Jonny Greenwood on Adam Buxton

Jonny Greenwood walks round Lyon with Adam Buxton on 1 June 2016, hours before Radiohead play the Roman amphitheatre on Fourvière hill. On stage he uses a Kaoss pad to record Thom Yorke at the start of “Everything in Its Right Place” and fire snippets back at him, timed to put him off. “Idioteque” runs on a homemade drum machine that sometimes drops a beat or adds one, and “when it goes wrong it goes properly wrong”, so they give up on the song and move on.

He loves touring, and says “there's no downside at all and I don't understand bands complaining about touring”. When Radiohead signed their deal, Ed O'Brien took them aside to warn that this is where bands stop trying. In their heads they still want to be Sonic Youth, and the ambition “was always just to make records as good as the ones that we all were excited about”. He got into Radiohead when it was still his brother Colin Greenwood's school band, teaching himself blues harmonica to play on a blues song of theirs, and he later got harmonica onto a Pavement record, Terror Twilight, which he is very proud of.

A Moon Shaped Pool, he says, skirts the edge of something that could be terrible, a little Alice Coltrane, the way the OK Computer songs were them trying to be Miles Davis with nobody playing trumpet. For once he got hold of a song, “Burn the Witch”, when it was only a drum machine and a voice, and kept it bare until the strings had something to do. “No Surprises” was dropped for three or four years when it stopped sounding right, and it is back with a swagger he puts down to Phil Selway's drumming.

In a bonus episode of outtakes he remembers playing “Street Spirit” to his old violin teacher, in her 80s by then, who said it was very good but very sad, and “don't forget life can be really happy and joyful”. She was always right, he says. He is badly colour blind, and told Teenage Fanclub only at the end of a tour spent doing their lights. Recording Junun, the film Paul Thomas Anderson made of him playing with Indian musicians, in a medieval Indian fort felt like being in James Brown's band, all repetitive bass in music that has no chords. Asked about fist fights between encores, he says the worst it gets now is one of them going quiet for an afternoon.