Jonny Greenwood on BBC Radio Oxford

Jonny Greenwood tells BBC Radio Oxford that his fantasy as a young teenager, driving past music shops, was to walk in and buy a different instrument, never a second guitar, and he still comes home from tours with unlikely ones. Two unusual instruments are in the concert he is about to give with an orchestra: the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument invented by the Frenchman Maurice Martenot in the 1920s, and the tanpura, an Indian drone instrument that accompanies singers. The programme will be mostly film cues and some new music only ever played in Manchester and London, perhaps something from Paul Thomas Anderson's next film, Inherent Vice. The setlist is settled at the last minute, the way a band does it, so the orchestra plays what it is excited about now.

He “got tempted into deeper and deeper water” a step at a time, from string arrangements for Radiohead to film scores. With the band, the first good recording of a song shows what the record will sound like. An orchestral piece takes a long time for a few minutes of music, usually heard once, and until then all he can do is hope. He likes the more melodic film composers, Bernard Herrmann's kind, and finds dark, strange sounds the easy part.

He was at school when Ride came out, and remembers the playground talk of a band from Oxford at last; he was listening to Ride's “Vapour Trail” that morning. On the new Radiohead record he is late, and the others have already started. The interviewer's “new avenues”, he says, is a kind way of putting the fumbling the band do, because every time they try to do it like last time, it doesn't work.