Jonny Greenwood says Radiohead are getting together to talk

Jonny Greenwood says nothing is under way for Radiohead, but the members are getting together to talk. It's all a bit disparate at the moment, but we are getting together to talk¹ he told Consequence. Anything more waits until everyone has the time and the inclination.

The Smile start their North American run at the Auditorio Nacional in Mexico City tonight, a day after “Bending Hectic” came out. Two years with no chance to play in a band left Greenwood, Thom Yorke and Tom Skinner with a store of ideas, he says, and the three still strike sparks off one another. The second album, which the band said in March was seven weeks into recording, sounds a lot like A Light for Attracting Attention, and many of its songs were played live first. We were doing a lot of the songs live, and we've made some faithful recordings of those³. The record is about what three people can do together and the limits that come with it, and about learning to enjoy working inside them.

Jarak Qaribak, his album with the Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, came out on World Circuit on 9 June. It has nine Middle Eastern pop songs, each sung by a singer from a country other than the song's own, and the title loosely means “your neighbour is your friend”. Greenwood has listened to this music for around 30 years, and played guitar on Tassa's 2009 song “Eize Yom”; some of the songs turned up by following YouTube's suggested videos.

The music was familiar, but working in it was not, and he had to put aside much of what he knew about harmony. There's times where you have to really step away and not impose what you think is a major or minor chord on something¹. He also wanted to keep the rhythms delicate. Too many versions of these songs get flattened into four-on-the-floor dance music, he says, the way early blues was reduced to kick, snare and hi-hat on the one and the three. The singers he found are young and extraordinary, and the songs themselves are nothing forbidding. Fundamentally, they're just pop songs. It's not like it's Stockhausen or something.²