Ten minutes out of Didcot Parkway, in a leafy one-street town, sit the offices of the world’s biggest experimental glitch-rock band: Radiohead. Their awards — NME finger, MTV spaceman — clutter a corner cabinet, while shiny discs fill the walls for increasingly odd albums, from Pablo Honey (1993) to Kid A (2000) and beyond. They recorded The Bends in the basement. The band’s beanpole guitarist, Jonny Greenwood, is curled up on the sofa. He lives nearby, as he always has, and as bandmates such as Thom Yorke still do. Hundreds of magazine covers featuring the five-piece lie face up under the coffee table, and the whole place feels historic — like a museum to getting rich off ever-richer sounds.

I had gone to Oxfordshire to talk to Greenwood about his classical work — on film scores, with the London Contemporary Orchestra (LCO), various attempts to sample the symphonies of Olivier Messiaen. But let’s shove [...]