Jonny Greenwood on RTÉ 2fm

Jonny Greenwood rings RTÉ 2fm with the new album done. “It's on a shiny CD, we can't change it anymore,” he says. He confirms he has had Pink Floyd's Meddle on his Walkman, for “Echoes” and “One of These Days”, though the band are quite snobby and hear more wrong with a record than right, and take only the ideas they like.

It was never Pablo Honey that was huge in America, he says, only “Creep”, which they spent their time there travelling round to play. They recorded the new one in a country house because studios are steeped in rock history, with gold discs from 1974 on the wall and the last band's girly magazines lying about. There were intense, depressing times and happy, confident ones. The success of The Bends only reached them halfway through. Half the new songs could have been on The Bends and half on the next record, he reckons, so the album will make more sense to people who know The Bends than to kids in America hearing it on the radio. Buying a whole record for one good single is what they are fighting against.

He remembers the Olympia and Galway shows last summer as overwhelming, after their last visit to Ireland drew a handful of people to the Rock Garden. As for the set at the RDS Arena in Dublin on 21 June, “we'll probably know half an hour before we play and not before then”. In Cleveland his ear started producing noise and blood on its own, and he fainted in the hospital's casualty ward, which was grim and nothing like ER. On tour with R.E.M., “we got embarrassingly huge amounts of consideration”, and even after nearly two years on the road R.E.M. were still writing and recording in their dressing room.

On the album credits the presenter reads out, Ed O'Brien is on polite guitar and Jonny Greenwood on abusive guitar. Greenwood has little time for people obsessed with guitars, finds guitar magazine interviews depressing for both sides, and thinks of his favourite guitarists as band members: it took him a while to remember that the band Magazine's guitarist was John McGeoch.