[Fade in ‘The Clock’]

Jon Pareles: "Radiohead wouldn’t be Radiohead if it did things like any other band. Right now, Radiohead is on tour – sold out everywhere as usual – and playing about half a dozen new songs every night. But there’s no new album – that’s because Radiohead hasn’t had a label since it released Hail to the Thief, in 2003 (its last album under contract for EMI). Meanwhile, Thom Yorke, Radiohead’s lead singer, has made an album of his own, called The Eraser, which comes out July 11th.

[Clip of ‘Black Swan’]

Jon: "When Radiohead played New York City, I spoke to Yorke about both his album and the state of his band. In the 1990s, Radiohead wrote songs that turned big guitar anthems inside out. Its music evolved toward the majestic, progressive rock masterpiece – OK Computer – in 1997. But instead of making a sequel to OK Computer, Radiohead dismantled its sound instead.

Thom: "I will always subscribe to the theory that no matter how hard you try to move on, you never do. You’re always in the same place because you’re always the same people working together, and it doesn’t matter what mediums you use, or what instruments you use, you’re always there. I think the worst possible situation to be in is to sort of say “you can’t go there because you’re this”. But that’s where you have the clash between [having] a successful record that people identify with, that takes on its own particular force. What do you do? Do you sort of listen to that, or do you just move on and be honest with the fact that you don’t understand how that happened, and you never quite understand how anything happens, and you just move on? That’s the only way to be honest about it, I think, really.

Jon: "Radiohead’s next albums veered away from big guitar rock with the eerie jagged electronics of Kid A in 2000, and Amnesiac a year later. Then Hail to the Thief wove back together the electronics, the beat and the guitars in another triumph. Suddenly, having fulfilled its contract, Radiohead was a band without a label. It toured for year, and after its last gig at the Coachella festival in 2004 band members went back to their families and Radiohead just about dissolved. Life without deadlines turned out to be strange.

Thom: "It was really nice to be in a period where there was none of that. There was no record company, there was no nothing. But actually the interesting thing, in terms of Radiohead, was that it started to do our heads in because there was no end point, there was no goal, there was no nothing. You have to have some sort of end point... something to work towards, whether it’s a record and so on. In this case, it was a tour.

Jon: "Yorke himself plunged into what sounds like depression.

Thom: "Lost my confidence in all of it for about a year. I used to bore my friends stupid in the pub.

Jon: "With Radiohead on hiatus, Yorke started working on The Eraser. He made it with sounds and beats he had been collecting on his computer through the years. Nigel Godrich, Radiohead’s long-time producer, helped him sort through the sounds and find structures. Then Yorke came up with melodies and lyrics.

Thom: "I didn’t really expect it to be a sung record, because basically what we started out with was just as a series of things that I’d built up over a few years that I’d started mostly on my laptop and then moved onto bigger computers and things. The more that Nigel forced me to isolate and tidy up my ideas the more they started forming into something you could call songs, that I felt relaxed about putting vocals onto because they felt loosely coherent. But there wasn’t really... the interesting thing is when we sat down and we went through it all I didn’t really know what to expect, but it was fairly obvious that there was the potential for it to be quite direct.

Jon: "The Eraser is very much a follow-through to Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac. It’s an album of nine haunted songs, with Yorke’s voice carrying long, beautiful, melodic lines through a spooky, mostly electronic soundscape.

[clip of ‘Skip Divided’]

Jon: "The lyrics are anything but happy. They are full of doubts, bitterness, anxiety and estrangement.

[clip of ‘Analyse’]

Thom: "There’s a lot of me trying to pick myself up off the floor, really, ‘cause I sort of dropped... what’s the word... sunk. Dropped down and went into this sort of big lull and couldn’t do anything, and went on a big downer about stuff. I think there’s a lot of ‘internal monologue’ stuff going on, but it’s never that literal. What ends up in the song always tends to be what the song wants to have rather than “I’m going to put this amount of garbage from my life into this particular song...”

Jon: "There has always been a tension in Radiohead’s music between Yorke’s voice – which can be as pure as a choir boy’s – and what he’s singing.

Thom: "I know! It annoys me, how pretty my voice is. [laughs] That sounds incredibly immodest, but it annoys me how polite it can sound when perhaps what I’m singing is deeply acidic. But that’s what’s there... I mean, the good thing about Nigel is that he always kind of discourages me from trying to mess the voice up too much because he’s like “well, I’m sorry mate but that’s what you’ve got”. Which is kind of good, because sometimes you have to admit defeat and say “okay, that’s what I have... that’s my trumpet. Whatever.” [laughs] This is my trumpet, this is what it does.

Jon: "Last August, Radiohead finally got back together and went into the studio. But it wasn’t until Radiohead decided its tour – a real deadline – that it started to feel productive.

Thom: "I think we lost all momentum and it’s very, very difficult to get momentum back. When I mean momentum, I don’t just mean physically working every day; I mean just hanging out, playing each other music, swapping ideas and stuff. It’s something that you take for granted until... [snaps] it’s gone, and then you’re like “oooh, what’s wrong? Something’s wrong here...” We spent a long time in the studio and it wasn’t going anywhere. We were wasting our time and that was really frustrating. But then, when we sort of upped sticks and went to a different space that we have, to start preparing for the tour, and it was like “okay, we’re on tour in 2 and a half months!” and that’s what we had. We basically had all these half-formed songs and we just had to get it together, and rather than it being a nightmare it was really, really good fun because suddenly everyone is being spontaneous and no one’s self-conscious ‘cause you’re not in the studio. So it was really good, just hanging out, working for about four, five hours a day... it’s interesting. It felt like being 16 again.

Jon: "On tour now, playing so much unreleased material on stage is a test for both the band and the audience.

Thom: "That’s why we chose to do it. To be honest, we know when we’ve got a good gig when the best-sounding stuff is the new stuff, and the old stuff is a bit like “yeah, yeah, whatever”. We’ve had gigs like that, where you can tell the audience is like “yeah we know this. Come on, play some new stuff!” And that’s cool.

Jon: "Of course, the songs aren’t new to everybody. The new songs are getting around from crowd recordings uploaded to internet sites. Yorke doesn’t mind the bootlegging because it helps fans recognise the new songs.

Thom: "I mean, if it wasn’t for the internet, I think it would be complete murder. But you get the feeling that at least some people are familiar with some of it.

Jon: "Radiohead is by far the most coveted free agent in rock at the moment, but after three years without a contract it isn’t making any plans about releasing a new album.

Thom: "I’m not really into that idea of picking an enormous fight. No, I think the structure of the music business is in the sate of collapse anyway, you may just let it get on with it. No point in us trying to help... and it makes you sound really arrogant, like “we’re gonna mess up the system”. Well, the system’s built us so that would be a bit silly, wouldn’t it?

Jon: "As far as Radiohead is concerned, the old system – where a recording company financed the sessions but owned the results – is no longer for them.

Thom: "I don’t think anybody these days should... if they want a bank loan they should take out a bank loan, and if they want to put a record out they should licence it. Nobody should be signing 6-album deals with major record companies who are either gonna implode or sell you onto somebody else, or sell your stuff on iTunes and you won’t get paid at all, which is the current situation, pretty much. They’re still arguing about what artists should get paid on downloads! They’re sort of trying to delay, delay, delay, delay... because record companies basically don’t want to pay the artists at all for the downloads.

Jon: "When Radiohead plays its new songs on stage, they’re mostly straightforward guitar tunes – from garage rock in ‘Bangers & Mash’, to something like a bossa nova in ‘House of Cards’. But once Radiohead gets them back in the studio, they’re likely to mutate again.

Thom: "This was very much a live gig and we’re working in this context, so we have to exclude all the other experiments for now. But the more the live stuff goes on the more you get more certain about how the other things are, [that] you want to explore. Which is cool!

Jon: "Clearly Radiohead is going to do exactly what it wants. By the time it has an album, let’s see if the music business can keep up...