Colin Greenwood on BBC 6 Music

Colin Greenwood launched a 24-hour pop-up radio station for World Radio Day last night, with an event at the ICA in London, and tells Elizabeth Alker on BBC 6 Music that his friends Kieran Hebden of Four Tet and Dan Snaith of Caribou played DJ sets. Ban Ki-moon and Desmond Tutu sent contributions. Radiohead, he says, are taking time out and plan to get back together in the summer.

He has just spent nearly two weeks in South Africa for the Children's Radio Foundation, visiting community stations where young reporters get an hour to make programmes about their own lives. Greenwood has done far too many interviews at radio stations in America and Europe, and thinks these children would put most broadcasters to shame for tact and sensitivity. Radio lasts, he says, because it is cheap and it is everywhere, and he grew up in a house of talk radio, Radio 4 and the World Service.

Johannesburg has an exciting club scene, but “I'm a bit of a fuddy-duddy”, he says, and what he loved was 1970s South African rock music, big chord changes and guitars with an African flavour he had never heard before.