Jonny Greenwood on Toazted.com

Jonny Greenwood talks to Toazted as the interviews for Hail to the Thief begin, the day after the interviewer's promo copy came to the door so secretly it felt like a drug deal. Greenwood expects the film industry to have the music business's trouble next, and it will be harder to ignore, because it has more money and more influence. Radiohead were lucky to start when they did. Their first trips to play in Holland were paid for by a record company that had made its money in the 1980s, from Queen or whoever, and a band starting now has less behind it.

Asked whether Thom Yorke is America at the United Nations, Greenwood says the others have the veto. Phil Selway has strong ideas about structure and when a song is boring, and when someone disagrees with Yorke, Yorke gets upset because he trusts them and thinks they may be right. “I met Colin when I was about two because he's my brother,” Jonny says. The rest were Colin's friends, in his year at school: Jonny was 14 and they were 16. Colin talked them into letting Jonny play harmonica on a song.

“We Suck Young Blood” is cheesy on purpose, Jonny says, frightening and a bit funny at once, like Nosferatu and the early horror films of the 1920s and 30s. He went to a school with chapel every morning. The Church of England is, to him, like the dodo, too friendly to last, and much of the music he loves was made by Catholics such as Messiaen and Elgar. Radiohead are like Rolls-Royce, a famous name with the engineers behind it beside the point. “I think our drug of choice is probably aspirin.”

To the charge that they think too much he points to Miles Davis studying at Juilliard, and to “Street Spirit”, simple as it is, taking two months to get right. He is gorging on Trojan reggae, a habit that goes back to playing his older sister's Magazine and Buzzcocks records five times in the morning and five in the afternoon. He is giving up hunting for new instruments. His guitar is “11 years old and it's a bit scratched”, and he has only one.