Jonny Greenwood wrote the Phantom Thread score in Radiohead's dressing rooms

Jonny Greenwood wrote much of his score for Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread on the road with Radiohead, in the hotel rooms, green rooms and dressing rooms of the A Moon Shaped Pool tour. Dressing rooms usually have a piano and nothing to distract him, he told Esquire's Matt Miller by email. It is the first of his film scores to be up for a major award: a Golden Globe, which went to Alexandre Desplat for The Shape of Water, and the Oscar nominations are due soon.

The film may have started with him. At an event for Junun, their 2015 collaboration, Greenwood told Anderson about Beau Brummell, the Regency dandy who dressed each morning before visitors and started again if a single item was wrong. Greenwood suspects the picture stuck. Phantom Thread stars Daniel Day-Lewis as Reynolds Woodcock, an obsessive dressmaker, and Anderson's brief for the music was 'big-ass strings,' which I think is American for 'orchestra'¹.

Greenwood tried Brixotica, the British take on Les Baxter, and gave it up, because it only works with a wink and Reynolds has no irony in him. He wrote instead from what Reynolds would have listened to: Glenn Gould's Bach and string-heavy jazz such as Ben Webster's Music for Loving, with the piano holding it all together. One session had 60 string players. He compares the recording to a firework display, the opposite of a Radiohead record, where a song grows slowly round a core that never changes.

Of Anderson, who hates jazz flute and teases him without mercy, he says He's like an amusing Danish architect who loves California.¹

He has no wish to make a solo record outside film, and beyond perhaps some orchestral writing for one concert, he has nothing else planned this year. I'm just planning to enjoy the Radiohead shows, and see how much better 2018 is than 2017.¹