I reply confidently, "You know, everyone loves this song so much--they just want to hear it!" Phil chuckles, then pauses before delivering a carefully thought-out response. He does this during our entire conversation--takes the time to think about things before they leave his mouth, and as a result is a charming and eloquent speaker.

"We've not been able to do justice to it yet as a band," he says earnestly. "When we've got a good version--a good band version--then we will no doubt make it into a record."

With that out of the way, I take him back to earlier in the year, which found Phil and Ed performing with Neil Finn around Europe and New Zealand to promote Finn's newest record. "Oh, that was amazing!" Phil exclaims like a little kid talking about his new bike. What is Radiohead's history with Neil Finn? "When he was still in Crowded House--this was quite some years ago now--we were both on the same bill at a festival in Germany;in fact, the same festival as we're playing this week-end," Phil explains. "We met him then and stayed in contact with him, and Ed was invited and Neil asked if I'd be interested as well, so we both went down and played!

"It was excellent. You know, for us it was the first time we'd actually played outside Radiohead in ten years." He laughs. "It was, uh, a very steep learning curve for us."

I ask whether that was very different from the way things work in Radiohead--if he felt he had to conform to what other people told him, rather than having the license to do what he wanted to.

"Um...yeah, because we were playing a lot of Neil's songs. We were playing Pearl Jam songs as well; we were playing Smiths songs and Johnny Marr's new songs and Lisa Germano songs--it was a good discipline to actually adapt to all of those different styles. And it wasn't like doing like standard cover versions because you're actually there playing with the songwriters! Yeah, that stretched us."