Jonny Greenwood says Radiohead are recording again

Radiohead are recording and rehearsing again, Jonny Greenwood has told Matt Everitt of BBC 6 Music, two weeks after The King of Limbs came out as a download on 18 February. The BBC bills it as the first time he has spoken publicly since, and it has posted the whole conversation. We have stopped planning ahead very far, just making music and wondering where to go next and what to do.⁵

Greenwood describes a band that work quickly and treat every instrument as equal, and he says that is how his composing and Radiohead feed each other. So playing guitars is great and I love it but I also love playing glockenspiels and pianos. They're all really important to me.⁴

He is also, Digital Spy notes, the BBC's composer in residence, and much of the conversation is about film. Everitt asks about Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood, whose score won Greenwood an Ivor Novello award, and about two new ones. The first is for Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin, still in post-production. The subject is serious, he says, but the job let him try new instruments. We used this harpist called Jean Kelly, who plays harp strung with metal strings, so it sounds like nothing you have heard, wonderful.⁵

His score for Tran Anh Hung's film of Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood is out on Nonesuch in Britain on Monday, and the film reaches British cinemas on 11 March. The film leaves out the novel's pages about music, but they helped him write its guitar parts. There's lots of stuff in the book about music lessons and learning to play Bach on guitar², he says.