The one instrument Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood wishes he could play
When Radiohead were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by David Byrne in 2019, the former Talking Heads frontman revealed he was a “huge fan” of the British band, describing their album, A Moon Shaped Pool, as “very cinematic, like a movie in your head”. Indeed, the dramatic orchestral presence of the record is befitting of an epic movie or a kaleidoscopic dreamscape.
It would appear that Radiohead’s later albums perhaps manifested their cinematic presence as a by-product of Jonny Greenwood’s increased involvement with film scores. Where frontman Thom Yorke made his film score debut with 2018’s Suspiria, Greenwood secured his first notch on the cinematic bedpost back in 2003 with his soundtrack for the BAFTA-winning documentary Bodysong.
Following these early embers of solo acclaim, Greenwood’s big solo break came in 2007, when he scored There Will Be Blood. The movie, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson and starring Daniel Day-Lewis, was a monumental success and threw Greenwood under the spotlight as a heavyweight in the film score ring.
“My reaction when Paul asked me was excitement,” Greenwood told NPR, recalling the moment Paul Thomas Anderson asked him to score There Will Be Blood. “I thought, ‘This is going to be a bit like being in a band with somebody — except I’m in a band with Paul and the people who are making this film.'”
Responding to praise for his virtuosity as a multi-instrumentalist in the same interview, Greenwood noted that when Radiohead first formed at Abingdon School in Oxfordshire in the mid-1980s, he pretended to play the keyboard.
“Thom [Yorke]’s band had a keyboard player — [whom] I think they didn’t get on with because he played his keyboard so loud,” he said. “And so when I got the chance to play with them, the first thing I did was make sure my keyboard was turned off … I must have done months of rehearsals with them with this keyboard, and they didn’t know that I’d already turned it off.”
Greenwood continued, explaining that Yorke didn’t initially realise he wasn’t playing. “They made quite a racket, quite a noise,” he said. “It was all guitars and distortion — and so I would pretend to play for weeks on end, and Thom would say, ‘I can’t quite hear what you’re doing, but I think you’re adding a really interesting texture because I can tell when you’re not playing.’ And I’m thinking, ‘No, you can’t because I’m really not playing.’ And I’d go home in the evening and work out how to actually play chords, and cautiously over the next few months, I would start turning this keyboard up. And that’s how I started in with Radiohead.”
Over the past three decades, Greenwood has become competent on guitars, keyboards, synthesisers, violas, harmonicas, recorders, banjos, glockenspiels and harps. He revealed in a 2014 interview with The Quietus that he enjoys “struggling with instruments I can’t really play”.
In a 2019 interview feature for The Times, Greenwood was asked whether there were any instruments he regrets not picking up yet. “Easy. The cello,” Greenwood replied. “I struggled for years with the viola — and am still struggling — but have recently started arseing around on an old, beaten-up cello. It feels much more natural to hold and so much easier to make a nice sound on — I only wish I had moved on to it when I was a kid.”
“I’m always astounded to see someone play the violin without apparent effort or discomfort,” he continued. “It’s a shame because I can play some of the Bach Cello Suites on my viola, only with every single note a tiny bit out of tune. It’s like being able to drive but colliding with every car you pass — mountingly painful the longer I play.”
Listen to ‘Open Spaces’, one of Jonny Greenwood’s arresting orchestral compositions from There Will Be Blood, below.
