Thom Yorke on Sirius XM

Thom Yorke talks to Jenny Eliscu for SiriusXM's You Sessions at Electric Lady Studios in New York, between solo piano pieces from his Suspiria score. He worked mostly from the script, because Jonny Greenwood warned him that watching the picture too much makes a composer think in straight lines. He rewatched the original film before saying yes, to check he would not be intimidated, and was not, since he could never go anywhere near what Goblin had done with the original score.

The central dance had already been choreographed by Damien Jalet, so the music had to follow its mathematics, which he calls a real head mash. His homework was The Shining, Morricone and a record of home tapes by the band Faust, made while they were plainly very stoned. For “A Choir of One” he spent weeks stitching his own voice together with the breaths taken out, following microtonal shifts written on a modular synth, while Stanley Donwood sat in the room typing a horror book and was asked to keep the typing down. Most of the time, Yorke says, he did not think of the music as scary while he was building it. Then he lit a candle one night, listened to the finished record with the lights off, and it genuinely freaked him out.

When Luca Guadagnino finally asked, Yorke's first reaction was to tell him to find someone who knew what they were doing. But Guadagnino had been set on Suspiria for years and had written it down in his notes back when OK Computer came out: Thom Yorke to do the soundtrack. It took about a year and a bit. The session ends on a piano “Bloom”, a version he first worked up for the Pathway to Paris single with Patti Smith.