The guitarist Thom Yorke said could play anything: “Absolute musical child prodigy”
The extent of their hiatus still stands ambiguous, but with side-project The Smile already three albums in, hopes for the next Radiohead album are looking increasingly remote. Committed fans may not care, turned off by frontman Thom Yorke‘s queasy silence on the ongoing Gaza genocide despite a public profile and music career defined by political activism, and his on-stage tantrum at the sight of a Palestine flag in Melbourne last year hammering the final nail in the coffin of the majority of his fans’ estimation of him.
Still, we can’t pretend that the Oxfordshire art-rock outfit hasn’t delivered some of the most sublime and innovative contributions to popular music since The Beatles. Snapped up by the early 1990s’ A and R frenzy during the commercial heights of UK indie, Radiohead went from grunge-lite with debut album Pablo Honey, before entirely bucking the Britpop trend with sophomore album The Bends‘ introspective widescreen rock followed by tapping into millennial anxiety three years ahead of Y2K with their haunting opus OK Computer.
In a pop climate of Starsailor and Limp Bizkit, 2000’s Kid A set an astonishing standard from then on, dropping minor masterstrokes of experimental excursions into electronica, jazz, and the avant-garde that arguably stand as the 21st century’s finest albums.
It’s hard to imagine Radiohead reaching quite the dynamic peak without guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Jonny Greenwood. Ingeniously translating Yorke’s compositions with his gift for creative arrangements, Greenwood is capable of thunderous riffs and solos as he is spectral whines from the ondes Martenot.
Such musical dexterity has seen him forge a hugely successful second career in film soundtracks, scoring many of Paul Thomas Anderson‘s most acclaimed works including There Will Be Blood, The Master, and Phantom Thread, as well as composing for the London Contemporary Orchestra.
Yorke has been open about Greenwood’s musical chops, as well as the rest of the band as students of the private Abingdon School, and how the combined talents spurred him to apply a bit more discipline to their jam sessions. “…I’d been in other bands and done bits and bobs, but when I first met those guys, they were more serious—especially Jonny, who was younger, but he was this absolute musical child prodigy,” Yorke told Interview in 2013. “He could pick up anything and play it straight off. He was in my brother’s band at the time”.
It’s not hyperbolic to slap Greenwood with the ‘prodigy’ tag. Reportedly spending as much time as possible in Abindon’s Music Department as a schoolboy, Greenwood became proficient enough to play the viola with the Thames Vale youth orchestra as a teen and was harmonising Bach chorales for his music A-Levels. An aptitude for technology was apparent early on too, and later became essential to his sampling and looping contributions, making simple computer games with BASIC and other machine programming codes.
Perhaps the best insight into Greenwood’s inventive musical brain comes from the strange inspiration he highlighted for his first work with the BBC Concert Orchestra in 2005, crediting his childhood family car’s engine noise evoking the sounds of Simon & Garfunkel and Mozart’s horn concertos if he concentrated hard enough. Such gifts for reduced listening and aural reach deep within the strangest places no doubt shine all over Radiohead’s best work.
