Thom Yorke on KCRW

Thom Yorke on KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic, to talk about his first film score, for Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria, and play songs from it ahead of two nights at the Orpheum in Los Angeles on 19 and 20 December. A horror film looked like a decent excuse for weird noises and synthesisers, and then Guadagnino turned out not to want a horror film in the normal sense. Yorke watched the 1977 film again before saying yes; its music is so much of its time that there was no question of copying it. Serving someone else's vision turned out to be freeing. He would never have sat down and told himself to write a German sabbath, or a complicated dance piece in five, ten and three. A scene of a dancer thrown round a room of mirrors under a spell, terrifying with no music at all, came to life when he put a simple piano part underneath.

Jonny Greenwood told him not to work too much to picture, and he was right. He also went back to Ennio Morricone, whose melodies work like characters in the film. He wishes he had never said he was making spells in the studio, because it sounds so pretentious. The score has loosened up the way he works, but he wants to be his own boss again, making videos properly, and is about to go on the road with Nigel Godrich and Tarik Barri, the Berlin artist who wrote the live visual software.