Jonny Greenwood on Musikbyrån

With Kid A just out, Jonny and Colin Greenwood sit down for Swedish television, and Jonny explains why the band stopped making videos. Theirs, he thinks, were fine when they were made and now look like old television adverts, which are always comical a few years later, and nothing about any of them is permanently good. A film also fixes a song. Once a video exists the listener hears white horses instead of the record, when the song should be attached to nothing except the first time someone heard it.

“Creep”, he says, cost them an entire album. The Bends was written and effectively finished a year or more before it came out, and they had to keep working the first record instead. Making the band's name was useful; losing a record to it still annoys him.

On the sound of Kid A, he describes going back to how drum machines were built in the 1970s and 1980s, to the basic electrical signals people used to make a bass drum or a snare, and building something that sounds approximately like a kit. He is most interested in how empty parts of the record are, and in the discipline of stopping where they would once have kept adding.