Nigel Godrich

A panel after a screening of Junun, Paul Thomas Anderson's film of the record Jonny Greenwood and Shye Ben Tzur made in Rajasthan, with Greenwood, Anderson, Ben Tzur, Nigel Godrich and the drummer Nathu Lal Solanki. Godrich calls the trip one of the best things he has done in his life. The sign telling them to have a good time came in the flight case, put there by Plank, Radiohead's chief tech, who helped them pack.

Anderson tells it backwards. Greenwood asked whether he wanted to go to India, he said yes, and only then asked what they would be doing. Ben Tzur first heard of Greenwood through a phone call while he was playing in Kolkata. Greenwood set the rules early, with no Western instruments beyond his own and Ben Tzur's guitar and no chords forced onto music built on ragas. When Ben Tzur suggested drums, Greenwood asked for drums that were not Western ones, which is how Solanki came in.

The first idea for where to record was somewhere vague in the desert, which Godrich had to point out was not really possible. They shipped everything out in a box and worked in the Maharaja of Jodhpur's fort, and all the reverb on the record is natural, from an enormous space underneath that happened to be full of pigeons. Anderson's camera equipment never got out of customs, so he shot the film on a very small camera. Greenwood thinks Westerners making music in India often show too much respect. The brass bands that follow weddings down the back streets of Jodhpur are rough, and that was what they answered.

A fan asks how he wrote the “Paranoid Android” solos. He didn't know the notes that high up the fretboard, he says, so he picked a pattern.