[recording starts here]

Terry: [Holding an OK Computer CD] Is it any different from the American one, or the British?

Thom: I don't think so.

Terry: Same artwork, same..?

Thom: They [expletive] it up in the same way on the back, here. That was supposed to be a big flame there? But they [expletive] it up.

Terry: Did heads roll?

Thom: See that? So the first half million copies have got that one there.

Terry: Did somebody lose their job because of that? C'mon.

Thom: No quite.

Terry: The people in Toronto are still talking about your show there in June. Was it special, was it a good night for you?

Thom: Try and remember, Colin.

Colin: It was the opera. It was about a half hour drive from where we staying. It was a sort of big old hall, old theater that had the seats taken out. It was all painted orange, which I thought was sort of wild.

Thom: And that was the new song I was writing, "I'm not here."

Colin: "This isn't happening."

Thom: That was the chorus.

[laughs]

Colin: It was good. We were all quite lagged. I bought these trousers, actually.

Thom: Yeah, so it must have been good, if you bought a pair of trousers!

Colin: No, of course we remember the show!

Thom: I remember it, yeah.

Colin: Cause you play the gig under the proscenium arch. So it's very difficult to get the vibe from the audience cause a lot of the sound is trapped in the stage space, so it was great, it was really good.

Terry: How long have you two known each other?

Colin: Wot, personally? [expletive] A hideously long time. Something about 12, 13 years old?

Thom: Eleven. I remember you running out of your classroom, and the rest of the class chasing you.

Colin: Oh really? My god.

Terry: How much has he changed?

Colin: Wot, Thom? That's a difficult question to answer.

Thom: You can answer, you can say what you like! I won't hold it against you.

Colin: Until later!

Thom: Until later.

Colin: Um, I don't know. We went through a phase with the group, and with people's perceptions of the group, where I found it personally distressing and upsetting when people would see like, particularly Thom in such a way that was not how I know him and worked together. And that seems to be changing now. And we seem to be perversely returning to where we started when Thom was talking about 4 track stuff, and feeling that what you were doing was all about possibilities, rather than feeling other people like journalists sort of have this image of you and like that's how they saw you, as a, you know...

Thom: It's taken about 4 or 5 years for that to have shaken off. And now I think it's shaken off.

Terry: Is he more outgoing, is he more withdrawn? Same?

Colin: Erm, I think, I think... I don't know. I think one of the coolest things is when we started, when we signed to EMI, we all made this kind of decision that we thought the most important thing was the music professional thing, that was more important in some ways than the qualities of friendship. And then when we sort of hung out and went on tour with REM, and people like that, we were on tour with REM on a very difficult point in their career because, they're kind of like us in some ways. They're very different individual people, and they've had a number of serious ailments. But they've kind of like got through it, and they're still together.

Thom: Michael is actually still really ill. So is Bill.

Colin: Right, yeah they're still recuperating throughout the touring. And you just realized that certain qualities of friendship were actually more important, cause it's kind of like, you don't want to let the other people down individually, you know, there's a lot more pressure that way, because of the friendship, than because of the business.

Thom: I think we lost our marbles for quite a while, because of the pressures of this thing that people kept putting on us. And I don't think that's the case anymore. I think discovering that we actually have- there was a real, kind of a quite a big watershed for us was doing this Tibetan freedom festival. It suddenly felt like we had some sort of- that we weren't having to justify, all five of us, having to justify ourselves at all times to everybody and everything. I mean, I know that sounds sort of over the top, but with The Bends, it was sort of, I don't think we realized how far we'd got with The Bends, and how much of a positive vibe we'd got from people, because we were away doing this. And when we came back and when we did the Tibetan thing, and all our peers were there, and everyone was sort of getting on, and there weren't any egos, and I think all 5 of us, I mean I know I did, all 5 of us actually felt some degree of acceptance. Which actually is extremely important to us as individuals.

Terry: It's also freeing, isn't it?

Thom: Yeah, because it's like, oh okay, we don't have to choose our words carefully all the time, we don't have to do this and this and this. We don't. We can just be in the 5 group of people making music, and that's it.

Colin: Especially coming from England, because there's this whole pressure on like English groups hourly to have this kind of aesthetic and manifesto a lot of the time, like people like Blur and Pulp and um, you know just to have this kind of- We were told when we were signed, one of these A&R men said to us, you know, you've got to have your soapbox to stand on that says like, we're really this or that, we wear this certain kind of clothes.

Thom: A manifesto. We did actually try to sit down and write one, did we once?

Terry: Did you? What was it?

Thom: It didn't go anywhere.

Colin: It was an abject failure, I think. I think the only thing we ever like reiterate in interviews is the fact that we don't live in London, we live in Oxford. It's kind of like an anti-manifesto. It's the fact that we're not in the center of things, we try to stay on the periphery. You know, one step away from the beating heart.

Thom: The coke freaks. [directly into the camera] One step removed from the COKE FREAKS.

Terry: ...heard something briefly about somebody working with DJ Shadow?

Thom: Yeah, just did that 2 days ago. Did that in San Francisco, and did it in George Lucas's place.

Terry: Excuse me?

Thom: Skywalker- oh sorry.

[Terry makes light saber noises]

Thom: Skywalker Ranch!

Terry: And what was the project?

Thom: It was one song, and it went very, very, very well. And it was very exciting.

Terry: For his project?

Thom: It's for, um, James Lavelle has a sort of outfit called UNKLE, which James Lavelle runs this dance label called Mo'Wax.

Colin: He's an Oxford boy.

Thom: He's an Oxford boy and a good friend of ours. So. And um, we'd talked about it for ages, and Shadow is sort of a genius, basically, and one of my heroes. So to get to work with him is a big kick.

Terry: Because this is such a visual album... Can I hold up the album? Is that ok?


Colin: It's up to you, it's entirely your decision.

Terry: Thank you.

Thom: The back's very good as well.

Terry: And to discover that you had plans to make videos for all of the songs?

Thom: If we do it, I'd want to do it as we're making the next one, so there's a long, so that way it's something else to occupy your time, and when you're touring it's very difficult, because when you're touring there's different momentums, you're working at different speeds. And cash is obviously a big problem.

Terry: Cash.

Thom: Cash. We ain't got any.

Terry: No. But soon, maybe?

Thom: It's possible, Melvyn Bragg wants to. Did you hear about that? Melvyn Bragg wants to give us cash.

Colin: Really?

Thom: Yeah.

Terry: Is cash good?

Thom: Cash is what we need. But we don't want to be advertising products for the cash. We just want the cash. So bank robberies it is.

Colin: It's an obscene amount of money as well, doing these videos.

Thom: Yeah, it costs us millions.

Colin: It's like, for the same price as an expensive video, you could record an entire album.

Thom: We could all get really nice houses in the country.

Terry: Is that important?

Thom: Not really, we'd never be in them. But you know.

Terry: Would you like to dispel but one myth about the band?

Colin: That we don't have any dress sense -- we do!

Terry: How long did you think about your wardrobe before you put it on today?

Thom: About a week.

Terry: Good! Then when the cash comes in-

Colin: Rubbish! No! The less you think, the better you look! Always! Always!

Thom: Depending on how hungover you are.

Colin: Yeah! When we started, the record company said, oh boys, you need a stylist. And we went and we just said no, no. We won't do it!

Thom: We went out! We out and we had 300 quid each.

Colin: And then they said yeah, you'll have 300 quid each.

Thom: We had 300 pounds each to get styled. And we went out, and Phil still wears some of it. I threw all of mine away immediately.

Terry: What did you do?

Colin: So bad...

Thom: I bought bags and bags and bags of second-hand clothes, and looked at them all... We had 3 hours to spend 300 quid!

Terry: What did you buy?

Colin: It's crazy.

Thom: You bought that suit, didn't you?

Colin: I was so confused about what I wanted to do. I thought well, if this ends, I should get a suit so I could be looking sharp for the job interviews.

[Thom laughs]

Colin: So I bought myself a suit.

Thom: That creased when you looked at it!

Colin: "That creased when he looked at it!" Terrible! And then it was like in the Portsmouth sale in London for about 80 quid about 2 months later, because it was so horrible.

Thom: And the guy in the shop said, oh it creases deliberately!

Colin: It creases on purpose!

Terry: It's very fashionable. I think maybe cash right now could end all your problems here.

Colin: Yeah- no, then there's larger problems!

Terry: Maybe some mental-

Colin: Style therapy!

Terry: Thank you for your time.

Colin: Thank you for the interview.