Colin Greenwood on Black Sessions

The host of the Black Sessions finds that Thom Yorke, who writes the words, is not at the microphone, so he turns to Colin Greenwood and his brother Jonny, who speak French. Colin, answering slowly in French, says they have played together for seven or eight years, since school in Oxford, but only seriously for 18 months, since university. Asked if pop music is dead, one of them jokes that it will be unless Radiohead get very big, then means it in English. Pop will die “if not this year, in the next couple of years”, unless record companies and the press sign bands people want to hear, instead of selling old dead pop stars to people who already own them. “The only good pop star at the moment is a dead one.” Asked whether Yorke wrote “Creep” from an extreme lucidity about our own condition or from something he lived, one of them answers: “Definitely the latter,” and “you can't write songs unless you really experience it.”