Jonny Greenwood: “We don't tour until we've got new music”

Radiohead have no plans, Jonny Greenwood says in a long interview with Andrew Male of The Guardian, given over to Octatonic, the classical label he started last month. Male met him the morning after his Late Night Prom, on about an hour's sleep. We don't tour until we've got new music and new music doesn't happen until we get together and that doesn't happen until everyone's free.¹

The recorder was his first instrument. As a teenager he played baroque music in recorder groups before he joined the Thames Vale Youth Orchestra. On American tours he goes looking for the arena's locker-room showers, for the reverb, and plays Telemann in rooms that smell of Deep Heat and jockstraps¹. For his dream rider, he says, instead of cocaine and call girls, hook me up with a really good amateur recorder group. It's sick, isn't it?¹

In June the band gave the money from MiniDiscs [Hacked] to Extinction Rebellion. Greenwood has no patience with people who point at campaigners' flights to wave the whole thing away. But if picking holes in someone's green credentials is all you need to convince yourself there's no climate change problem then you're kind of an idiot.¹ He is wary, all the same, of Radiohead being cast as standard-bearers.

Octatonic, named after his favourite eight-note scale, began when he looked for the classical section on the online shop Bleep late one night and found there wasn't one. He would like to put out the work of two new composers he admires, Mica Levi and Edmund Finnis. Writing for orchestras has made him less afraid of strings in Radiohead too. On “Burn the Witch” he dared, at last, to leave the song unfinished and let the strings finish it.

There are maybe 20 bars of Horror vacui, the Prom's closing premiere, that he would happily cut, but more of it worked than not. Paul Thomas Anderson was at the Prom, and the two talked over a pile of ideas, one of them a horror film. Watching Anderson's films with the man himself, Greenwood says, makes it plain that they are all comedies.