Thom Yorke on Festa del Cinema di Roma

Close Encounters of the Third Kind was the second film Thom Yorke ever saw, and it took hold completely. The alien figures became an obsession, and he still doodles them absent-mindedly at home. He bought the cheap novelisation every child had and was captivated by an invented passage in it about the filmmakers borrowing a synthesiser from Stevie Wonder, which left him, at eight, dreaming of an instrument that could communicate with aliens.

What he assumed for years was pure synthesiser is, he points out, a blend that includes cor anglais and tuba, and he marvels that one tuba can be made to sound that immense.

He hears John Williams building the piece by repeating a pattern, altering it and repeating it again, and says this is everywhere in music now, tracing back to Steve Reich.

Otherwise he is not much of a Williams fan. The very successful film composers are imitated so heavily, he explains, that going back to the original makes it hard to hear what was remarkable about it.