Jonny Greenwood on NPR

Jonny Greenwood tells Bob Boilen of NPR's All Songs Considered that after writing their own software for The King of Limbs, Radiohead made A Moon Shaped Pool on magnetic tape, with eight or 16 tracks a song and no undo button. A retake went over the old one, so if it was no better the old one was lost, and the pressure was fun. They did about 80 per cent of the record in two weeks. Every record ends, he says, with the band agreeing it didn't come out quite as meant, “like rewriting the same letter and getting each draft slightly wrong”.

The opening track, “Burn the Witch”, was a rare chance to start with strings rather than add them at the end. It was only Thom Yorke singing to a drum machine when Greenwood wrote for 13 players of the London Contemporary Orchestra, strumming with guitar picks, and “string days are just the most exciting days to record”, he says. On “Daydreaming” the band built the backing track without Yorke, Greenwood played the piano, and Yorke came in only to sing. “Glass Eyes” is a piano run through software he wrote in Max/MSP, which now and then breaks down and leaves the band waiting, like an old car. As a teenager he played viola and, with no shame, the recorder in groups until he was 18, and if you listen closely there are recorders in the choruses of the song “The Bends” and at the start of a song on the new record.

He sees the band as arrangers, like the producer in The Buddy Holly Story, there to serve a song Yorke can sit and play at the piano, a “Pyramid Song” or whatever it is. The worry is how to make it better than “him just playing it by himself which is already usually quite great”. He uses one delay pedal and nothing else. As a boy he loved songs and never noticed who played on them, and when Radiohead's first record came out he had to memorise that John McGeoch played in Magazine so as to have a guitarist to name. Lately he has been trying to get into heavy metal, having just seen Deep Purple in Italy. Boilen suggests Swans and Boris, and Greenwood says Yorke is obsessed with Boris.