Jonny Greenwood on BBC Radio 4

Krzysztof Penderecki tells BBC Radio 4 he wants to write a piece with a part for Jonny Greenwood's electric guitar, the day after their joint concert at the Barbican. “If anything is going to make me look at the electric guitar in a different way it's going to be working with a professor on this kind of music,” Greenwood says.

He first met Penderecki's music just before Radiohead signed, during a few weeks at music college, when a lecturer played the class Threnody and showed them the score; he took the score on tour. A primary-school violin teacher who asked every child for a different sound taught him to treat an instrument as a piece of technology, the guitar too, “like a typewriter or something but also quite limitless”. He hears Penderecki in the microtonal strings at the end of “How to Disappear Completely”, and as early as “Climbing Up the Walls”. “What I've realised is that recordings just aren't good enough,” he says, and he would send everyone to hear an orchestra live. Then a pneumatic drill starts up in the street outside, and the interview moves from a dressing room at the Barbican into the concert hall. Radiohead are touring until November with no plans after, and he feels computers and acoustic sound pulling him two ways.

Penderecki, 78, was young and angry in 1960s Poland, maybe hungry too, and like the theatre and cinema of the day refused the aesthetic the authorities asked for. About 30 years ago Stanley Kubrick rang him about The Shining, and he sent pieces for him to listen to. He knew Radiohead from his children and his granddaughter, who gave him the records.