Colin Greenwood on 5FM

Colin Greenwood is on 5FM's Fresh Drive in Johannesburg as global ambassador of the Children's Radio Foundation, which trains young people at about a dozen community stations in South Africa as reporters and presenters. A friend in Oxford who chairs the charity in Britain asked him, knowing how much he loves radio. He has just sat through three days of the trainers' refresher course in Cape Town, learning vox pops and audio profiles. At one station an 11-year-old on her first day took the questions the other children had written for her and interviewed him without a flicker of nerves. He has been interviewed for 20 years by people with shaky notepads, and she had no idea who he was. The children he meets through the foundation, organising their own time, remind him of the band at 12, 13 and 14, rehearsing in village halls, away from school and parents.

Asked whether a band should be a democracy, he passes on what Thom Yorke once said, that “Radiohead's like the United Nations and he's America”. Changes of direction come from taste: Colin raves about a Giorgio Moroder disco track his brother has never heard, explains how it goes, and Jonny plays it and it becomes Jonny's idea. There is a name for bands that sound the same for 50 years, he says, “and this is not a criticism, they're called heritage acts”. Radiohead would rather be a moving target, and it meant a lot that musicians he met in Johannesburg knew the rhythms of the new records.

He has three boys, who call his job “daddy band”, and the children at the school gate follow him down the lane playing air guitar. At Bercy in Paris his eldest, nine, announced just before the show that he didn't even like Radiohead. Colin wishes he were sportier. “If I could kick a football a bit further then I'd be a really cool dad.”