Jonny Greenwood says Radiohead would never name a record after one man

Radiohead play their only Florida show tonight, at the Sound Advice Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach, and three Florida papers mark it with G. Brown's interview with Jonny Greenwood, first printed in the Denver Post in August before Red Rocks. Brown ties the title Hail to the Thief to George W. Bush's disputed election, and Greenwood will have none of it.

We would never name a record after one man, one electoral event

Jonny Greenwood²

, he says, because records are bigger than that and last longer. Of the album itself he says It's just confusion, really. I'm confused, the record's confused. What can you do?¹

Before the North American tour he spent a lot of time in dance-record shops, watching buyers settle on a record after two seconds of it, and caught himself doing the same at his turntable, judging five minutes of music on its sound and rhythm alone. It left him afraid that Radiohead could start making new sounds for their own sake and lose something musical.

Most of his favourite records are full of sounds nobody had heard before, but novelty alone can make a bad one, and in music that is harder to spot than in film. You can make a truly original film that's unwatchable rubbish.¹ He tries to weigh new sounds and colours against musical ideas.

Most of Hail to the Thief was recorded in two and a half weeks in Los Angeles with Nigel Godrich. It was spontaneous once the tape rolled, Greenwood says, but only after three months of daily rehearsals that the band taped and played back at home every night, like setting up a very elaborate two-week concert.

The five are only now appreciating what it is to be a group of five people, Greenwood says, and they are all still obsessed with it and not bored yet. None of us has gotten into collecting cars or supermodels or whatever the traditional distractions are.¹