Humphrey Lyttelton tells how he rescued Radiohead's “Life in a Glass House”

Humphrey Lyttelton, the jazz trumpeter, has told how he came to play on “Life in a Glass House”, which closes Amnesiac, due on 4 June. The session ran to seven hours, and when they finally had a take they liked, the band suggested getting something to eat and playing on. Lyttelton, who is 79, said no, it had been a very hard day for him.

His account is in a Radiohead package by Mariana Enriquez in No, the youth supplement of the Buenos Aires daily Página/12, on 12 April. It began with a letter from Jonny Greenwood, who admitted the band were stuck and had decided that Lyttelton was the one person who could help them settle the arrangement. Lyttelton, a bandleader since the trad-jazz revival of the 1950s and the chairman of Radio 4's I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, had never heard of Radiohead. He borrowed OK Computer from his daughter and met Greenwood briefly before saying yes.

People had warned him the band were crazy, he says, but they had a good time. Nobody knew what he would play. The band wanted something exploratory, like people improvising with nothing planned, and found it hard to make him see exactly what they meant. To him the finished track starts in minor keys and turns wild and primitive, like a New Orleans blues.

What struck him most was Thom Yorke. When Thom sang, he disappeared from view. He sat cross-legged in a sort of meditative pose in a corner of the booth. He's a strange lad.¹