Colin Greenwood tells Bass Magazine how “Identikit” was built

“Identikit” began as a leftover from The King of Limbs, Colin Greenwood tells Jon D'Auria of Bass Magazine: three singing loops Thom Yorke had recorded. Greenwood took it to his studio at home and worked on it with an Akai MPC, sending ideas back and forth with Yorke until Yorke's piano parts became the bridge after the last verse.

The rest of A Moon Shaped Pool came in starts and stops. At the band's Oxford studio Nigel Godrich banned computers and sent everything to tape, after the eight-track records of Motown and early David Bowie. A year later the band built on those tapes at La Fabrique in the south of France.

Colin only took up the bass because Yorke and Ed O'Brien already had the guitars, and his heroes are James Jamerson and Duck Dunn. His line for “Bloom” was written as he imagined J Dilla would have played it, though he doubts anyone listening has thought of J Dilla. On “Staircase” he and his brother Jonny play a line in unison. In our heads we're being Crockett and Tubbs from Miami Vice on that one¹, he says.

At home he still practises for one to two hours a day, and he has lately been playing live with Tamino, on whose album Amir he also recorded bass (the two shared a stage at the Ancienne Belgique). On stage he stands between two drummers, and of Phil Selway he says I've come to know his ankles very well after staring so intently at them for so long. I swear they haven't aged a day¹.