Chapter 1: Why We Sleep

Zane Lowe: Three shows at the Hollywood Bowl on no sleep. All right. I had this two-week period at the end of the tour where, for some reason, I just couldn't sleep properly.

Anyway, I'm obsessed with this book about sleep. Have you heard of it? Why We Sleep?

Thom Yorke: I've heard of it.

Zane Lowe: I read it, and it's amazing. If you don't dream enough, you don't process enough. In a dream state, that's where you develop your ideas. Scientists have had their best ideas, musicians have had their best ideas...

You have two types of sleep. One is like a defragmentation of your hard disk—NREM. It's literally like a radar that beeps. When they scan you, when they put you on an MRI, all brain activity almost ceases.

Then the cycle goes into REM. In an REM period, there's more activity in the brain than there is during the day. If you don't have that, you don't develop. You don't process the stuff that's happening to you. It sticks.

Now they think there might be links to autism if children aren't getting enough REM sleep, because one of the things you process is your ability to subtly understand people's language, physicality, and all the signs that help you integrate into society. That happens while you're unconscious—or at least semi-conscious.

There's a whole bit in the book that says napping is completely legitimate. You must nap. Societies that still have the culture of siestas or napping have undeniable health benefits.

Why do we push ourselves to the degree where logic plays no role in health and well-being?

Chapter 2: Why We Push

Thom Yorke: It's an interesting shift of idea, because I still do this to myself. My wife will say, "Why are you doing this to yourself? Stop. Take a break." And yet I'm just compelled to keep pushing in. I don't know why. I don't know where I learned to do that.

Zane Lowe: That's crazy. Sleep is the first thing to go, because we have so much to do in our day. But you get diminishing returns.

What I find interesting is, if you're an artist or a scientist—or whatever—you spend a lot of your time trying to find solutions to problems. You inhibit your ability to make good judgments and good decisions if you don't rest, if you don't relax, if you don't assimilate.

The thing I need to figure out is how to come into conversations like these. I'd like to think I'm mining for information, hopefully in a really nice way, but I'd be searching for ways to get things out that I don't even think some people want to tell me. I don't know why I do that. I think it's my job.

But we can do this in an empathetic state, in a way that's more of a trade between people, rather than me asking questions and you answering them.

I raise that because, for the longest time, you rejected that trade. You were like, "No, I don't have to answer that question. I don't like this trade." It felt like the trade didn't work for you for a long time.

Thom Yorke: I've kind of recognized that that's all it is—a weird trade.

I used to be really honest. Someone would ask me a question and I'd answer honestly. But then I'd read what people wrote afterwards and think, "Well, no, that's taken out of context. That's not what I meant."

You see yourself in print much as when you first see yourself in the mirror. You go, "Yeah... terrifying. Awful." And that just keeps going and going because you're forced to do more and more of it.

So you come up with a strategy of, "Well, I don't really want to see this bit of me naked, so I'm going to avoid it." But that doesn't work either.

Zane Lowe: I remember, in the late '90s, waking up, turning on whatever music channel it was, and there's Lou Reed destroying an interviewer. Legendary behaviour.

But when I watched it, I thought, "He's totally right." The interviewer would ask him a question and he'd go, "That's a stupid question. Next."

He was right. It was a stupid question. It's our job to limit the number of stupid questions we ask.

Chapter 3: Influence

Zane Lowe: Imagine what you could ask Lou Reed.

I'll be straight with you. It's weird, because I feel like I know you really well because of the influence you've had on me as an artist and as a musician, and the way you've encouraged me to shape my thinking and deal with my emotions through your music. So... thank you.

Thom Yorke: Well, thank you.

I guess there are two types of influence. There's the emotional connection people have with music I've been involved in. Part of me is completely mystified as to why that would be the case, because human beings are really different. Why would what I do connect in that way?

The only answer I can ever give is that, maybe around The Bends, I discovered that the bit I didn't want to show—the vulnerable bit, the bit that wanted to sing about my own feelings but was scared of doing it—that was the bit that mattered.

You can put up a million defences, but that's what people connected with.

Zane Lowe: When you discovered that early on, and before you'd even settled into the rhythm you're in now, you realised that the more transparent, honest and vulnerable you were, the more it mattered to people. That's quite a responsibility, whether you acknowledge it or not.

Thom Yorke: It can take you by surprise, especially doing concerts. That's when you reconnect with how people react to your music. When you're in your own studio, in an abstract space, you don't have that.

I'm not thinking about me. Why are you thinking about me?

On this record, for example, I was trying to develop how "Dawn Chorus" was going to work. I'd pace around my studio trying different combinations of synth voicings, again and again and again, because I needed that hit. I knew that when I found it, I'd find my way into the song.

Things like that matter to me. They're obsessive, whatever, but there's an emotional connection I have to find.

When an artist starts repeating themselves because they think that's what people want, it's all over.

The second point about influence is that all I've done—with my bandmates and by myself—is try to create enough of a safe space around what we're doing creatively that we can continue feeling free to experiment and be wherever we want to be.

All the while being aware that it's fundamentally a business. You have to play games. You have to make compromises. But, centrally, you've got to be prepared to torch it all at any moment.

Zane Lowe: From the very beginning?

Thom Yorke: Since the beginning. There's never been a bluff.

Zane Lowe: I'm so glad you mentioned "Dawn Chorus." It's actually the perfect place to start.

Chapter 4: Dawn Chorus

Zane Lowe: I've always loved your solo albums, but this one is another level again for me.

"Dawn Chorus" is such a beautiful moment on the record. You talked about needing that hit—recognising when you've found it. What does it feel like? How do you react?

I straight-up got too old to lie. Floods of tears in the car the first time I heard that song. Whatever else was going on in my life, I thought I had it under control. That song came on... forget about it.

What does it do to you?

Thom Yorke: Same. That's the point.

On a musical and technical level, I was deliberately trying to find something as cold as possible to go with it. I essentially sing one note, and the chords just go round and round. There's nothing happening other than the words.

That's the brutality of it, in the best possible way.

Sometimes—I can't do this very often—I can just sit down and a stream of consciousness runs from one end to the other. It tells me what I want to say before I've had time to think, "I want to say this." It just came out.

One of my favourite musical experiences recently was on the last Radiohead tour, when we had three nights at Madison Square Garden. We played 75–80% different sets each night, which was amazing.

Every night I'm going through memories and connecting with songs in a different way. There's no sense of everything being by rote, because the context is totally different. Where songs sit alongside other songs changes the emotional experience.

Sometimes it doesn't work. Fine. I wouldn't do that again. But it's hit and miss, and both you and the audience are experiencing something similar. That's kind of cool.

Chapter 5: Modern Boxes

Zane Lowe: It seemed like you were having one of the best tours ever.

Thom Yorke: I was really enjoying it. We were all listening to each other. We were all totally open to how everyone else was playing, and there was this sense of joy and celebration that I really didn't expect.

Zane Lowe: When I was watching the Tomorrow's Modern Boxes live show, I realised that the way you were putting it together sounded like you were making another album. It felt like making these albums had become a reflection of the live shows—trying to get to that spontaneity.

Thom Yorke: It's totally that. Not all of it, but most of it was developed from the live show, or in the spirit of the method. The method was extremely random.

It started by taking old stuff and cutting it up a bit, like a DJ would do. That was really difficult and counterintuitive. I thought, "I don't have an instrument. I'm not playing." But then I gradually got into the drama of it. That's how it happened.

Nigel was basically sifting through my ideas and collaging them together. We'd have a loose idea to begin with, but not much. In the early days of developing those shows, I was going on without lyrics and just making them up.

Chapter 6: Eraser

Zane Lowe: When I first heard The Eraser, I remember saying to people—probably to the point of annoying them—that this was how you use electronic instruments to capture real emotional resonance.

I'm not talking about something cerebral. I mean driving and crying. Real emotion. A lot of artists were diving into that abstract electronic landscape, and I assumed it was all by design.

Only now am I realising that it actually came out of your desire to get yourself into a place where you were as surprised as anybody else.

Thom Yorke: Mm.

When I'm rooting around with ideas, it's like a child playing with Lego. I'm just making stuff. We'll see what it means later.

Then I lay it all out on the counter and see which pieces Nigel reacts to. Once someone else reacts to something, I react to it too.

I go through this weird process where you make stuff, then forget it, then someone picks it up and shows it back to you, and you think, "Oh... there's that in it."

It's actually not too dissimilar to what I used to do in Radiohead. I'd play a bunch of chords, mumble over the top, send them around to the others, and they'd say, "That's good. Can we work on that?" Only then did I feel I had permission to connect with it differently and pick up the microphone, because someone else had built the music around it.

Zane Lowe: I think most artists, if they're honest—and certainly solo artists—you and Nigel have built an incredibly strong creative environment for each other.

Chapter 7: Trust

Zane Lowe: Obviously, you have to trust each other. When did you realize you trusted Nigel enough to value his opinion like that? Was it immediate?

Thom Yorke: No. It died today.

[Laughs.]

During OK Computer I was still thinking, "I'm not sure about this guy."

He tells me this story about how I'd stand over him while he was trying to mix "Airbag" saying, "It's just senseless. Sounds like you've killed all the dynamics."

I might actually have been right, but that wasn't the point.

When it got to Kid A, and we had our own studio, I was actually watching him take this chaos that we were giving him and turn it into something. That was when I thought, "All right, I trust you."

Zane Lowe: There are a lot of great creative relationships throughout history that exist for a period, and then someone decides, "I want to let go and try something else over here." Totally within their rights to do that.

You and Nigel have remained steadfastly collaborative.

Chapter 8: Suspiria

Thom Yorke: Yeah. Except... I mean, my only sleeping around has been on Suspiria.

[Laughs.]

Because the nature of what it was—a horror film—I just knew Nigel wouldn't have the patience to sit around watching me indulge my effects without any songs or structures.

Zane Lowe: But you also said that you felt really challenged by that opportunity.

Thom Yorke: It was great. Somebody said something brilliant recently: it's that feeling where you dread the idea of doing it, but if you don't do it, you'll regret it.

Zane Lowe: Yeah.

Thom Yorke: That's how I make most of my decisions.

Zane Lowe: To be fair, though, it got to a point where you called Sam, who produced it with you.

Thom Yorke: Yeah. He arrives and spends weeks going through my chaos, trying to find missing bars.

I just got to the point where it was a mess.

Zane Lowe: So you mean you'd gone down the rabbit hole? You weren't cataloguing anything or keeping track of what was going on?

Thom Yorke: No.

Then the film people started asking me for files.

Zane Lowe: And, for those people watching or listening right now—not to break the fourth wall—I apologize, but film people are brutal. Even compared to music people.

Chapter 9: Film Composers

Zane Lowe: There's real money in film.

Thom Yorke: Yeah, real money.

Zane Lowe: I did this talk in LA with a whole bunch of film composers, and everyone was saying the same thing.

You've had a lot of preliminary conversations about that with Jonny, though.

Thom Yorke: Yeah. Jonny has coping strategies.

Zane Lowe: Like what? What can you share?

Thom Yorke: Well... you just do a lot yourself. I mean, he's lucky as well because he mostly works with Paul, and Paul gets it anyway.

But Jonny said, "Lay a lot of stuff out yourself. Do a lot of it yourself. If they don't like it, walk away. Don't worry about it. Move on."

He really helped. I mean, really helped, just watching him go through all that and understanding, "Okay... this is what I'm getting into."

Otherwise it would have been very nasty.

Zane Lowe: Amazing job, though. I'm really proud of it. You should be.

It's one of those things that—even with you attached to it—the film could easily have been one of those critically acclaimed works that only a few people like. You move on and make another Radiohead record.

Instead, people loved it. They still talk about it.

Thom Yorke: I was very surprised.

Because it was a difficult record. Luca, the director, pushed me into a place I would never have gone otherwise. He made me do a bunch of stuff I'd never dreamed of doing, and that was great. Such a cool feeling.

The central dance piece in the middle of the film—I smashed my head against the wall for months over that until I got the breakthrough. Then it was just... I knew I was looking for a bite. I just couldn't find it. I didn't have any choice. I had to see it through.

Zane Lowe: At what point did this album start to take shape? When did you realize you had something that was going to be an album?

Thom Yorke: It's not the usual way because it was really frustrating. We'd had most of this stuff for ages, and we just couldn't get the slot in order to finish it.

I couldn't get into the right mindset. It was like, "Okay, we need to set aside two months. We just need to do this."

The joke was that it was actually really quick to make. We set it up as we do the shows live for most of it, knocked it out, and it was really fun. It was quick and easy because we'd lived with it for so long. We knew where we were going.

Zane Lowe: You mentioned recently that you went through a bout of writer's block.

Thom Yorke: That was around the time of Suspiria. Though I'm using irony in that, because Suspiria was my writer's block.

If that's my writer's block, I mean... writing it was ideal. It was like therapy. I didn't want to write a bunch of songs. I just wanted to make noise, and that was great.

I found myself immersing myself in musique concrète and all this anti-music, and I loved it.

Writer's block...

Chapter 10: Feeling Like Hell

Zane Lowe: It must feel like hell when your instinct is to create, to release things and find emotion in them. But I also think there must be a part of it where sometimes it's actually a relief not to have to write anything.

Thom Yorke: Yeah. That's kind of the point. You take the pressure off yourself.

Every artist or musician goes through a period where you have to think again about what you're doing. You have to stop because you have to walk out the door and learn to see again.

Zane Lowe: Have you had that before?

Thom Yorke: Yes. The biggest one was after OK Computer. I'd gone through a period of playing the same songs for years and finding myself in increasingly large venues, but not feeling mentally able to fill them. I was shrinking mentally and physically.

Zane Lowe: I remember watching that as a fan, seeing Meeting People Is Easy and everything that was going on. The prevailing takeaway for me was that you'd always been writing from outside the room.

Chapter 11: Inside the Room

Zane Lowe: Then suddenly you found yourself inside the room, and everyone in the room was saying, "How does it feel to be inside the room?" And you're thinking, "I was writing about it because I'm supposed to be outside the room."

Thom Yorke: Yeah. It was that, but it was also a massive upheaval of everything.

The fight to be seen and recognised was over. It was like, "Okay... I don't have to do it anymore."

Chapter 12: The Thief

Zane Lowe: When did you start focusing on more specific things that mattered to you—and should matter to all of us? Things like, "They're crooks. This needs to be fair."

Thom Yorke: That was starting to happen in Kid A. I didn't really feel I had a choice. Going back to that thing of, "If I don't do it, I'll regret it."

I remember having a phone call with Jonny when I was proposing calling the record Hail to the Thief. He said, "That's too much, man. It's too much."

Maybe he was right. Maybe it was taking it too far.

I wasn't necessarily talking about that particular thief, by the way.

Zane Lowe: Have you seen Vice?

Thom Yorke: Amazing.

Zane Lowe: Dude... my son and I watched it last night. I couldn't believe they made that film.

It must be kind of weird because, when you were first saying all these things, there was this aura around you of, "Oh, it's him again."

Thom Yorke: I know.

Zane Lowe: But now... it's not a happy thing... you've been saying this, along with a lot of other people, for a long time.

Chapter 13: The Consequences Are Real

Zane Lowe: Now we find ourselves in a situation where ANIMA is very much asking, "What are we actually going to witness? What is going to change?"

Thom Yorke: I think the reason it ended up being called ANIMA was partly because I'm obsessed with this whole dream thing, and it comes from Jung's concept of the anima.

But also because of Jaron Lanier. He's one of the people involved in the early internet, and he's a great thinker.

He said we've started to emulate what our devices say about us. We emulate the way they tell us to behave.

I had this whole thing where the reason we can watch Boris Johnson lie through his teeth and promise things we know will never happen is because we don't have to connect with it as something real. It's just this little avatar, this little character waving a flag. It's funny.

The consequences don't seem real. We can remain anonymous. We send our avatar out to hurl abuse and poison, then disappear back into anonymity.

The difference between now and me being the barking, annoying dog doing Hail to the Thief and The Eraser is that now there seem to be no consequences. It's just a volume of traffic, noise...

Zane Lowe: And yet the consequences are very real.

Thom Yorke: Exactly. The consequences are still real, but we don't see them because we're no longer connected to them in the same way.

Chapter 14: Extinction Rebellion

Zane Lowe: I'm forty-five now. I've got two kids growing up, and they're pretty woke. They're like, "We don't really like this. We're not happy about this. It's your fault."

Thom Yorke: Yeah.

We were supposed to be the generation that learned from the previous generation, because we said exactly the same things about our parents.

Having kids made a massive difference to me. It made me angrier. It made me more panicked.

One thing I really feel—and I was talking to someone about this—is that Extinction Rebellion has been a really great thing because it's making a difference.

Since I've been involved with Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth over the years, the one thing that was always difficult was getting people angry. They'd get worried and say, "Oh, I can do some recycling..." But there wasn't that spark.

Now people have come to terms with the idea that the only way things change is through fundamental structural change.

And the only way that can happen, when you've got a bunch of clowns running things, is to be angry. There's a power in a coherent form of anger.

When a thousand people were arrested in London, that's proper action. I hope it makes a difference.

Right now we've got this Punch and Judy show going on in America, another one in Britain, and apparently that's what passes for politics these days.

This is their last-ditch attempt. "Okay, now we're going to put monkeys in charge. Get them to wave around a lot." That's all they've got left.

Then the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez walk in and say, "Right, shall we get started?"

Zane Lowe: Yeah. That's what I think too.

I love the fact that there's optimism in there, because one thing people have often overlooked in your music is that, while they talk about it as doom and gloom, there's always been optimism wrapped up inside your songs—a sense that the fight leads somewhere better.

Chapter 15: Optimism

Thom Yorke: My clichéd thing has always been: when people stop listening to sad music, that's when they don't want to know anymore. Emotionally, they've switched themselves off.

Zane Lowe: So this album is obviously piggybacking off the back of Tomorrow's Modern Boxes. Will you just continue? Business as usual?

Chapter 16: Reflection

Thom Yorke: Probably. Then I'll get bored and move on.

Zane Lowe: From my perspective, it's super-interesting that you've been thrust into this reflective mode, because you've never been a reflective person.

Now it's like, "Hey, twentieth anniversary."

Thom Yorke: Weirdly, I'm down with that.

Amnesiac's twentieth anniversary is coming up, and Stanley, Nigel and I have been rooting through stuff because that's what we do.

Oh my God...

Amazingly, for us, we had the foresight to put most of it on disk and not lose it.

Zane Lowe: Twenty years ago, what did that look like?

Thom Yorke: Jaz drives. We used to fax each other all the time. I've still got all the faxes.

Zane Lowe: Come on. Tell us one.

Thom Yorke: We'd have to discuss something like a T-shirt, or some decision, and that part would be one line. The rest of it would just be, "By the way..." followed by something about Tony Blair, a huge drawing of Alastair Campbell, or some other ridiculous thing.

What the hell were we on?

We were in the studio for more than a year. It was the first time Stanley had a proper space to work, and his first proper painting studio as well. We basically had two studios running.

When I look back now, I see a bunch of people who'd had the kind of success they never imagined, and completely overcompensated by recording everything, documenting every mistake, doing everything a million times, going round and round and generating an enormous amount of work.

Zane Lowe: I remember the first time I got Kid A. If you can even remember the anticipation... I don't know if anybody else does, but I do. It was like, "Finally, it exists."

It arrived on a MiniDisc.

Thom Yorke: On a MiniDisc!

Zane Lowe: Somebody had glued it shut.

Thom Yorke: So rude.

Zane Lowe: I didn't get past the first song because I was just so in love with that moment.

When you think back to writing something like "Everything in Its Right Place," and now you're reflecting on it twenty years later, what does that song mean to you now?

Thom Yorke: I always really enjoy it because the melodic pattern means you can't really go wrong. It doesn't matter how badly you play it—it works.

I remember trying to record it lots of different ways. Eventually Nigel suggested, "Go and record it on the Prophet."

It happened really, really quickly. So quickly that I literally only remember moving the filter on one sound and trying some words while he was recording.

I was literally reading them off the sheet.

He said, "Yeah, that's it."

I said, "No, I'm just reading off the sheet."

He said, "That's it. We're done."

Then Jonny walked in and said, "I'm going to try this."

He'd discovered that in Pro Tools you could scroll audio backwards and forwards, so he made all those backwards sounds, then edited them together like a little symphony.

It happened in about two days. We added loads of other things afterwards, but they didn't work.

Zane Lowe: It makes sense because those ingredients are essential. You can't really think that piece of music into existence. That probably leads you, consciously or subconsciously, to where The Eraser came from. Now you trust that spontaneous experience because you can't create it cerebrally.

Thom Yorke: Exactly.

What's nice about still being a creative person is that you trust you can have an idea, really feel something for it, but not know where it's going to end up.

You don't freak out when you don't know, because the most exciting thing is getting to a certain point with something, leaving it, presenting it to someone else, hitting a brick wall, and knowing that because you've hit that wall, it's not finished. You're going somewhere you didn't expect.

Chapter 17: Meeting Ed Sheeran

Zane Lowe: The first time I met you, in Auckland, I'd ask you a question and you'd go completely quiet. I'd think, "Is he falling asleep?"

Then, after a long pause, you'd suddenly come alive and answer. It was amazing.

You came up to me afterwards in the hotel bar and said, "I think I'm done."

I said, "What do you mean?"

Thom Yorke: Yeah. I think I said, "I might just sack all this off and go to Hawaii."

Zane Lowe: Exactly. I'd had a drink, but I remember saying, "I really don't think you should."

Thom Yorke: I had exactly the same conversation with Ed O'Brien on stage at Glastonbury in '97.

I went over and tapped him on the shoulder and said...

Zane Lowe: Later.

Thom Yorke: Yeah.

He said, "Okay, well, you can go, but I think you'll probably regret it. Let's give it another go."

Zane Lowe: So it makes sense that you keep taking yourself right up to that point where it almost can't be done. That's where your best work comes from.

Thom Yorke: Yes—as long as I've learned to do it in a non-destructive way.

Chapter 18: Ambition

Zane Lowe: Does ambition ever play a part in your life? What does that word mean to you?

Thom Yorke: No.

I'm ambitious to carry on doing good shit.

That's it.

Zane Lowe: Have you ever wanted to get into a room with a simple arrangement and a few acoustic instruments? More of a songwriter environment?

Is your Rick Rubin album coming?

Thom Yorke: Maybe.

I'm actually in the process of going back there.

I've indulged heavily in electronics, and I've thoroughly enjoyed it. It's actually got to the point where my studio is almost entirely electronic instruments.

There's a certain relief in picking up a guitar or sitting at a piano again.

Chapter 19: Life Balance

Zane Lowe: Where are you in your life right now? Are you having a good time?

Career-wise, you're in the position where you can pretty much do whatever you want. No restrictions anymore. People flock to see you. Financially you're comfortable.

Thom Yorke: I just find myself very, very busy, which I really like.

I did go through a period where I wasn't able to do that much, and I'm really enjoying the fact that things are coming out again, and doing concerts again.

The balance, for me, is still enjoying it—which I do. Probably more than if you'd talked to me fifteen or twenty years ago.

I hope it's still as interesting as the stuff I was doing then. That's really all I care about.

Life balance, to me, comes back to what we were talking about at the beginning:

Rest.

Staying outside things as much as possible.

One thing I can quite often forget—but I used to be much more acutely aware of—is that I've had a very unusual life, and I'm extremely lucky to be an observer of things when other people are in the middle of them.

Outside the room, not inside the room.

That's been given to me as a gift.

I know that sounds a bit pretentious, but I don't mean it like that.

When I was a kid, the way I dealt with things—the way I processed what happened to me—was through work, through music, through writing.

I see it with my kids. They both write too.

I'm so happy that it's still able to happen, because it means I'm still alive.