Jonny Greenwood plays the banjo Godrich never allowed on Bodysong

Jonny Greenwood plays banjo on Bodysong, his score for Simon Pummell's film, something Nigel Godrich would never let him do on a Radiohead album. He tells Andy Gill of The Independent that it was fun, and that the banjo can be a very sinister instrument.

Bodysong came out on Parlophone on 27 October, the first record any member of Radiohead has put out under his own name. On 23 October Jonny spent five minutes on BBC Radio 4's Front Row telling John Wilson why he took the job.

Pummell first asked the whole band about a year and a half ago, after the long Kid A and Amnesiac sessions. The other four took six months off; Jonny took the job. Six days is usually enough for me.¹ He admits to being addicted to working in the studio.

Pummell's film runs an hour and 20 minutes without a word of dialogue, cut from a century of library footage from around the world, from dancers filmed around 1900 to 1960s science films of embryos and a 1930s German clip of two toddlers dressed as Nazis. Since nobody speaks, Jonny wrote three- and four-minute pieces that hold a single mood, the players worked without click tracks, and Pummell sometimes cut the picture to fit the music. He would send half an hour of footage due to become ten minutes, and Jonny would send back about 15 minutes of music. The price, Jonny says, is that a theme can never return, because music written for a birth would sound wrong brought back for a shooting.

He made it with Graeme Stewart, the engineer on the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions, in the same studio with the same instruments lying around. The ondes Martenot, the early electronic keyboard Maurice Martenot invented in the 1920s, is on several pieces, and on the closing track, “Tehellet”, Jonny runs it through a vocoder to sing along with a string quartet. It's the most expressive electronic instrument that's ever been invented, I think, just so natural to play - neutral in a way, but so magical.¹

For the jazz pieces he sent Gerard Presencer's quartet a letter naming records in the style he wanted, Dollar Brand's “African Space Programme” among them, along with a tape collage. Their answer became “Splitter”, and the collage itself became “Trench”. Other pieces were cut and spliced by hand, one built from percussion tracks run at different speeds and backwards until they drift into step, with Jonny on the studio floor recording one drum at a time.

In 1991 he was three weeks into a university music course, studying the viola, when Radiohead signed to EMI. Writing the string parts for Bodysong, he remembered that. I got really bitter and gave the viola all the interesting stuff in this, because I remember scraping along with all the simpler parts!¹