Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood Talks A Moon Shaped Pool, Pixies, Pavement, More in New Interview
Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood was the guest on the latest instalment of the Adam Buxton Podcast. Buxton, a comedian and friend of Greenwood, sat him down for a congenial chat in Lyon on June 1. They discussed “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” for which Greenwood has acquired a four-page script (“It has no dialogue—it’s unbelievable how they took that and turned it into joyful television”), his love of the Pixies and Pavement, Radiohead’s reluctance to hew to industry standards (“In our heads, we still wanna be Sonic Youth”), and whether he’ll revive his original role as the band’s harmonica soloist (“I’m waiting for the moment”). Listen or download it below.
Elsewhere in the chat, Greenwood explained how Radiohead’s ever-changing setlists take shape: “We tend to find that some songs suddenly don’t sound very good to our ears, and then we just leave them off for a while. Like, ‘No Surprises,’ we didn’t play for three or four years, just ’cause we tried it in rehearsal didn’t really feel it. But now it’s back in again. It’s got a swagger in it now.” Asked about using the Kaos Pad in “Everything in Its Right Place,” Greenwood adds, “I get to record Thom, and make him sound like he’s singing backwards. … Throughout the song, I take little snippets and fire it back in a timing best designed to put him off.”
Asked whether the band try to avoid certain pitfalls when recording, Greenwood responds, “I’m conscious on this record that we’ve been occasionally skirting round the edge of something that could be terrible, which is kind of fun. It’s not jazz piano, exactly, but there’s elements of that. Because we like records by people like Alice Coltrane, we’ve got the gall to go, let’s try and make it sound a little bit like that. And we’ve always been like that. The songs on OK Computer, in our swollen heads, were trying to be Miles Davis, frankly. Even though no one plays the trumpet. … You have big ambition and you get as far as you can with it. You enjoy ‘missing.’”
He also discussed his comfort with different instruments. Playing guitar, he says, “is still a clumsy struggle, but piano, I imagine I’m home sometimes, ’cos I remember practising all the songs at home. And so I pretend I am there, and it makes me a bit less nervous that so many people are watching and listening.”
Read our interview with Greenwood and Shye Ben Tzur about the Junun project.
Read our feature, “Internet Explorers: The Curious Case of Radiohead’s Online Fandom.”
Revisit Buxton’s vignette for Radiohead’s “Desert Island Disk”:
A video posted by Radiohead (@radiohead) on May 27, 2016 at 7:00am PDT
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