Marc Maron: We went to the Magic Castle last week.
Thom Yorke: Oh yeah?
Marc Maron: Were you heckling? Were you shouting, "Come on! Where's the card?"
Thom Yorke: No, we were trapped in a room. We couldn't get out.
Barbara Streisand started playing really, really loudly while someone was flying through the air, but we had to get out.
Marc Maron: I've been there once. You really do feel like that once you get inside—like there's no way out. It's a very bizarre place. You're led through the bar into one room, then another room, and suddenly you've got a choice of rooms. It's a vortex.
Do you like magic? Were you entertained, or are you one of those people who thinks it's all ridiculous?
Thom Yorke: I never seek out magic.
It was more the horror of that level of entertainment.
Marc Maron: (laughs) "The horror."
I'm going to get in loads of trouble now, aren't I?
Thom Yorke: Yeah.
Marc Maron: What do you think—the magicians are going to send you hate mail?
Thom Yorke: Or maybe worse.
Maybe I'll wake up tomorrow morning in three pieces inside boxes.
Marc Maron: "Thom Yorke involved in a magic trick... involuntarily."
"He was found in pieces. The magician refused to put him back together."
Thom Yorke: (laughs)
Marc Maron: You could just tour as a disembodied head.
Thom Yorke: "I would see you... but I can't find my hands."
Marc Maron: Exactly.
What's your feeling about California? Do you spend much time here?
Thom Yorke: I do really like it.
There's a big British expat population here, and there's still something novel about coming somewhere sunny where people seem—at least on the surface—to be friendly.
Marc Maron: I don't believe it.
Thom Yorke: Well, obviously they're evil and predatory.
Marc Maron: Of course.
Thom Yorke: We're used to that. We ourselves have sharp edges.
Marc Maron: Historically.
Thom Yorke: Yes.
It's also nice to get away from the Tory Party pulling Britain to pieces.
That's always a relief.
Marc Maron: Is politics constantly in your face?
Thom Yorke: I was thinking about it a lot last night.
I don't really understand the mechanics of American politics, but in Britain we have a party that we didn't vote for dismantling the country beyond the point where things can easily be repaired.
Marc Maron: We went through that.
Thom Yorke: We didn't even vote for them, but there they are telling everyone that they mustn't stray from the path of righteousness.
Meanwhile, everybody—including the IMF—is saying, "Please don't do this."
And they still do it.
Marc Maron: What exactly are they dismantling?
Thom Yorke: The NHS.
The school system.
They're using what's happened with the banking crisis as an excuse to do a lot of other things.
Marc Maron: That's Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine.
Thom Yorke: Exactly.
Marc Maron: One crisis becomes the portal for all kinds of other policies that people wouldn't normally accept.
Privatisation. Opening public services to private enterprise. All of that.
Thom Yorke: That's exactly what's happening.
They're using debt as the excuse, even though the IMF says it has nothing to do with that.
Marc Maron: So they're dismantling what Americans would call socialised services?
Thom Yorke: I think the whole reason they even exist as a party is to move as far to the right as possible.
To me it's all public relations.
David Cameron is a PR man.
The idea is that the only way they can stay in power is by looking as uncompromising as Margaret Thatcher looked.
Following a narrow path without question.
Marc Maron: Straight through working people.
Thom Yorke: Exactly.
They know those people don't vote Conservative anyway, so they're not particularly worried about them.
From their point of view, appearing unrelenting is the only way to keep support within their core base.
So they can never admit they've made a mistake.
Even if they know they've made one, they can't back away from it because they believe that's how they'd lose power.
It's one enormous PR exercise.
Marc Maron: I'd like to think they know it's a mistake.
You want to believe they still have hearts somewhere—that they've simply rationalised their agenda into something they genuinely believe will eventually help everybody.
The old argument that if business prospers, everybody prospers.
Thom Yorke: That's the point, though.
They're surrounded by business lobbyists telling them that's the only way forward.
Those are the people who put them there.
Marc Maron: They're owned.
Corporate shills.
And trickle-down economics...
Come on.
That's right up there with believing America is still a meritocracy.
Thom Yorke: Exactly.
The message is basically, "The poor will adapt—or die."
Marc Maron: And somehow we're all supposed to believe that if the rich make enough money, eventually everyone benefits.
Which obviously collapses once you've got tax avoidance on a massive scale.
Thom Yorke: Exactly.
Marc Maron: When did you first become politically engaged?
I know you've had battles with record companies over the years, but were you always interested in politics?
Thom Yorke: Always.
Even at school.
Even at a private boarding school I was the chippy left-winger.
Marc Maron: Really?
What did your father do?
Thom Yorke: My brother and I went through years of political arguments with him around the dinner table.
My mother eventually had to tell us to stop because every meal turned into a shouting match.
Marc Maron: You and your brother were on opposite sides?
Thom Yorke: No.
We were both on the left.
Marc Maron: So you were ganging up on your father?
Thom Yorke: (laughs)
He was a nuclear physicist.
Later he did other kinds of research as well.
Marc Maron: So what was it about?
Did you accuse him of making bombs?
Thom Yorke: (laughs)
No, no.
It wasn't like that.
It was really about the Thatcher years.
That belief that if you simply freed the market enough, everything would somehow work itself out.
The same philosophy Reagan was promoting in America.
If you deregulated everything, righteousness would prevail and we'd all become wealthy.
Instead, people like James Goldsmith were buying everything, stripping the assets, taking the money offshore and disappearing.
Marc Maron: Exactly.
The assumption behind completely unregulated capitalism is that markets somehow possess their own moral compass.
Then the financial crash happens and everyone suddenly discovers that greed exists.
Thom Yorke: (laughs)
I wish there were a less clichéd way of saying all this.
We sound like two grumpy old lefties.
But none of what we're talking about is especially radical.
It's simply what's happening.
Someone needs to explain it using the language of Sesame Street, so everybody can understand it.
Marc Maron: I was listening to the Amok album in the car on the way over here.
I had my phone plugged into the stereo, but I also had the GPS running. Every so often, in the middle of one of your songs, this voice would suddenly interrupt:
"Turn right at Laurel Canyon."
It almost sounded like some strange remix. It actually worked. It felt like the GPS had become part of the music.
When you talk about politics—and even the name Atoms for Peace—do you feel that music can still have genuine social relevance?
Thom Yorke: It's funny.
In Britain, whenever people start talking about politics it very quickly becomes an angry "us and them" argument.
One of the things I liked about calling the project Atoms for Peace was simply having the word "peace" in the title.
I like the references it carries.
The late sixties.
The protest movements.
I was born in 1968, so I think about that period quite a lot.
Obviously there's Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" speech and everything connected with nuclear politics, but I also think about ordinary people simply occupying public space.
People standing together in the street.
Not doing anything violent.
Just being there.
Riots generally only begin when the police decide to charge the crowd.
I've been on demonstrations where I've seen exactly that happen.
If people simply remain present—like what's been happening in Spain—you create a different sort of resistance.
I was in Bilbao recently and every day there seemed to be another demonstration on the same bridge.
Four or five hundred people.
Different banners.
Different causes.
But they just kept turning up.
That persistence really stayed with me.
Marc Maron: Passive resistance.
Thom Yorke: Exactly.
You're there.
You're visible.
But you're peaceful.
When I was younger I went on lots of demonstrations.
One of the first big ones was over student loans.
At that point university education was still funded by the state, and we were protesting against changing that because we believed it would reduce access for poorer people.
Parliament was sitting that day.
Margaret Thatcher was apparently furious that we'd chosen that particular day to demonstrate.
She sent in the mounted police.
I was standing there with Stanley—Stanley Donwood, who I still work with on the artwork.
We were facing a line of riot police with plastic shields.
People were getting frustrated because we weren't being allowed across Westminster Bridge, but everything was still basically peaceful.
Then, suddenly, the shields opened.
The horses charged straight at us.
I saw a pregnant woman with a broken leg.
People were screaming.
The mounted police were swinging batons indiscriminately.
Anyone they caught, they arrested.
It was absolutely terrifying.
Then, of course, the news that evening reported us as violent troublemakers.
Later they introduced kettling as well—simply trapping protesters inside police lines until people inevitably became angry.
Marc Maron: That's unbelievable.
When I saw Radiohead in Phoenix last year, there was something about the atmosphere that made me think of that in a completely different way.
Your music seems to create movement.
Not release, exactly—but a sense of people becoming unified.
Thom Yorke: We talked about that after the last Radiohead tour.
Phoenix was one of the shows that really stayed with us.
There aren't many big concerts there, and Flea actually emailed me afterwards saying the same thing.
It felt as though everyone who normally exists on the margins had come out.
The stoners.
The old musicians.
The weirdos.
Everybody.
All mixed together.
It wasn't chaos.
It happened through the music.
For a while you stop feeling like the person on stage.
You simply become part of this gathering.
It's difficult to describe.
The room itself almost seems to change shape.
There's something extraordinary about forty thousand people moving together.
I don't really understand it, but there's definitely something happening.
Marc Maron: I suppose, at this point, the people who come to see you have evolved alongside the music.
They've followed wherever you've gone.
Thom Yorke: Which I still find completely bizarre.
We've simply followed our own instincts.
People have looked at it and gone, "Okay..." and followed us.
There was never some grand plan.
I certainly didn't wake up one morning with messianic ambitions.
Sometimes I think, "Really? Me?"
It's ridiculous.
Marc Maron: But at some point you consciously decided not to repeat yourselves.
You walked away from the big anthem-rock approach.
You must have realised that doing that might cost you part of your audience.
Thom Yorke: Yes.
There was always that possibility.
But if you're writing honestly, you can't keep repeating yourself.
I couldn't.
That's simply how I work.
My instinct tells me to go somewhere else, and I don't really have any choice.
I've been incredibly lucky that people stayed with us.
But I couldn't have done it any other way.
You can't write songs simply to please people.
You write what's inside you.
Then you hand it over.
Like a painting.
"This is what I've got."
That's it.
Marc Maron: Is there also an element of defiance?
You don't strike me as someone who's particularly comfortable with authority.
Thom Yorke: (laughs)
Not especially.
Actually, what we were talking about earlier reminds me of something else.
During the 1990s there came a point where people involved in protest movements realised that simply marching wasn't working anymore.
Every demonstration either ended with the police beating people up or the media portraying everyone as violent extremists.
Then there was the Reclaim the Streets movement.
They had a huge influence on me.
I knew people who were involved.
Instead of confrontation, they used humour.
I loved that.
One of my favourite actions was when they turned up on a motorway that was due to be widened.
Rather than stage a conventional protest, they arrived as though it were a parade.
They built this enormous walking puppet with a huge skirt.
Hidden underneath were people carrying jackhammers, literally digging up the motorway while the giant puppet wandered along.
It was brilliant.
The police didn't know how to respond because everyone was laughing.
That's how you do it.
You make people laugh.
You stay peaceful.
You completely scramble expectations.
Humour opens doors that anger often can't.
Artistically, I think exactly the same principle applies.
You surprise people.
You make them look again.
That's always been much more interesting to me than simply shouting louder.
Marc Maron: Is that also true artistically?
You seem like someone who has a problem with authority, but I imagine you also have a problem with expectations.
Thom Yorke: Kind of.
One of the things I've always enjoyed is messing with people's heads a little bit.
You do one thing, and then you think, "Okay... this is really going to confuse them."
"How do you feel now?"
I'm a little bit like that.
Not in an obvious way, but I do find it funny.
There's a certain humour in following a completely different path from the one people expect.
Part of what inspires me is simply the absurdity of choosing to do that.
Marc Maron: Who were your heroes when you were growing up?
What did you listen to? What first compelled you to make music?
Thom Yorke: When I was very young I loved Queen.
I thought they were brilliant.
Marc Maron: They are brilliant.
Thom Yorke: They are.
And they're wonderfully silly as well.
Then, as a teenager, the band that really changed my life was R.E.M.
Also Siouxsie and the Banshees, Joy Division, and, rather oddly mixed in with those, Bob Dylan.
Marc Maron: That's a pretty emotional combination.
Joy Division, Siouxsie, R.E.M.—there's a tremendous amount of vulnerability in that music.
Thom Yorke: The greatest concert I saw at that age was Siouxsie and the Banshees.
Not many bands came through Oxford, but they did.
She was extraordinary.
It wasn't simply that she was an incredible singer.
It was her presence.
The moment she walked on stage, you knew the stage belonged to her.
Even though part of me wanted to watch Budgie playing drums, your eyes always came back to her.
She completely controlled the room.
Not in a "Look at me" sort of way.
She simply existed there.
It completely blew my mind.
Marc Maron: There was something theatrical about her.
Not theatrical in the Queen sense, but in a very different, almost punk way.
Thom Yorke: Exactly.
It never felt manufactured.
It was simply who she was.
She also turned conventional ideas of femininity upside down.
She was incredibly attractive, but also absolutely terrifying.
Marc Maron: That's the best kind of woman.
You don't always realise you're terrified until it's far too late.
Thom Yorke: (laughs)
Marc Maron: Early Radiohead had a similar sort of intensity.
You weren't hiding behind costumes or elaborate stage gimmicks.
How did you discover your own stage presence?
Thom Yorke: It took a long time.
When we first signed to EMI, we told them very honestly, "We haven't got a clue what we're doing."
"It's wonderful that you like the songs and think we're going to be successful, but we've literally just left college."
"Give us enough money for a van, enough money for cheap hotels so we don't have to sleep in the van every night, and then leave us alone for about eighteen months while we figure this out."
Unfortunately, about a year later everything changed.
We got called into a meeting and were told that "Creep" had become a huge hit in Israel, then on KROQ in Los Angeles, then in New York.
Suddenly we had to fly to America.
People expected us to behave like rock stars.
We were still trying to work out who we were.
Marc Maron: Were you terrified?
Thom Yorke: I don't think I even had time to be terrified.
We were just swept along.
Looking back, perhaps I should have thought about it a bit more.
I only really began to understand performing towards the end of the The Bends period.
Oddly enough, making videos helped.
Watching yourself.
Learning not to hide behind the sofa every time you saw your own face.
It's like hearing your own voice on tape for the first time.
You have to learn to live with it.
Marc Maron: So you only toured for about a year before everything exploded?
Thom Yorke: Pretty much.
It was strange.
The nice thing was that we'd already been booked into small venues.
So suddenly people were turning up.
We were still learning what was going on.
Marc Maron: Was that when the pressure started?
The pressure to write ten more songs like "Creep"?
Thom Yorke: That was the first major battle.
Our managers were almost as inexperienced as we were.
The record company was putting pressure on them, and they came into rehearsals asking, "Where's the next hit?"
Marc Maron: Your managers actually asked you that?
Thom Yorke: Yes.
But they were under enormous pressure themselves.
Everything became slightly absurd.
Eventually we all sat down together and realised that if we wanted to carry on, we had to do it on our own terms.
I stamped around the room a bit.
Threw a few tantrums.
Told everybody to leave us alone while we figured things out.
Marc Maron: Everybody?
The management?
Thom Yorke: Pretty much.
I kept thinking back to art school.
At art school they teach you to trust your instincts.
The work comes first.
If the work is good, everything else follows.
I kept saying, "The only reason we're even here is because, by accident, we wrote one song that connected with people."
"So let's not try to write another hit."
"Let's keep following whatever it was that led us there in the first place."
We stopped talking to anybody outside the band until we were genuinely excited by the music again.
Marc Maron: That's the opposite of the way most major labels operate.
Thom Yorke: Exactly.
If you're not careful, you simply become one tiny part of this enormous corporate machine.
I've experienced it again more recently in the film world.
You walk around one of the big studios and everybody introduces themselves:
"Hi, I'm Head of Music."
"Hi, I'm Head of Marketing."
It immediately reminds me of the old days at Capitol Records.
Marc Maron: That's difficult for creative people.
You spend months making something because you genuinely care about it, almost like a child saying, "Look what I made."
Then somebody immediately tells you the snare drum should sound different because it'll sell more copies.
Thom Yorke: Exactly.
"Bob Clearmountain needs to remix this if you want it to be a hit."
And you're thinking, "Who are you?"
"If you don't do what we say, we won't release it."
Our answer eventually became:
"Get fucked."
Marc Maron: So the second album was The Bends.
That's a masterpiece.
Do you still feel good about it?
Thom Yorke: Yes.
I haven't heard it in quite a while, though.
Marc Maron: I don't mean to drag you back through your own history, but do you remember making that record?
Thom Yorke: Very well.
It was difficult.
Then you gradually discover that every record is difficult.
If making one ever becomes easy, you're probably in trouble.
Actually, the Atoms for Peace record wasn't especially difficult.
That one was genuinely fun.
Marc Maron: It's a wonderful record.
There are certain Radiohead albums—OK Computer, Kid A, and others—that I keep returning to.
One thing I've always noticed is that they seem to get deeper the more you listen.
Every time I think I understand one of those records, I hear something else.
That's a remarkable quality.
You mentioned art school earlier.
Was the main lesson simply to trust your instincts?
What exactly were you studying?
Thom Yorke: Art.
Although they made you study a bit of everything.
I really wanted to paint.
The problem was that I wasn't very good at it.
I'm still not very good at it.
I still want to paint, though.
Marc Maron: But you've done artwork.
Thom Yorke: Occasionally.
I'm hampered by the same thing a lot of people are.
You pick up a paintbrush and, for about five or ten minutes, everything seems possible.
Then you suddenly hate absolutely everything you've done.
Stanley doesn't have that problem.
He's unbelievably patient.
He can work on one piece for days.
He's extraordinary.
We were at art college together.
Actually, they more or less threw me out of the painting department.
I disappeared for a term and then came back with nothing but paintings of Jesus.
They were absolutely dreadful.
Marc Maron: What was Jesus doing?
Thom Yorke: (laughs)
I honestly don't know.
One of them was called "The Fuck Machine."
It was completely awful.
Even I knew it was awful.
At art school you have critiques where everyone stands around discussing your work.
Needless to say, those critiques didn't go particularly well.
Marc Maron: "The Fuck Machine" would actually make quite a good album title.
Thom Yorke: I was drunk most of the time.
Marc Maron: Really?
Thom Yorke: (laughs)
Anyway...
After that I became much more interested in video and computers.
I got into digital media fairly early.
Art college changed my life.
Not because it convinced me I was a great artist.
I never believed that.
But living alongside creative people every day...
Watching how other people worked...
Being surrounded by modern art...
Learning to respect creativity itself...
That changed everything.
It gave me confidence in who I was.
That was the important thing.
Marc Maron: Which probably explains Radiohead's evolution.
You eventually abandoned the idea that songs needed obvious hooks.
Thom Yorke: (laughs)
Every now and then I still think perhaps I ought to write a proper chorus.
I actually like choruses.
There are one or two on this record by complete accident.
Marc Maron: Early Radiohead was much more of a guitar band.
There came a point where you deliberately moved away from guitars.
Thom Yorke: Yes.
That was difficult.
It was difficult for everybody.
But eventually I reached a point where every time I picked up a guitar...
Nothing happened.
I also wasn't listening to guitar music anymore.
So there really wasn't any choice.
Jonny, especially, is extraordinary.
He can pick up almost any instrument—or any machine that produces sound—and immediately discover something interesting to do with it.
It's astonishing.
One of my favourite things he ever made was a piece for a quarter-tone piano.
He had one of our upright pianos retuned so that every note sat a quarter-tone apart instead of following the normal chromatic scale.
It sounds completely insane.
The piano still sits in the studio.
Every now and then I'll play it.
To me it makes absolutely no sense.
Jonny, meanwhile, wrote an entire composition around it.
At the moment he's fascinated by different tuning systems and non-Western scales.
He keeps threatening to teach them all to me.
I'm completely fascinated by it, but I honestly don't know where to begin.
I suppose I eventually realised that if Jonny could keep throwing himself into unfamiliar musical territory, I ought to do the same.
To me that's an essential part of creativity.
You deliberately put yourself somewhere you're completely out of your depth.
Marc Maron: There's an incredible vulnerability in admitting you don't know what you're doing.
Thom Yorke: Exactly.
We'd suddenly say, "Let's write something for strings."
None of us really knew how.
But we'd do it anyway.
When people listen to Kid A now, I don't actually think it's as radically different from OK Computer as people imagined at the time.
We simply chose instruments that a lot of rock audiences regarded as somehow illegitimate.
Electronic instruments.
People reacted as though we'd suddenly discovered Aphex Twin.
I don't think Richard D. James was especially impressed by that idea either.
Marc Maron: I interviewed Thomas Dolby once.
He told me that, in the beginning, the instruments he wanted simply didn't exist yet, so he had to invent ways of making those sounds.
Thom Yorke: That's probably true.
Thomas Dolby actually went to my school.
When I first arrived there, I wandered into the main music room and there was this older student surrounded by synthesizers, drum machines and all sorts of electronic equipment.
I just stood there thinking, "Wow."
He was the first genuinely famous musician to come out of the school.
Marc Maron: So you actually knew Thomas Dolby?
Thom Yorke: Not really. He was older than me. But seeing somebody surrounded by all those synthesizers and drum machines had a huge effect on me.
I remember walking into that room thinking, "What is all this?" It completely fascinated me.
Marc Maron: It sounds as though people like Jonny have that same instinct—to invent the tools if the tools don't already exist.
Thom Yorke: That's probably true. I mean, there was a lot of that at my school. Because the school I went to...
Marc Maron: What school?
Thom Yorke: Abingdon School for Boys.
Marc Maron: Prep school?
Thom Yorke: Private school.
No girls.
Marc Maron: No girls?
Thom Yorke: No girls. So you had to put that sexual frustration into something.
I hit puberty at eleven and walked into our bloody boys' school.
It was great.
Marc Maron: It made you who you are, man.
Thom Yorke: Let's not pursue that particular element of it.
(laughs)
There were lots of scientists' kids there.
The expectation was that you'd go into mathematics and building things.
Marc Maron: Really?
Thom Yorke: No, I mean they were just kids with smart parents.
There were lots of really bright kids.
Jonny's smart in a very particular way.
He always was.
Marc Maron: He went there too?
Thom Yorke: Mm-hmm.
We all went there.
Marc Maron: What did his father do?
Thom Yorke: His father wasn't around.
He and his brother were RAF kids.
We all went to the same school together.
Marc Maron: Wow.
Is everybody cool with the Atoms for Peace thing?
Thom Yorke: Yeah, I think so.
We took a year off.
It was supposed to be a year off anyway.
We officially declared a year off because I think it was good for our heads to say, "Nothing's really happening."
We were tired.
Marc Maron: Right.
Thom Yorke: You get to that point where you're getting together because you don't know what else to do.
That's not good.
You should get together because you want to get together—because you've got a good idea.
Marc Maron: When I saw you, I noticed Jonny spent a lot of time on the floor.
Thom Yorke: (laughs)
Yeah, he always does.
He's moving things around.
Marc Maron: He's got some things going on.
Thom Yorke: Oh man, that's a simple setup.
You should see what he's got in the studio.
Marc Maron: Really?
Thom Yorke: That's nothing.
Going back to Kid A, when we started talking about doing things more electronically, Colin and Jonny went off and spent thousands of pounds on modular synthesizers.
They basically learned how to use the whole lot in a week.
They're wizards.
It's insane.
Colin taught himself MPC drum machines and samplers.
Jonny taught himself Max/MSP, which is this incredibly high-level sound-processing environment.
They can just do that.
Marc Maron: And when you sing over all that, after moving away from guitars...
People can be a little condescending.
"Oh, great—electronic music."
But you still feel you can bring your humanity into it.
Thom Yorke: To me it's not even an issue anymore.
If you look at where music is now—at least outside the mainstream—it's simply ceased to be an issue that you're mixing those things together.
Marc Maron: Do you miss the guitar?
Thom Yorke: Yeah.
I played it last night.
It's useful.
Marc Maron: Do you still write on guitar sometimes?
Thom Yorke: Not much.
At the moment I write mostly on piano.
Marc Maron: When I listened to the Atoms for Peace record, I wondered whether these songs begin with a groove, and then you experiment until everything grows out of that.
Or do the lyrics sometimes come first?
Thom Yorke: This was all born out of the idea of things evolving from grooves.
We jam a lot.
Not today—but generally we do.
Marc Maron: I can see it's ready to go.
It's a little quiet in there at the moment.
It's amazing walking through this place.
People obviously can't see us, but we're in a mansion on Laurel Canyon.
Thom Yorke: A run-down mansion.
Marc Maron: It's like Exile on Main St., man.
Thom Yorke: (laughs)
Well, the girls are coming shortly.
We just thought we needed a few hours off.
Marc Maron: Sure.
Drugs.
Thom Yorke: All the drugs are coming.
You've got to stay clean during the day.
Otherwise someone's got to wake up Bobby Keys so he can play saxophone.
Marc Maron: (laughs)
So it really is groove-generated?
Thom Yorke: Yeah.
The sound, the voice, the riffs—they all came out of that.
Guitar, piano, bass, synth.
A lot of it we took away afterwards and wrote to later.
But it all grew out of the joy of coming up with grooves together.
They weren't starting from nothing.
We'd usually begin with some mechanical programmed idea I'd made to set everybody off.
That forces everyone to play differently.
The metre changes.
Where the "one" falls isn't where you'd instinctively expect it to be.
The bass line starts somewhere unexpected.
That's good.
It immediately puts you somewhere new.
That's really what this band is about for me.
Everybody works incredibly quickly.
They bring all these crazy ideas together almost immediately.
In the end, it's really all about grooves.
Marc Maron: How did you and Flea come together for this?
Thom Yorke: It was a weird one, really.
I'd seen the Red Hot Chili Peppers backstage a few times, so I kind of knew them.
Then Nigel and I went to see them in London, and John and Flea were talking about The Eraser.
Marc Maron: Your solo record?
Thom Yorke: Yeah.
I was quite surprised because they'd listened to it a lot.
They were asking how I'd put it together.
They were really into it.
Marc Maron: And that record was just you?
Thom Yorke: Me and Nigel.
Jonny wrote the piano riff on the first tune with me.
Marc Maron: Nigel's been with you since the beginning?
Thom Yorke: Yeah.
He was the engineer on the early Radiohead records.
Eventually we decided we'd had enough adults telling us what to do.
We could do it ourselves.
Anyway...
I had this little worm in my head.
I wanted to make The Eraser into a real band.
Most of that record had been made on a laptop, with a bit of bass.
Looking at it afterwards, I realised the bass was almost the lead instrument.
When I was playing those bass parts I kept thinking about Flea.
I love watching him play.
There aren't many bass players who really play lead bass.
So I asked him if he'd be interested.
I asked Joey Waronker the same day.
Both of them said yes within a couple of hours.
It was lovely because something that had just been a silly pipe dream suddenly became real.
Marc Maron: Had Joey and Flea worked together before?
Thom Yorke: They knew each other.
Joey's one of those musicians who's everywhere.
I first really got to know him through R.E.M., and we've been friends ever since.
We've hung out on and off whenever I'm in town.
He still plays with Beck sometimes.
Nigel's produced Beck as well, so we all move in similar circles.
Marc Maron: Do you ever stop and think about the fact that you're suddenly playing with musicians from bands you admired?
Thom Yorke: Yeah.
Sometimes it spins me out a bit.
But it's also lovely because it's something completely different.
I'd been playing with the same people since I was sixteen.
Other than this, I'd never really experienced anything else.
So it was genuinely mind-blowing.
It opened me up.
It relaxed me.
Thank God for that.
Marc Maron: Was it intimidating playing with Flea?
He's kind of a frightening little genius.
Did you ever feel you had to keep up with him?
Thom Yorke: No.
He's always been incredibly sweet.
He completely gets it.
Marc Maron: Do you all feel that excitement when something suddenly locks together?
That moment where everybody looks at each other and knows you've found it?
Thom Yorke: Yeah.
That's one of the things I've enjoyed most about this band.
You can be working away in a room all day thinking, "That's cool."
Then we played our first show at the Echoplex—just a tiny warm-up gig.
When we watched the footage back afterwards it was insane.
There was this incredible energy.
It's one thing to get excited in the rehearsal room.
It's another thing entirely to watch it happen live and realise it's actually even better than you imagined.
Marc Maron: That's a great feeling.
So when you travel, does your family come with you?
Thom Yorke: They're coming tomorrow.
The kids are at school, so they can't always travel.
Marc Maron: How old are they?
Thom Yorke: My son's twelve.
My daughter's eight.
Marc Maron: You love being a dad?
Thom Yorke: Yeah.
It's wonderful.
Noah's twelve now.
He's going through all the changes.
It's lovely watching him.
Everything's skateboarding and surfing.
Marc Maron: Is he interested in music?
Thom Yorke: He's actually a really good drummer.
We finally got him a proper drum kit.
He's amazing to watch.
He's already learning jazz tricks.
Marc Maron: Are you a jazz fan?
Thom Yorke: Absolutely.
Charles Mingus is my man.
When I'm over here I listen to Duke Ellington a lot.
Marc Maron: Listening to the Atoms for Peace record, even though it's electronic, I kept hearing something very primitive in the rhythms.
I started thinking about African music.
Then I started thinking about Brian Eno, Jon Hassell and all those early records where electronics and organic rhythms meet.
Thom Yorke: That's interesting.
At the moment we're experimenting with mixing electronic sounds into live percussion.
Triggering samples.
But it's always more exciting when somebody is actually hitting something.
You hear it in the room.
There's a physicality to it.
One thing that fascinated me early on was writing rhythms on a machine and then hearing real musicians interpret them.
Once we started doing that, I realised a lot of those rhythms had this almost African quality to them.
Multiple rhythms weaving around each other.
Flowing because they're being played by human beings.
I find that completely fascinating.
Marc Maron: It's almost like the power people talk about in a drum circle.
Thom Yorke: Oh, I love all that.
It's incredibly hands-on.
It's actually very similar to the best dance music.
Not the obvious stuff, but the records that gradually lock you into a particular state of mind.
That's exactly what I love about Can as well.
Especially Tago Mago.
You can't point to one specific thing and say, "That's why this is great."
It simply takes you somewhere mentally.
We listened to Can constantly while making Kid A.
That was the lesson.
Something happens between the musicians.
You can't explain it.
You just hope the tape happened to be running.
To me, that's the whole point of making records.
At the end of making this album we were all so excited by what was happening between us that we booked three days in the studio just to play.
Almost like a celebration.
Nigel sat at the controls while these little moments suddenly appeared.
Maybe only eight bars.
Maybe longer.
There's no rational explanation why one passage has that magic and another doesn't.
All the ingredients are technically there.
But something extra happens.
Whatever that thing is...
That's the magic.
Marc Maron: Probably the same thing that happens in a drum circle.
If you're stoned enough.
Thom Yorke: (laughs)
Exactly.
Marc Maron: Well, I think the record's terrific.
Thanks very much for taking the time to talk to me.
Thom Yorke: Thanks.
I really enjoyed it.
Nice to meet you.
Marc Maron: Nice to meet you too.