Yago: Can you tell me the story behind "Pyramid Song"?

Yorke: That song literally took five minutes to write, but yet it came from all these mad places. [It's] something I never thought I could actually get across in a song and lyrically. [But I] managed it and that was really, really tough. [Physicist] Stephen Hawking talks about the theory that time is another force. It's [a] fourth dimension and [he talks about] the idea that time is completely cyclical, it's always doing this [spins finger]. It's a factor, like gravity. It's something that I found in Buddhism as well. That's what "Pyramid Song" is about, the fact that everything is going in circles. [RealVideo]

Yago: Does America seem different to you three years after the OK Computer tour?

O'Brien: Yeah, very. When we came over here, I remember it being a really dark time, and really not enjoying touring America. In fact, it was a f---ing nightmare. We suddenly found ourselves in these arenas at the end of the tour, and we were not in the right frame of mind to be doing that. But we did it.

Yago: Did having such a bad experience on the OK Computer tour scare you guys about going on tour again?

Yorke: Touring in America is very good at making you do lots of histrionics, hardcore stuff that makes you go, "Yah!" You do this move here, and you do that move there, and everything is scripted because it makes everybody in the crowd go, "Whoo!" But I would much rather be someone like Miles Davis who turns his back on the audience and just listens to what everybody is doing because that is why they are really there. They want you to f---ing play.

Yago: Thom, in October 2000 you told Kurt Loder that you heard yourself singing "Fake Plastic Trees" and you didn't recognize your own voice, and that that made you happy. I was wondering if you could explain that.

Yorke: That's why I still say what we do is like pop music, because there's an element of it that's supposed to be disposable and supposed to be something you don't remember. When I hear "Exit Music (For a Film)," I don't recognize the person singing it. The same happens with music like "Airbag" on OK Computer. I don't recognize us playing it. It's just that that's the way you were that particular moment and then you're something else.

Yago: When "Creep" came out, a lot of critics pegged you guys as one-hit wonders. Was there ever a time where you thought that might have actually been the case?

Yorke: Oh yeah, all the time. We're still doing it.

Colin Greenwood: We really didn't think about it so much. We were just enjoying being in America and playing little clubs then. It's a real privilege to see that side of things, and it's really cool because you get to hang around record shops and bookshops and stuff.

Yago: Do you find that you are inspired by the same stuff when you write songs now as you were eight years ago when you first put out Pablo Honey?

O'Brien: No, of course not. Music you listen to when you are 23 is very different from the music you listen to when you are 33. You can't stay with the same stuff. You can come back to stuff and realize why you liked it then if you haven't listened to it in nine years.

Yago: What does your studio look like?

Yorke: Messy.

Yago: Is there just stuff lying everywhere? Computer equipment? Instruments?

Yorke: A collection of old vintage computers, but of course we don't know what to do with them. They look great. There's lots of tapes all over the place that we can't remember what we put on them. There's a lot of gear.

When we built it we wanted it to [also] be a house where we could just hang out. But it's like we built it and then we immediately started working on Kid A and Amnesiac. So at the moment, it is literally a bum sight. [It's] like what we always dreamed of having, a neutral space we would go to when we do our own thing.

Phil Selway: It's kind of reminiscent of when we did live together.

Yorke: It smells the same.

C. Greenwood: Jonny never does the washing up.