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Ed à son propre fan-club, voué à son adoration. Il est dirigé par Tique.

Now, with the album at Number One, the pundits are applauding the brilliance of the band's anti-marketing 'strategy,' which infuriates O'Brien.
Oh my God. You can't win, can you? People always seem to be crediting us as being these marketing geniuses but there is no master plan in mind. We're just reacting to what we've done before. We know what we like to do and what we don't like to do, and we were in a position with this record whereby the record company couldn't tell us to have singles. We were aware of the commercial risks involved, but the commercial side has never been as important as the creative side. And the people in the record company who've worked on the record have been able to be really creative about it. They've found it empowering. (hmv.com, octobre 2000)

Je ne pense pas que le côté joyeux de Radiohead se fasse remarquer dans nos albums. (Vox, septembre 1997)

We were all at different universities around the country, and the commitment was pretty unbelievable in that we'd get back every three weekends. We'd all come back to Oxford, and Oxford's not - you know, i was in Manchester and Manchester's such a great city. Why would you want to leave Manchester for weekends when there's so much going on? The only reason was 'cause of the band.

Probably our biggest criticism of ourselves is we think too much. We all went to university and have never thought there was anything wrong with thinking too much.

It's an understanding. We don't talk about it. There's no bullshit that goes on. We've been fortunate enough to play for 12 years and learn as a band, learn our instruments, and we've stuck and we've worked really hard at it.

Thom comes in with lots of lyrics, a melody and chords, and usually he strums it on acoustic guitar. We then take it from there and beat it up and arrange it. sometimes they need a lot of arrangement. Sometimes they need absolutely nothing. Sometimes Thom will present a song and it's so obvious how it should be done. Those are actually the hardest to do - the ones where we have free scope and it can go in any direction are the easiest ones to do.

In 1994 we taped everything on video, in 1995 we bought Powerbooks. Our next step on the techno-superhighway is 'the polaroid'. If we go on like this, we'll be painting up our tourbus with charcoal next year.

I don't think we're individually amazing musicians, but what we do collectively is pretty good.

the Smash Hits Pollwinners' Party
We had to do that just because it was so bizarre... It seemed like the entire audience suddenly burst into tears, tugged at its mum's sleeve and demanded to be taken to the toilet.

Tony Blair...
He's definitely the first pop star PM.

Select: Are you at all amused by the fact that this is simultaneously your most out-there and most most successful album to date?
Ed: Well, I don't think the record company expected it to do as well as it has. But I think that's more to do with music generally. Everything seems to have widened up. With this record, we were proud of it but maybe it was (pause) perverse in parts. When you put something like Fitter Happier in... that had to go in, but it was a question of where you placed it. If that had gone at the start, it would have been, "No man, you've gone of the boundaries of (pause) what's descent (laughs).

Select: The other irony is the fact that you set out to make a straight-laced pop record.
Ed: Yeah. We were saying, "Let's do it really straight ahead, let's not fuck around and spend ages analysing the material." And we up doing 16 versions of No Surprises and then went back to the first one. The problem is, we get bored very easily.

Select: Having said that, when you're obviously not thinking about it, you get something like Pop is Dead, which is awful.
Ed: (laughs) It's crap, yeah. Exactly. It's bollocks. (regaining thread) I think we play pretty well as a band now. Am I stretched by being in this band? Yeah, I think everyone is. There was a very good article written about us which said, "They're musically adventurous, but they don't get pompous and hark back to progrock, because the punk thing is still in there." That's very true. We're all learning.

Select: In Interviews, which songs are people keenest to divine the true meaning of?
Ed: It depends on the country. In Germany, they're very keen on Karma Police . (german accent) "Oh yes, karma. '70's. Yah, Karma. 'Instant Karma', John Lennon. Cool, yeah." Paranoid Android, too. We were doing an interview yesterday with this Italian guy called Red Ronnie and he said, "So, Paranoid Android - is it about the fall of the Roman Empire?"

Select: And do people still have this idea of Radiohead as monkish intellectuals?
Ed: The thing is, it's much better to come from that angle, where people think you're readers of books and bridge players, because it means they don't have Rock and Roll expectations. We camped that up to an enormous extent in '93 or whenever, purposely. And we don't get hassle from customs (laughs).

wednesday august4 1999
first time since starting this that i have had absolutely no desire to write anything about today. 24 hours and a good rehearsal (thursday) later things are a little clearer. yesterday or rather today (the 4th) there was very little played but a lot of talk. the problem we have found is that we are essentially in limbo - for the first time in our time we have nothing to get ready for, except 'an album', but weve been working on that since january and nothing substantial has come of it, except maybe a few harsh lessons in how not to do things*. its like how do we start this - when we made our last three albums, there were time restrictions - we no longer have these. are we going down 'stone roses' territory? the result of this somewhat frank discussion is that we need a plan and something to aim for...
*not quite true in hindsight - we have recorded some good stuff (not much, though).

23/2/00
listen to 'cuttooth' and it sounds fucking great. graham, our new engineer, earns his spurs by doing some great tape editing......which involves cutting the master tape at a particular place in the song and attaching another piece of tape from another version of the song. a bit more complicated from the days when your tape recorder chewed up your favourite 'madness' tape and you had to get out the old tape splicing kit and when finally fixed there was a section missing in the second chorus of 'embarassment' ......no very different from those days.

28/2/00
[...] keep getting that ground hogday sensation writing this diary. can't help feeling that this must be an exceptionally boring read except to maybe the diehard muso............

8/3/00
left early......mixture of the lurgee doing the rounds at the moment....but also one of those days when the winter seems to have been too long and you just feel like a bag of shit. probably something to do with smoking more fags...gave up for almost a year and am gradually being wheened back on them. bollocks. this summer i'll cut down. the thing is it's true what they say about giving up ....you do feel so much better it's just that i have no will power......better to mope around at home than around here where good things are going on.

16/4/00
never again............that's it, no more..............not another drop of alcohol, in this case vintage cava, is going to pass my lips until next time............... i'm in the epicentre of one mutha of a hangover................ in fact the last time i felt like this i never drank gin again and that was 14 years ago.............it's evil stuff. my father rang to tell me i reminded him of himself when he used to drink a bit.........maybe hangovers are hereditary..........alcoholism probably is...........it was my birthday, we took the evening off and drank....and drank. i did a run down to majestic got the booze and issued strict instructions that no one was to leave until everything was finished.................and so it was......anyway enough of the fug.

up to june 8.......a long time
[...] here's an idea............... it looks as though alastair campbell has made a few errors in judgement over the handling of his pm's media engagements recently and might want to seek further employment elsewhere in an effort to save some of his rapidly dwindling credibilty......and maybe, just maybe he could add some 'spin' to us radiohead fellas...........that would be ace to see 'al' doing interviews for us............tight-lipped, stern and fending off the press .............."listen sonny if you ask this lot another question about why they always seem such a miserable bunch of bastards i will personally make sure you never hear another record of theirs again...........and for the record Meeting People Is Easy.................." .................... ah yes that would be just fine..........no more questions as to how you got the name of the band, or what you thought of creep now some 7 years after its release....actually to be honest the interviews done so far seem to be of a different calibre compared to last time round........so consequently they're not or at least have not been so far too much of an effort ...........but that might also have something to do with us and our new-found spirit of glasnost.prost.

Our response is always however long it takes. There is no way we are consciously going to release shit.