Jonny Greenwood on Caroline Martel

Jonny Greenwood meets an ondes Martenot player in Montreal, filmed by Caroline Martel, and tries to explain what draws him to it. The player had been at Radiohead's Montreal show the night before, the first rock show the player had ever been to. He can't sing, and the ondes, an early electronic instrument played from a keyboard or with a ring slid along a ribbon, is the nearest thing to singing he has found. The vibrato that feels awkward on his viola comes naturally on it. His synthesisers are just switches; this is the one electric instrument he knows that takes a player's personality, as a violin or an oboe does.

Beside a real player he feels like Elton John meeting Glenn Gould, bad at long leaps between notes and using the wrong finger because nobody ever showed him. He knew it for years only from recordings. “I couldn't even find a picture.” Then he heard of one for sale in a Paris shop and had it delivered to the studio where the band were recording in Paris. He would like it to cross over the way the saxophone did, and once read an article in London arguing that Maurice Martenot invented it at the wrong time. The early electronic composers wanted brutal, raw sounds and passed it over, he says, because “it was too passionate, it was too lyrical and expressive.” He finds that “really interesting and quite sad”.