Jonny Greenwood says much of The Smile's album is nearly finished

Much of The Smile's album is nearly finished, Jonny Greenwood has told NME. The interview was published as Spencer, the Pablo Larraín film he scored, premieres at the Venice International Film Festival. He and Thom Yorke are sitting in front of a pile of music, deciding what goes on the record, whether things are really done and whether some guitars need fixing. Spencer is finished this week, and next week belongs to The Smile.

The Smile grew out of wanting to work on music with Yorke in lockdown, with Tom Skinner of Sons Of Kemet on drums. Greenwood calls the work stop-start but happy. Everything they played on Glastonbury's livestream in May has been recorded, but he doesn't know whether “Skating on the Surface”, an older song Radiohead played in 2012, will make the album. Touring is undiscussed and undecided.

Asked about the rumoured 20th-anniversary reissues of Kid A and Amnesiac, he says the band talk about it but he doesn't know; such projects take a lot of time, and new music is usually more interesting. He calls himself the most impatient of everybody in Radiohead¹. I've always said I'd much rather the records were 90 per cent as good, but come out twice as often¹.

Spencer, his ninth film score, follows Diana over three days at Christmas 1991. His first way in, through the music she liked, led to Dire Straits, Go West and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Films about the royals, he says, lay fanfares and harpsichords over shots of Buckingham Palace. You either use actual Handel or pastiche Handel.¹ He wanted to show how chaotic and colourful Diana was amid all that baroque tradition, so he wrote in the regular royal style for a baroque orchestra of kettle drums, trumpets, harpsichords and pipe organs. Then, while they were playing, we substituted the orchestra with free jazz players.¹

At first the jazz players clung to the chords, as if improvising over the Antiques Roadshow theme, and the fix was to stay vaguely baroque while leaving room for real chaos. The trumpeter Byron Wallen, he says, blew his mind. The soundtrack will come out on Mercury KX once the film's UK release date is set; it opens in US cinemas on 5 November.

He has just finished another score, for Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog, where the banjo sounded comic as a contemporary classical instrument, so he ended up playing the cello like a banjo. Lockdown, he says, made him less afraid of long music, and he has written a piece for church organs that lasts eight hours and may never be played.