Jonny Greenwood on Silver Rain

Jonny Greenwood, in Moscow for the first time, comes on Yuri Pronko's morning show on Silver Rain with Robert Ames of the London Contemporary Orchestra, on the day they play the club Space. He answers in English through an interpreter, whose Russian is most of what reaches the tape. He came to writing for orchestra through his film scores, and hearing the LCO play made him want to work with them. They are strings and a pianist, not a symphony orchestra.

Self-taught, he says the best thing that happens to him is starting on a new instrument. Worship of the guitar puzzles him, and a magazine about nothing but guitars seems as odd to him as one about washing machines. Asked what he would still like to play, he says he would like to sing, which he cannot do at all, and that is why he loves the ondes Martenot, because it sounds like a voice. He learned it from a book before the internet, without even a picture, so when one arrived while the band were recording in Paris he stood in front of it matching the written instructions to what he saw.

Creative block, he says in English, is about ego and confidence. “I think the secret is to be sort of secretly quite impressed with yourself, even when you can only play one chord.” He writes his own programs, and wrote most of the one The King of Limbs was mixed on, until someone pointed out that half of it already existed. He prefers to start with pen and paper, because “the software always guides you and makes you make certain decisions”.

Junun was recorded sitting in a circle in an old palace in Rajasthan, Sufi devotional music “played with real aggression and it sounds like James Brown”, the opposite of the calm records Western musicians usually bring back from India. The new Radiohead album is recorded, but they keep listening back to it; they hope to finish it soon and tour the world next year. One of the guests has heard that Russian audiences are noisy, for better and worse, whereas in England people who hate a concert still applaud and tell the person next to them it was awful.