Colin Greenwood on At the Rookery

Colin Greenwood was in conversation with the writer Geoff Dyer and the musician Martin Hayes at an event around How to Disappear, and this extract follows Hayes's history of the Irish céilí band. The Catholic Church moved against house dances, he explains, which pushed the music into parochial halls; what two or three musicians had managed at a crossroads now needed six or eight to fill a room, and in a hall a door could be charged and the evening supervised. That, he says, is where the showbands came from.

Greenwood picks up the thread. A photograph, he says, can be listened to in a way an oil painting, which is silent, cannot.

He connects it to John Leckie, who produced The Bends, and whose working idea was that making a record is like taking a photograph, catching something that happened once rather than building something that never did.