Jonny Greenwood on BBC 6 Music

Stuart Maconie meets Jonny Greenwood at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, where the London Sinfonietta are playing Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians and Greenwood plays Reich's Electric Counterpoint, live over a recording of 12 electric guitars and two basses. It was written for Pat Metheny, and Greenwood has spent many hours watching Metheny play it on YouTube.

Messiaen was the first living composer he was obsessed with, then Penderecki, but seeing the music live is what changed it for him. He was raised to trust recordings as what an orchestra sounds like, and a room of live players still strikes him as “very odd and a bit embarrassing”. Reich's music is all effort and muscle, one marimba player staying off the beat for minutes on end. He bewails two guitars, bass and drums as an old-fashioned format, then admits that being alone with a drummer, with a guitar to play, can be the most exciting way to make music.

The piece he is writing for the cellist Oliver Coates, who plays with two bows, is probably not difficult enough yet. He took the recorder seriously, carried on long after his friends gave up, played in teenage recorder groups until he was 17 or 18, and there is recorder on The Bends. “I just have never learned to be ashamed of playing any instrument,” he says, though a bladder pipe bought in Prague is “probably the stupidest instrument I ever bought”. Now, beside the guitar, the instrument he takes seriously, especially in Radiohead, is the ondes Martenot, a kind of electronic violin played with a piece of string, which sounds like the woman singing the Star Trek theme.