Jonny Greenwood on Radio New Zealand

Jonny Greenwood talks to Radio New Zealand the day after Radiohead's Auckland show, where he reckons they sweated out every illness of the past three weeks. Q's readers have just voted OK Computer the best album ever, and he is unmoved: Radiohead could turn out as irrelevant as Van der Graaf Generator, who probably won album of the year in 1972. The record took prog's instruments and textures, he says, “but we just don't sing about unicorns”. He is happy to steal from records he once wrote off. Horace Andy and Scientist Meets the Space Invaders won him round to dub. He found early Pink Floyd only a year ago, having grown up thinking them terrible. Country and western went the same way: he once decided it was all terrible, then found songs from the 1940s and 50s about cocaine, women and people dying.

A band at EMI, about five years earlier, turned up to video screenings with stopwatches to make sure the keyboard player was on screen no longer than the drummer, which is why Radiohead try to stay out of their own videos. The Romeo + Juliet soundtrack, with one of their B-sides on it, has sold four times as many as any Radiohead album, he says. For the film Velvet Goldmine he and Thom Yorke covered obscure Roxy Music songs; Greenwood had never heard any of them.

The brace he wears on his guitar arm on tour comes from clumsy technique, he says, not from hitting the strings hard. They still play “Creep”, and in New Zealand, where they last toured Pablo Honey, the shouts for it are fair enough. In America a few months ago an interviewer asked what they had been doing since Pablo Honey, and “suddenly a whole three years of our life had been wiped out”. In Oxford people have started knocking on his door. He has eight or nine new songs, and would happily start next week.