Jonny Greenwood names Ed O'Brien the hardest man in Radiohead

Jonny Greenwood has answered readers' questions in The Guardian, sent in before the Oscars, where his Phantom Thread score lost to The Shape of Water. One reader wanted to know who is the hardest member of Radiohead. The field is not strong, he says, but it is Ed O'Brien. He has had boxing training and was sparring on the last tour with the head of the band's concert security, so he’s probably quite tasty³. O'Brien is also the most placatory and peaceable of them all. Phil Selway would be handy if he ever lost his temper with someone, which is unlikely, though Greenwood would not push him.

The rest of us are … not a threat.

Jonny Greenwood³

Asked which of his Radiohead guitar parts he is proudest of, he says the writing matters more to him than the playing, then names two. Ful Stop has good phasing arpeggios which are really satisfying.³ The other is the line of “Present Tense” that Paul Thomas Anderson filmed him and Thom Yorke playing in Anderson's back garden.

Radiohead's string parts were how he learned to write for strings, starting, he thinks, with the middle eight of “My Iron Lung”. Anderson found him through his first film score, Bodysong, and went from there to bootleg recordings of his first orchestral pieces, “Smear” and “Popcorn Superhet Receiver”. Parts of both ended up in There Will Be Blood. If one film had to stand for Radiohead's music, Greenwood would pick Anderson's Punch-Drunk Love.

“Idioteque” started as a short stretch of an hour-long session of aimless arseing around with modular synthesisers and turntables³. Yorke listened to the whole hour and found the piece that became the song.