Radiohead book studio time with Nigel Godrich, Colin Greenwood says

Radiohead are going back into the studio with Nigel Godrich soon, Colin Greenwood has told Ryan Dombal of Pitchfork, speaking by phone from his home in Oxford. The time is booked, and in his words we've got stuff we want to do³. He likens Godrich to an old-school executive producer, the kind who looks at the bigger picture and reserves time for the band to be creative in.

Rehearsals for the tour, which opens in West Palm Beach on 5 May, began last week. We were just playing a couple of new songs in rehearsals.³ Everyone, Colin says, is still keen to do new things, but whether the new songs reach the tour he doesn't know yet. Thom came in with a list of 70 songs we're rehearsing for the tour and it's like, fucking hell! So it's been real difficult to remember stuff.³

The day before the interview, Thom Yorke, Ed O'Brien and Colin ran through Siouxsie and the Banshees' “Happy House”, and Jonny Greenwood asked what on earth it was. Colin doubts that the covers from January's webcast, The Smiths' “The Headmaster Ritual” and Björk's “Unravel”, will be played on the tour.

That webcast was the small club show at 93 Feet East in London, where the songs from The Bends bounced off the walls. Jonny wasn't wearing earplugs and he was deaf for the next three weeks.³

Before rehearsals began he played In Rainbows for the first time since before Christmas, and some of it still moved him. He puts the record's turning point in February 2007, when the band met again in their Oxford studio and recorded “15 Step” and “Arpeggi” in two days; the earlier sessions with Spike Stent had come about because Godrich was busy with Charlotte Gainsbourg and Beck. Colin would like the band to put out music outside the album format, and says Jonny had wanted to record the classical arrangement of “Weird Fishes” he did with Thom at the Royal Festival Hall.

Remembering the band's show at Liberty State Park in Jersey City in 2001, Colin thinks of Berlin, where they played on the night of 11 September that year. They had sold 13,000 tickets without knowing whether anyone would come, and everyone who had a ticket turned up.