He and Godrich were, he said, "very much trying to keep with the aesthetic of it being homemade, but discernibly out of the computer or out of the laptop, and making that something to be celebrated rather than pretend it's not."
Radiohead reconvened last summer to work on new music. "There was no record company, there was no nothing," Yorke says. "It was really nice to be in a period where there was none of that."
At the end of September the band posted a photograph of a studio blackboard filled with song titles. "That was just to wind up all the Web sites," Yorke admits. But the band didn't feel productive overall. "Because there was no endpoint, there was no goal," Yorke says. "To focus a group, a deadline is an excellent idea."
Radiohead hasn't resolved the question of how to release its new material. Although it seems that every last one of Radiohead's North American and European fans is online, Yorke ruled out purely digital distribution because fans elsewhere -- Russia or South America, for instance -- are not so well connected. A company still needs to press CDs and get them to stores. "The truth is that the traditional medium is still there, and you need it," he says.
Around last Christmas, Radiohead gave itself a deadline: The band decided to tour again. "We spent a long time in the studio just not going anywhere, wasting our time, and that was really, really frustrating," Yorke says. "But then we upped the stakes, and we went to a different space that we have, to start preparing for the tour. And it was like, OK, we're on tour in two and a half months. And 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 because you're not in the studio. So it was really good just hanging out and working for about four or five hours a day. It felt like being 16 again."
The night after the interview, Radiohead played a typically polymorphous set at Theater at Madison Square Garden: intricate picking and blunt drum-and-feedback drones, twinkling keyboards and bruising bass lines, plaintive anthems and bitter sarcasm. Among the new songs are Down Is the New Up, which harks back to the Zombies; Bangers 'n Mash, a grinding garage-rocker, and the tricky, odd-meter 15 Step, which begins: "How come I end up where I started?/How come I end up where I went wrong?"
Backstage after the show O'Brien, one of Radiohead's guitarists, says happily that the songs are "morphing rapidly" as they are played each night. Some might even be considered finished. But there is, for the moment, no album in sight, just a band that will let the music business wait until its songs are ready. "All we have to do," O'Brien says, "is record them."
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