Colin Greenwood on James Acaster's Perfect Sounds

James Acaster, who believes 2016 was the best year for music ever, visits Colin Greenwood at home for a bonus episode on A Moon Shaped Pool, five years on. A double bass has just been delivered, so the lesson comes first, with rain hammering on the windows.

The record began on tape. Nigel Godrich had been taken with stems from old sessions, the separate tracks of “Space Oddity” and the like, and turned one of their two 24-track machines into a 16-track to work the old way, punching in on tape. Drums are a world of pain to record like that; bass is the easy duffer's route, and Colin just sat at the desk with Godrich and played. What he loves most is his brother's work, the staccato strings that found “Burn the Witch” its verse and the string and choir sessions at RAK. “The Numbers” owes something to the Soulful Strings records the brothers liked as boys, and “Identikit” grew out of Thom Yorke's vocal loops during The King of Limbs. As for “True Love Waits”, Jonny might say you could play it on two teaspoons and a box of matches.

He won't say what the record is about. A newcomer should start with the B-sides from The Bends and OK Computer, “How Can You Be Sure” for one, songs that never got the scrutiny the album tracks did. “Black Star” went onto The Bends but, he thinks, gained the same way, from missing the scrutiny the other songs got. It was, he thinks, the first thing they recorded with Godrich, on a day to themselves while John Leckie was mixing the rest of The Bends at Abbey Road. His joke is that when Radiohead finish he'll front a tribute act, Colin's Radiohead Experience, playing “Creep” 10 times in a pub to five people, four of whom wandered in by mistake, and Jonny has promised to drive past on the first night.