keep working on it until something happens or I'll find myself with a song in my head, with the melody in my head in a situtiation where I'm open and it'll all fly in. It maybe what people are saying, it maybe what's on the tele, it maybe something I pick and it'll just go bang! A lot of that happened on OK Computer, we were travelling so much during The Bends and it was a really great why to write because the world's changing in front of your eyes the whole time, everything is different, you got these melodies rattling around in your head all the time, it was piss easy. Everything was just falling in; it's much harder being at home for example, because the world isn't changing, the world's the same every day. There's much less simulation.

Andrew: "In making of In Rainbows, did you find there were particular situations that you hadn't expected, you know, that maybe unblock the drains a bit?

Thom: "Well most travelling, Reckoner is an interesting one because that was done probably in about ten minutes. I'd been talking to Jonny about the song, we had a complete version of it, but I hadn't got any lyrics, but that was one of the situations where I just went and sat in front of the piano and thought – I'm just gonna fucking do this and it's gonna be good and that's it, and it actually worked in 10 times I got, let’s do it. But that really doesn't happen very often.