Colin Greenwood on BBC 6 Music

Colin Greenwood wanted to be Radiohead's guitarist, he tells Matt Everitt on 6 Music's The First Time With, and he has a score to settle. He and Thom Yorke had classical guitar lessons together, but Ed O'Brien got a guitar first, and Yorke told Colin he would play bass. It was Colin who brought Jonny into the band. “Jonny owes his place in Radiohead to me and I never let him forget that every single day,” he says, and on stage he wanders over to remind him. Jonny has a grievance of his own: at an early show at the Rock Garden Colin forgot the keyboard stand, so Jonny had to play with his back to the audience, and he still holds it against him.

His first listening was in Germany in the 1970s, where his parents lived, on a small turntable with about a dozen records and Bridge Over Troubled Water on Sunday mornings. The first album he bought was by Kid Creole and the Coconuts. The second record was a New Order single, bought to find out what came after Joy Division, and the band covered its B-side, “Procession”, when they started at school. His mother put up with it all on the grounds that it kept him and his brother Jonny off the streets of Abingdon. The poster for the band's first show, at the Jericho Tavern, hangs in his bathroom, his name half coloured in red before he gave up. When Radiohead's first release, the Drill EP, came out, members of the band found the free promo cassettes marked down to 25 or 50p in a record shop in Leicester or Nottingham, and the manager took pity and gave some back to them.

OK Computer, he thinks, was made on the nerve of being young. “You don't have a clue about anything. You don't have any fears.” J Dilla and the Stones Throw producers taught him that a bass can play a loop the way a computer plays a sample, good discipline for a player Yorke used to tell off for noodling. His part on “Nude” came from Al Green's live cover of a Bee Gees song, and Yorke liked it enough to tell him to keep it. As for a solo bass record, he uses the interview to announce “that's not happening anytime soon”, though he is open to offers.