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Self-confessed geek: Jonny Greenwood would really rather spend an evening at the Royal Festival Hall than at a sweaty rock gig

Film hit: Dillon Freasier and Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood

Victory: Greenwood with his Evening Standard award

Musical chemistry: Greenwood and Thom Yorke give Radiohead their eccentric edge

Look here too

• Review: There Will Be Blood
• OK consumer, make offer for Radiohead album

Jonny Greenwood, lead guitarist with the UK's most successful rock band, Radiohead, is an unassuming kind of bloke. He doesn't give interviews very often and has a reputation for extreme shyness, partly because of the way he hides his face behind that curtain of dense black hair on-stage.

This week, though, he was forced to step out of the shadows to receive the Evening Standard's Best Film Score Award for the strikingly beautiful music that he composed for the magnificent There Will Be Blood.

The film is out today, following extraordinary critical acclaim, a clutch of awards already, and anticipation of further success at the Baftas on Sunday and the Oscars later in the month.

It's hard to imagine Paul Thomas Anderson's masterly tale of oil prospecting in 19th-century California without Greenwood's haunting soundtrack, a vital ingredient in the film's remarkable atmosphere of underlying unease.

Still, the idea of writing the soundtrack for such a major film - starring Daniel Day-Lewis as the maniacal prospector Daniel Plainview - was a "hugely daunting one", and Greenwood says that he got seriously cold feet.

"Whenever I thought about all the hundreds of people who'd already been working on the film, and then it was finished, and it was up to me to do the music ...." He gulps, even now. "At one point I tried to wriggle out of it. But Paul Thomas Anderson is this amazingly enthusiastic person and he had this blind assurance that I was going to do the right thing.

"So I kind of hid by throwing lots of music at him. In the end he had two hours to plough through, and, you know, edit out all the ones with banjos or the bits with the harmonium. He kept saying 'I want more stuff like this - and lose the banjos'. Which is always good advice."

The result is an intense 40 minutes of at times spooky and deeply uncomfortable, at others rather joyful, orchestral composition. It's a weird mix of horror-movie eeriness and full-blooded neo-romantic strings. At the centre of this seemingly orthodox period movie lies a black heart, revealed in cataclysmic violence at the end; mistrust, greed and hatred course through it like an underground stream.

"When people hear strings in a film, they find it familiar and comforting. When it's not - like this - it can be an enjoyable confusion," Jonny says. "When I watched the film, what I saw most was that implied malice. People are sort of being polite to each other, but there's this real violence not far beneath the surface. So I started to think about music where something is kind of wrong. It's still conventional music in a way but some of the quartets, for example, have got little mistakes in them, or awkward pauses. On one track the players have all detuned their lower string so it's all slack and the harder they bow the higher in pitch it goes."

Day-Lewis's performance, he says, "astounded" him. "You just believe it. What makes it even more impressive is that he's playing such a big character - it's a natural rather than naturalistic performance."

The actor came to the soundtrack recording in Abbey Road, with the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Robert Ziegler, and stayed, a quiet observer, all day.

"I got the impression he didn't just do his filming and leave, but that he and Paul [Thomas Anderson] were talking all the time and very much working together right until the film was finished."

If Day-Lewis is a shoo-in for this year's Best Actor Oscar, Greenwood recently discovered that his soundtrack isn't in the running, despite industry bets on its nomination. It has been disqualified on a technicality (a proportion of the music in There Will Be Blood comes from pre-existing works; the Academy Awards will only consider wholly original soundtracks).

Greenwood is disappointed - but not hugely. "The implication is that it came really close, so that's weird and nice," he says. "It doesn't really bother me because, you know, it's in a film by Paul Thomas Anderson with Daniel Day-Lewis and that's kind of amazing enough already."

The younger of the Greenwood brothers by two years (38-year-old Colin is Radiohead's bassist), Jonny has always been the quiet, mildly unconventional muso, enthused by obscure instruments such as the clavichord or a spooky early electronic keyboard called the Ondes Martenot, which features on their fourth album, Kid A.

Nowadays, he says, he is at his happiest "in a room full of music-stands waiting for the orchestra to start up". He composed his first soundtrack in 2003 for Simon Pummel's film Bodysong. In 2004, he was made the BBC composer-in-residence - adding weight to the claim that he's emerging as one of our finest modern classical composers - and the following year premiered his second classical work, Popcorn Superhet Receiver (named after a piece of radio kit). It was this supernatural-sounding experimental string piece that first sparked Anderson's interest.

If last year contained a large element of solo work, this year is all about Radiohead's European and US tour - and an expanding family: Greenwood's wife is about to give birth to their third child when we meet.

The band don't tour endlessly and don't much relish the prospect. Last year they commissioned a report into the CO2 emissions generated by a worldwide tour, and came to the conclusion that car-pooling - increasing the number of people per vehicle travelling to each gig from 2.2 to three - could reduce total emissions by more than 20 per cent.

"But there are other things we can do, like sending all the gear over to the US by boat," says Greenwood. "You don't want to do so much that it ends up a rubbish show, or that we just don't travel anywhere. We don't want to be seen as standard-bearers but we'll do the obvious things."

Yet Radiohead don't do the obvious very often. Last year, of course, they sent shockwaves through the traditional record industry by offering their latest album, In Rainbows, as a download from their own website, and asking fans to pay what they thought the music was worth, or to take it for free. Their contract with EMI - a company now in near meltdown - ended in 2004, and they have since signed in the UK to the Beggars Banquet offshoot XL Recordings.

"We feel kind of detached from the EMI thing, though it's sad to see people we were friendly with lose their jobs," says Greenwood. "The aim with In Rainbows was simple: we wanted everyone to hear the album more or less at the same time. That it would be arriving on everyone's desktops on the same morning. I really enjoy reading reviews of films that I've already seen, to see what someone else made of them. And we knew that the reviews of this album would be out after everyone had heard it. But we also thought people would download it who weren't sure whether they liked us or not, and that was interesting too."

The average paid for Radiohead's seventh album turned out to be less than £4. But there were still plenty of fans prepared to pay £40 for a lavish box-set version-too, and earlier this year, the conventional CD release went straight to number one in both the UK and the US.

Since emerging in the early Nineties, the band remains one of the most popular and original around. Alongside singer Thom Yorke, Greenwood is widely credited with giving Radiohead its characteristically eccentric edge. He admits to "that slightly geeky ability to play lots of instruments, but none of them really well" - yet Greenwood always features on those vaguely scholarly lists of best guitarists.

"Well, the guitar is my best instrument. But even then, in the wrong band, you'd hear that that's all I can do - play like I do in Radiohead. We're all a bit like that. It's not like, in between sets, we effortlessly slide into some jazz or something. We really can't do that. Some bands can play in a lots of styles, but we can't. We're really at the limit of what we can do as musicians the whole time."

As well as their digital release of In Rainbows, Radiohead made a webcast, Scotch Mist, an hour-long DIY film featuring 10 tracks from the album, which was premiered over the net at midnight on New Year's Eve.

"The webcasts were all done with video cameras bought off eBay," says Greenwood. "Nigel [Godrich, the band's producer] kind of learned how a TV studio worked and cobbled one together. We got that atmosphere we get when we're recording, of there being no adults present. It was fun and unprofessional in a good way, which is how it feels when we're making a record."

If he's being absolutely honest, however, Greenwood would rather spend an evening at the Royal Festival Hall than at a sweaty rock gig.

He took viola lessons as a child, and credits a music teacher at Abingdon School - the boys' public school where the members of Radiohead met and formed their first band in the mid-1980s - with encouraging an early taste for classical music, but has no formal training beyond that. Yet: "The single best concert of my life was seeing Pierre-Laurent Aimard play Messiaen at the Barbican, about five years ago now."

His other great love is the Polish composer Penderecki, whose work captivated him as a child. "I remember seeing the viola concerto and spending the whole time looking for the speakers and wondering how these magical strange warm sounds were coming out of so few instruments. That was the start of it all really."

Surprisingly, he has yet to see There Will Be Blood on the big screen, complete with his own music, and will wait for its release at his local cinema in Oxford.

Greenwood is rarely bothered by fans when he's out. "No one recognises me. It's good. It's like Radiohead is this famous brand but we're all anonymous. Well, maybe except for Thom. I like walking behind Thom and watching people do that double-take. Otherwise, it feels like working for a company that makes this product that people use and like, but no one really knows who you are."

It's the hair, Jonny. No one can see your face. He laughs. "And I don't like talking about myself much either. All that me, me, me. The end product is all about the music, isn't it? Whether it's a concert or a film, that's what's important in the end."

• The There Will Be Blood soundtrack is out now, on Nonesuch.

 

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