Colin Greenwood

The interviewer on Sideshow, a Los Angeles public-access programme, tells Colin Greenwood that he always looks preoccupied on stage, as if he were running through a shopping list. Colin takes the question seriously and then takes it apart. There is a lot to keep track of, he explains: avoiding Jonny as he spins round with a guitar, avoiding Ed O'Brien, who now and then arrives shouting in what Colin diagnoses as a men's-movement bonding ritual he wants no part of, and being deafened from the other side by Phil Selway.

Asked whether he is planning an escape, he says he is trying to run away but has to stay rooted to the spot.

Playing a show, he says, is like doing a crossword, standing still and thinking very hard. He is not one for a foot on the monitor, and has no use for the bass as a weapon to spray at an audience. His job is to stand at the low end and hold the thing together.