Jonny Greenwood on Adam Buxton

Adam Buxton talks to Jonny Greenwood in Greenwood's dressing room at the Royal Festival Hall, on the afternoon the London Contemporary Orchestra played the Phantom Thread score live under the film, for a short bonus episode of his podcast after the score's Oscar nomination.

Greenwood wanted to write it for six or seven players, so that a cinema would receive the film and a book of music and hire local musicians. Paul Thomas Anderson kept asking for bigger strings. He teased Greenwood about how unromantic Radiohead are, and wanted music that was English, romantic and by Greenwood, “a kind of big three-way contradiction”. Asked about Beau Brummell, a 19th-century dandy famous for his dressing routine, Greenwood says he teased Anderson with the name on a clothes-shopping trip where Anderson took ages. Greenwood is not sure about going to the Oscars and rather pleased with himself at the thought of not going. Buxton pitches speeches; Greenwood's own idea is to shuffle off halfway through a sentence.

Greenwood says Radiohead would never sit at a mixing desk for a documentary; he would be amazed if they did. Mark E. Smith, the Fall's singer, dead a few weeks, was the voice of Greenwood's teenage years, and seeing the Fall at Oxford Polytechnic knocked him over so completely that he walked out halfway and stood outside. The engineer on Pablo Honey had taken him for a proper musician until the morning Greenwood came in wearing his T-shirt for the Fall's album Extricate. The engineer had once had the Fall in the studio, reckoned Smith scribbled his lyrics down anyhow and the Fall were not a real band, and stopped talking to Greenwood after that. The main theme was called “Riddle” while he wrote it, after Nelson Riddle's book on arranging, before it became “House of Woodcock”, which he plays on the dressing-room piano.