Radiohead record Jonny Greenwood's strings in Dorchester Abbey

The Orchestra of St John's, Smith Square, has recorded Jonny Greenwood's string arrangements for Radiohead in Dorchester Abbey, a 12th-century church in Oxfordshire about five miles from the band's studio. John Lubbock, who organised the session, conducted, and right at the end handed the conducting over to Jonny so he could try out an idea of his own.

Jonny had spent most of the fortnight before in his room scoring the parts, for 24 professional players who would play exactly what he wrote. Among them are the strings for “How to Disappear Completely”. On 25 January the band lost a day trying to move that song away from a band-with-acoustic-guitar treatment, until Jonny found what Ed O'Brien, in his online studio diary, calls the one chord thing² for the strings, and that evening Thom Yorke sang a vocal O'Brien calls wonderful. His summing-up of the day is bad day, good day, good cop, bad cop.²

The band passed over the London studios for the abbey, booked for three hours, and O'Brien writes that they needed the day after an incredibly draining week. He calls the acoustics fantastic, and thinks Nigel Godrich was blown away by the sound.

O'Brien sets the day against the strings session for OK Computer at Abbey Road, where, he says, Jonny's ideas were dismissed. This time Lubbock and the players were enthusiastic and open to his unusual ideas. there is no way that he would have been allowed to have done that at the abbey road session.¹

The fortnight before the strings, from Ed O'Brien's diary