Kottke reports this juicy excerpt from Jonny Greenwood’s interview at npr:
Thom [Yorke]’s band had a keyboard player — [whom] I think they didn’t get on with because he played his keyboard so loud. And so when I got the chance to play with them, the first thing I did was make sure my keyboard was turned off … I must have done months of rehearsals with them with this keyboard, and they didn’t know that I’d already turned it off.
They made quite a racket, quite a noise. It was all guitars and distortion — and so I would pretend to play for weeks on end and Thom would say, “I can’t quite hear what you’re doing, but I think you’re adding a really interesting texture, because I can tell when you’re not playing.” And I’m thinking, “No, you can’t, because I’m really not playing.” And I’d go home in the evening and work out how to actually play chords and cautiously over the next few months, I would start turning this keyboard up. And that’s how I started in with Radiohead.
Full interview is available here.