Jonny Greenwood on BBC Radio 5

Jonny Greenwood talks to Nihal Arthanayake for BBC Radio 5 Live's Headliners podcast about Octatonic, his new label for contemporary classical music played by soloists and small groups. He is a big believer in listening to music and doing nothing else. After a life of three- and four-minute songs, the hardest part of writing for orchestra is resisting the temptation to string seven three-minute ideas together and call it a piece. The music spends nine months on paper, gets played once in a big room, “and it's gone forever”, which is what interests him.

He started on a plastic recorder at six, with no music in the family, and still plays one. He takes one on tour and plays it in the communal team showers of American sports venues, showers that sound enormous and smell of Deep Heat, a muscle rub, and defeated things. The one time he tried conducting a Radiohead string session he was told he looked as if he was politely suggesting they could play if they wanted to. On one Octatonic record, Michael Gordon's piece for solo cello and distortion pedal, Oliver Coates plays the cello and Greenwood plays the pedal.

Thom Yorke did not call him when he was offered the Suspiria soundtrack. Greenwood remembers visiting him at college, where Yorke and his flatmates watched television with the sound down and records on, and learning that nearly any music does something interesting to what is on screen. The record he made in India taught him melody without major and minor chords, and brass players in Rajasthan who sounded like Lee Morgan and Miles Davis had never heard of either. Asked whether Radiohead would play with an orchestra, he points to the terrible track record of bands who tried. There is a little recorder on The Bends, “kept very quiet out of shame”.