Jonny Greenwood on BBC 6 Music

Jonny Greenwood's first memory of music is being given a plastic recorder at four or five, and he kept playing it into adulthood. He tells Matt Everitt on 6 Music's The First Time With that he was in recorder groups as a teenager “when I should have been taking bong hits in a stolen car or something”. His brother Colin played New Order's “Everything's Gone Green” in the living room every morning for a year. Jonny's own first record, a pink copy of “Cool for Cats”, went in the bin because their mother thought it a bad influence. His first gig, The Fall in Oxford, was too much for him; he left after four songs and listened from outside the emergency doors.

As On a Friday, before they were Radiohead, the band played once or twice a year and spent the rest of the time rehearsing. Thom Yorke once drove him around playing the Pixies' “Dead” and said they should sound like that. For this year's tour they rehearsed 120 songs, every one they had, then cut the list to about 60 or 70, and play 24 a night. The studio is less of an ordeal than its reputation, and “it's only torturous looking back”. The ordeal he does remember is “No Surprises”, recorded, rerecorded twice and released in its first take. Glastonbury 1997 felt like a disaster from the stage, with the monitors broken and Yorke walking off. At one show in the 90s they came off thinking it brilliant, while out front someone asked their manager, Chris, whether he had anything to do with the band, and he said no.

There Will Be Blood was the dream first film job, for a director who likes his music loud and plenty of it. The theme the band wrote for a James Bond film, “Spectre”, was too dark for it, so it came back to the band to finish as they liked and release. On “Burn the Witch”, for once, the strings were part of the plan from the start, and at the end of “Daydreaming” he had the cellos tune their bottom strings down about a fifth and play on, struggling to stay in tune. Asked how Radiohead have kept from falling apart, he offers “just neurosis, I suppose”.