Colin Greenwood visits South Africa for the Children's Radio Foundation

Colin Greenwood has spent part of January in South Africa as an ambassador for the Children's Radio Foundation, a Cape Town charity backed by UNICEF that works with community radio stations in five African countries to put young people on air. He joined it in October 2011, announcing it on Dead Air Space, the band's blog. From Cape Town he goes on to community stations in the Northern Cape, North West and Gauteng.

Kate Stegeman of the Daily Maverick spent time with him in Cape Town last week, and he joked to her about the Children's Radio-head Foundation¹. At a training session at the foundation's headquarters he teamed up with three young trainers from stations in Atlantis, Newcastle and Durban to make a radio “postcard”, a short piece built from a place's own sounds, a presenter describing it and a few interviews. Watching them work together, he said it reminds me of my band practices when we were kids in a village hall in Oxfordshire and we didn't really know what we were doing¹.

They made it at the flower market on Adderley Street. A veteran seller, Soraya, refused to go through her routine a second time for the microphone, and came round when Greenwood offered to play a customer and buy a bunch of flowers. By the end she was telling them the stall was her whole livelihood.

He asked to see township life for himself rather than be told about it. The party went to a youth HIV clinic in Site C, Khayelitsha, where they met Médecins Sans Frontières staff and volunteers from the iKasi Youth Radio Club, then walked the streets up to the Lookout Point.

The next day young reporters interviewed him at a youth centre in Manenberg, on the Cape Flats. Many of them did not know Radiohead's music, which did not seem to bother him. The main thing I love is the affirmation of young people's curiosity.¹ Asked whether Radiohead would play South Africa, he said he would like them to, without saying when. The questions about his family were the hard ones, he said, and he rated it one of his cooler interviews, better than some he has done for Rolling Stone.