Jonny Greenwood on VPRO

Jonny Greenwood tells Sander Kerkhof of VPRO that for Hail to the Thief they wanted the freedom of Kid A and Amnesiac, only much quicker, with every instrument on the shelf and each one grabbed for the song it suits. “I Will” sounds great on a guitar, and “Backdrifts” would sound really stupid on one. The voice is at the centre of the record, and he agrees Thom Yorke is singing better than he ever has in the studio. The trick is to steer a song onto the record without anyone seeing their hands on it. Sometimes a song waits years for that: “Motion Picture Soundtrack” was ten years old by the time it went on Amnesiac.

He used to hate making electronic music, and then worked out why. “You're using somebody else's idea of how the computer should make music,” he says, the way work done in Photoshop usually gives itself away. So he has gone one level lower and writes his own software, as he did as a nerdy kid on a Sinclair Spectrum at 11, and no longer has to take anyone's word for what reverb is meant to be.

Radiohead are one of the luckiest bands in the world, he says, because they can rely on a lot of people listening to a record closely, more than once, before deciding. When people want them to sound like they did in 1992, though, “on some level you have to stand up in front of a lot of people and say to yourself that they're all wrong”. His score for Bodysong, Simon Pummell's film of library footage with no talking and no story, uses a jazz band he had for a few days, a string quartet, guitars and drum machines. At home in Oxford he is starting down the road of family life, very vaguely, and has a very ugly dog.

“2 + 2 = 5” opens the album because it was the first thing they recorded, on the first day, the sound of them plugging in at the start of two weeks of a new song a day. The energy from it, he says, carried them through that week and the next.