Jonny Greenwood: "[The National Anthem] started with Thom saying this track should really sound like... by the end it should turn into a Charlie Mingus track. [...] And we pretty much just got a brass section into the room, and I scored out the rough tune, and Thom and I stood in front of them conducting, sort of... I say 'conducting', it wasn't Simon Rattle, it was more just jumping up and down when we wanted it to be louder and faster and calming them down at certain points. [...] We wanted them to play around with the rhythms of what was happening, and do crossbeats, and be taking it in turns to take solos, really. A bit like Charlie Mingus, the organised chaos of that, the fact that it's not random. There's a structure going on, but it's very loose around the edges." [...]

Robert Sandall: "Charlie Mingus - as a musician - obviously is tremendously diverse, extraordinarily prolific arranger and performer. Which bit of Mingus were you aiming for here?"

Jonny: "I suppose like the Blues & Roots era. It's funny, I always find it very comforting to find that a whole style of music, that I'd always been contemptuous of - like big band music - without knowing any, and just sort of never thought much of. And then someone played me Charlie Mingus, and I just thought 'that's just fantastic, that's amazing'. And so suddenly it opens up all this other music that you'd previously been contemptuous of. That happens a lot to us."

Thom: "It was sort of written initially... the demo I did of it for the others was very, very, very slow, indeed. And I kind of wanted it to keep that in, keep this sort of like chanting about it, really. And the words weren't really relevant, it was just these melodies going 'round and 'round against each other, you know. I'm not quite sure where that came from, but it's probably kind of a Mingus thing, one of my many Mingus hang-ups from another Mingus track. But then it just turned into this blimming, I don't know, rhythm fest thing. because it was obviously not gonna stay like that, I don't know... It's very, very old as well. I mean, it's pre-Kid A, the initial idea for the song. And the 'rain drops' section just came out of thin air, I don't know where the hell that came from, to be honest. Got no idea.

Q: "'Pyramid Song' and 'Everything In Its Right Place' seem close?"

Thom: "They were both written in the same week - the week I bought a piano (laughs). The chords I'm playing involve lots of black notes. You think you're being really clever playing them but they're really simple. For 'Everything' I programmed my piano playing into a lap-top, but 'Pyramid' sounded better untreated. 'Pyramid Song' is me being totally obsessed by a Charlie Mingus song called Freedom and I was just trying to duplicate that, really. Our first version of 'Pyramid' even had all the claps that you hear on Freedom. Unfortunately, our claps sounded really naff, so I quickly erased them."

Jonny: "I guess that, well, we realised that we couldn't play jazz. You know, we've always been a band of great ambition with limited playing abilities. So the final product you get to when you work under those expressive parameters, with those creative concepts, is something I quite like. In that sense, our main inspiration has been Miles Davis and Bitches Brew, how he and his band are capable of filling up the recording with sound from beginning to end... oh god! Now that felt sort of awkward... if a Miles Davis fan hears me talk about him that way he might get really mad at me. He'd be entitled to really. Don't get me wrong, I have too much respect for Miles Davis. None of us plays trumpet or sax very well, we're definitely not skilled instrumentalists. What we take from these records are things that other people may overlook, maybe things they don't feel that passionate about. Like the chaos in those records which is fantastic... an amazing thing. And with Charles Mingus it's utter chaos all the same, the things happening in their music and the way they happen... This kind of music that's supposed to be, somehow classical, calmed... I don't know, when you're younger, you grow up picturing the image of big bands like Glenn Miller's, and when you listen to Mingus he makes you change your perception of jazz. So jazz is a grand thing, but we're not trying to play jazz in these songs [my question refers to 'The National Anthem' and 'Life In A Glasshouse basically] but if we were we'd call 'real' musicians to help us out."

"I often think about the horn section on 'The National Anthem.' Me and Jonny were standing in front of all these players: Jonny was writing out scores, and I was going, 'Just play it like a bunch of cars in a traffic jam! They're really cross!' I really didn't give a shit what they started playing. I was listening to a lot of Charles Mingus. I wanted to take that to the extreme."

Q: "Now, there's a very unusual brass arrangement on that, did you do that, Jonny?" Jonny: "It started with Thom saying this track should really sound like... by the end it should turn into a Charlie Mingus track. And Thom has these ideas quite often, and sometimes they're best ignored and sometimes they're genius and he's completely right. And we pretty much just got a brass section into the room, and I scored out the rough tune. And Thom and I stood in front of them conducting, sort of. I say "conducting", it wasn't Simon Rattle, it was more just jumping up and down when we wanted it to be louder and faster and calming them down at certain points. You know, I'm sure it looked ridiculous, but it sounded... I mean, it sounds on tape pretty good, I think." Q: "It's a very spiky sound, is that what you wanted?" Jonny: "It is, yeah. We wanted them to play around with the rhythm and do cross beats and be taking turns in taking solos, really. A bit like Charlie Mingus, the organized chaos of that, the fact that it's not random, there's a structure going on. But it's very loose around the edges, it's quite..." Q: "And the solo-ing seems to get more intense towards the end of the track. Were you sort of trying to build up the noise quota?" Jonny: "Yeah. The very last high note is actually done on the lowest instrument. So, this gives some idea of the sweat and the red faces going on in that room, it was just... it was intense."

Thom: "Every track on both records was me trying to drag out the feeling from that song. The Mingus thing for me, when I first heard Mingus I didn't think it was jazz at all. Jonny (Greenwood) is the jazz freak in the band and I like some of the stuff but most of it leaves me a little bit cold. Mingus to me was much more about blues and gospel. It was this album called The Town Hall Concert and I sat there and I saw pictures and images in my head and it really freaked me out because I'd never had that before and it changed the way I thought about music forever. Mingus does things with the notes he adds to a melody and stuff that makes things incredibly tense and upsetting, somehow you're hearing the things you've been waiting to hear your whole life, like when I first heard Joy Division, that sense of incredible tension and so much stuff going on behind the music. Here's a person who just lives for his music and that's it. The song Freedom, when I hear it sounds like something for the people who row Roman ships, the ones where they beat the drums. That's the kind of music I wanted to make."

Kurt: "On 'The National Anthem', there's a horn section that comes in and does a sort of free jazz, Ornette Coleman thing. Was it hard to find these guys? Or do you just kinda go, 'Blow over the top of this'?"

Thom: "The running joke when we were in the studios was, 'Just blow. Just blow, just blow, just blow.'"

Kurt: "Did they know what you meant? Clearly they got it."

Thom: "Apparently that's what jazz people say. So they did, yeah. The reference point was this tonal concept by [Charles] Mingus. I think most horn players are Mingus freaks. I think we're going to go see Mingus' Big Band tonight, actually."

Charlie Mingus changed the way I heard everything forever. Especially "Freedom" from The Captive State (on Blue Note). It's what I thought rock music was... It was like hearing voices from beyond. The horns hit all the hidden notes you'd forgotten about. Like the first time I heard Sonic Youth.

Greenwood has plenty to say about the recording of the album but points to some of the influences they took into the studio with them. While Yorke was going through the entire Warp records back catalogue, Greenwood and others were listening to Miles Davis (he points to Bitches Brew specifically) and 'a lot' of Charlie Mingus. It's not a great leap to line up the divergent influences and see their handiwork in the new album. From the more immediate (the synth pulsing of "Idioteque" and the jazz section from hell cacophony of "The National Anthem") to the more indirect (the open structure of "Treefingers" and the oddly comforting percussion of "Kid A") Greenwood puts it succinctly: "The album as a whole is a distillation of our favorite records. It basically a band copying styles of music they can't really play. We took bits from lots of other records that other people really didn't notice as well. I mentioned Bitches Brew and it was the drumming and the electric piano that was most exciting to us on that album. We love all these records but we can't really play them, so we get these songs instead."

Jonny: "I guess that, well, we realised that we couldn't play jazz. You know, we've always been a band of great ambition with limited playing abilities. So the final product you get to when you work under those expressive parameters, with those creative concepts, is something I quite like. In that sense, our main inspiration has been Miles Davis and Bitches Brew, how he and his band are capable of filling up the recording with sound from beginning to end... oh god! Now that felt sort of awkward... if a Miles Davis fan hears me talk about him that way he might get really mad at me. He'd be entitled to really. Don't get me wrong, I have too much respect for Miles Davis. None of us plays trumpet or sax very well, we're definitely not skilled instrumentalists. What we take from these records are things that other people may overlook, maybe things they don't feel that passionate about. Like the chaos in those records which is fantastic... an amazing thing. And with Charles Mingus it's utter chaos all the same, the things happening in their music and the way they happen... This kind of music that's supposed to be, somehow classical, calmed... I don't know, when you're younger, you grow up picturing the image of big bands like Glenn Miller's, and when you listen to Mingus he makes you change your perception of jazz. So jazz is a grand thing, but we're not trying to play jazz in these songs [my question refers to 'The National Anthem' and 'Life In A Glasshouse basically] but if we were we'd call 'real' musicians to help us out."