Jonny Greenwood on SmartLess

Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood join the comedy podcast SmartLess, whose hosts Jason Bateman, Will Arnett and Sean Hayes are fans; Bateman had put them on a list of guests he never expected to get. The Smile came together quickly and then painfully slowly: Greenwood and the drummer Tom Skinner had tracked about four songs, Yorke says, before he knew what was going on. The Smile record was held up by Yorke doing the artwork, and he sang his parts over the internet into Nigel Godrich's studio, stopping at four o'clock because that is when the children got home.

Yorke wrote his first song at 11, “Mushroom Cloud”, and remembers half the riff. The early takes of “Everything in Its Right Place” sounded like a bizarre noise, and they have learned to wait a day or two on things like that. The bands they name are the Pixies, New Order, Sonic Youth, Throwing Muses and R.E.M. When Kraftwerk toured South America with them, they spent a long dinner asking what instrument was used on every part of Computer World. The OK Computer string players were the grumpiest they ever had, and an orchestral librarian warned Greenwood not to try to engage their enthusiasm, because they had none. Paul Thomas Anderson took Greenwood on after putting a fan's bootleg of one of his classical pieces against the pictures.

Greenwood worried that one son didn't like music, until the boy announced he had found an artist called “Librac”. Greenwood assumed a German techno producer. It was Liberace. One of them stretched “Creep” to 10 minutes for a friend's fashion show and calls it his favourite version. Bateman had used “Decks Dark” in Ozark, and hearing it there made one of them like a song the band had struggled with.