My heroes are James Jamerson and “Duck” Dunn. While that sounds like all of the makings of a rockstar lifestyle, Greenwood, like his bandmates, has always kept a low profile. Much like how I approach the upright bass — with great trepidation. Joe Osborn is my new current hero. I’m also playing loops and samples, stuff we’ve taken from the studio, and I enjoy that. Three weeks later when we got to play in Israel the audience knew the words to all the new songs and it was wonderful." In a piece for the Times Literary Supplement, author and poet Adam Thorpe, a friend of Colin Greenwood, joins the band at La Fabrique recording studio, … That was great fun, but I always prefer working with other people in a band setting. At the time I was really into Ray Brown’s Bass Method [Hal Leonard]; I learned all of the exercises in it, and it opened up all of the chords on the neck for me. When I realized the guitar spots had been taken in our band, my mum got me a black Westone DX Spectrum. So as I said before, if I hear a beat or a song that reminds me of J Dilla, then I’m going to try to play something that I think J Dilla would have played over it that encapsulates what I love about him. Nigel Godrich can tell the complete story of King of Limbs in a succinct paragraph. On the last record I sat with our producer, Nigel Godrich, and I wrote all of my bass lines and recorded them in a series of sessions where I could focus on each individual song. I love soul music, and I felt that like it sounded like an old Motown kind of bass run, so I tried it and it worked. But his place in Radiohead’s music is simply instinctual at this point, as his life in the band is all the 49-year-old has ever known. Collaborating with Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood on his brilliant debut EP ‘Habibi’, this new songwriter creates delicate but soaring songs that prioritise space to give the maximum emotional impact. You should learn your entire fretboard and where all of the notes are, and which ones sound good where, and let that influence your playing. Colin Greenwood said: "We played in Barcelona and the next day the entire performance was up on Napster. Ed and Thom took the guitar spots already, so I picked up the bass and got way into a lot of that post-punk stuff like Joy Division, The Fall, and Magazine. He speaks exclusively to Roisin O'Connor about the record, his musical heritage, and working with Radiohead's Colin Greenwood. How do you typically write your bass parts in sequence with the band? In the interview, author Adam Thorpe, a friend of Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood, joins the group in southern France’s La Fabrique studio. When we first started the band, I wanted to play guitar because I had been taking guitar lessons with Thom when we were 11. It’s rather funny because I was only allowed to have pedals onstage recently, because previously I would stand on them accidentally and press the wrong button and all of a sudden there would be this wild distortion through the massive sound system. I’m also trying to listen very hard to all the different sounds around me, and play to those sounds. And I’ve learned a lot from watching our second drummer Clive and how he practices the basics and fundamentals every single day. (2021/01/21) BBC Radio 4 - Glastonbury Cancellation Interview - Colin Greenwood (Video) 660+ views. For three and a half decades, this is where he’s been so comfortably stationed — his focus rarely leaving the kick pedal of Phil Selway, moving with the rhythm and expertly delivering his bass lines. If I hear some music and I connect it to something else I really like, then I try to play like that thing I’m thinking of. Really, I’m as excited and as intrigued by music as I was the day I started playing. Radiohead have since achieved critical acclaim and have sold over 30 million albums. When they sent the album I was having breakfast and … The Radiohead story began in the mid Eighties at Abingdon School, a “public,” boys-only grammar school located just outside the city of Oxford. How do you dial it in? He’s amazing to watch, especially on guitar. I’ve been teaching myself to read music, and that Jameson book [Standing in the Shadows of Motown, Hal Leonard] really helps me with that. image caption Radiohead (L-R): Colin Greenwood, Jonny Greenwood, Thom Yorke, Phil Selway, Ed O'Brien Few bands receive rave reviews 23 years into their career - … The idea that the bass could be used to make such beautiful lines and be such a big part of music astonished me. I’m in a band with a lot of other members doing a lot of things at once, so it could get muddled if we go on and step on each other’s toes here and there. Thom is a genius at finding melodies with hooks, and he came up with some for this song. I love how he plays to the song, and has his own style. Beyond that, you have Jonny Greenwood, Colin’s virtuosic younger brother, who has become a guitar icon in his own right, along with being an acclaimed movie scorer and influential multi-instrumentalist. Which players have influenced your playing the most? That was just my fantasy. Then you have guitarist Ed O’Brien, whose haunting and instantly recognizable guitar playing is matched evenly with his beautiful singing voice. Sometimes I’ll also write when we’re all standing in a room playing together. One of my favorite songs that we’ve written is on our album In Rainbows called “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi.” I had a 1978 Jazz Bass that I love because the neck is narrow and I have really small hands, so it plays beautifully for me. Colin responded that he’d like to take the interview as an opportunity to “let everybody know that's not happening any time soon.” He then laughed and joked, “The bass odyssey—that would be great, wouldn't it?” Listen to the full interview here (with his comments about going solo at the 55:47 mark). Colin mentioned in an interview that he purchased around the time of Radiohead’s record deal in 1991, when Christopher Dean “set up a workshop in the Cotswolds in 1985. There seems to be a point about halfway [through] when band and crowd slip into the same hypnotic spell. “I had a friend in … I don’t think anyone listened to that part and thought about J Dilla, but that’s how I wrote it. Whatever he does he makes me sound better than I have any right to sound. It’s a very welcoming vibe, sharing that space, and that comfort and excitement transmits itself to the audience. You can translate something that you understand that they don’t get, but when they hear it, they translate it as something entirely different. Jonny Greenwood was born on 5 November 1971 in Oxford, England. The beginning of the tour was in Chicago, so I got to go into Lakland’s workshop and explore it. I had an old Toshiba radio cassette player, and I would listen to Joy Division, Otis Redding, Cocteau Twins, Booker T., James Brown, and anything my older sister passed on: Magazine, The Fall, Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive, and I’d play along with everything. I’ve figured out that if I have a smaller, narrower neck, then I can make chord shapes with my hands. The process had a lot of starts and stops, but the two most important times for that record came when we were in our studio in Oxford in the beginning, and Nigel wanted to do a process where we didn’t use computers at all. I came up with different lines and then I found that wonky boom, boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom, and I tried to play it and phrase it in a way that I imagine J Dilla would have done, maybe from his album Ruff Draft [2003] or Donuts [2006]. Pitchfork may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. It was very black. I love the Precision’s midrange growl, and I’ve found that these new basses have that. I suppose the time signatures we use come out quite naturally as how write, without thinking about it. On a Precision Bass I have to fight with them more. I’m trying to have more confidence to move away from the drum position and go check out what’s happening up front. That song was a kind of a leftover from our previous album The King of Limbs. He’s less keen on Jazz Basses because they can hum, so we use my P-Basses. I’d send my ideas to Thom, and then he’d play piano parts on it and send it back to me, and those became the bridge part after the last verse. I’ve come to know his ankles very well after staring so intently at them for so long. That’s a great example of how we work together as a band, because Thom had programmed that drum part initially and placed the bass line where it is, and I learned from that and then wrote the rest of it, including the higher-register part. And now it’s such an honor to share the stage with Clive Deamer, who has always been a hero of mine. It sounds like “Bloom” could have been inspired by upright bass. “15 Step” is another example of you hanging back and then playing a song-altering riff late in the composition. What’s it like playing with Phil as a rhythm section after all of these years? The first track, "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box", is an electronic song built from loops. It’s something he’s become renowned for. He’s tipped me to some nice bass lines when we’re working, usually from his deep love of all things dub and reggae, like slow eighths and offbeat reggae-syncopated lines — that’s his bass style. I honestly don’t have any sort of idea what he’s doing to my bass until I hear [the final product]. The trickiest songs always seem to be the simplest, with lots of space and sustained notes. Later that year, Radiohead toured Europe in a custom-built tent without corporate logos, playing mostly new songs. It can be a lot more distracting live, compared to the studio: You’ve got all these dynamically lit sonic whiz-bangs going off onstage. Greenwood's original transcription for "Arpeggi". Of course, I didn't realize until after I'd hung up with Greenwood that my tape was blank. We’d been working on using loops, and Thom has such a beautiful voice and he had recorded these three singing loops, and it became a sketch more than a song at the time. He’s humble and laconic by nature, but when something enlivens him, he’s quick to articulate his thoughts on the matter with profound certainty and excitement. But I think that stands very true for our instrument. I also have a Ned Steinberger electric upright, and I feel terrible because I can’t play it that well. Along with his younger brother, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, Greenwood attended Abingdon School in Abingdon, England, where he met the future band members. You’re more animated during shows now. Then my brother usually joins in next, and then it all unfolds from there. We love hip-hop, and his work has really inspired us in what we do. So naturally, amongst all of that, Colin’s place as a bass player is to hold all of that frenetic frequency together and use his grooves as rhythmic mile markers that keep the vehicle on track. That’s not my area of expertise. As fate would have it, during the interview my computer crashed as did my tape-recorder. I’m trying to get my writing better and be able to notate my parts. I dip into all of those, and when I’m home I try to play for one to two hours a day. How do you decide when to use your fingers or a pick for a song? Kid A was, in Yorke’s estimation, barely rock at all. A Moon Shaped Pool seemed like it spanned a lot of sessions over that two-year period. And then we had seven days in New York, so I got in touch with Roger to go visit Sadowsky. And rounding it out is now not one but two drummers in Radiohead’s own Phil Selway and stage member Clive Deamer (Portishead, Ronnie Size, Robert Plant), who work together almost as one percussionist, kicking out polyrhythmic waves that are quick to entrance listeners. In a recent interview, he joked about playing Radiohead songs solo if the band get inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Then a year later, we went to this amazing studio [La Fabrique] in the southern region of France, and we went through the previous recordings we’d done in Oxford, and we built upon all of that and finished it. Now my bandmates have finally let me have pedals so long as I promise to be careful [laughs]. I have a Korean student upright bass that I use sometimes on “Pyramid Song,” “You and Whose Army,” and on some of my brother’s music for Bodysong [2003]. Really, I guess I try to find all of the good notes and what feels best to play. You also often take the function of bass beyond its common place as simply the foundation. But luckily for us, Colin is finally stepping out of the shadows. Ad Choices, Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood on Going Solo: “That’s Not Happening Any Time Soon”, “The bass odyssey—that would be great, wouldn't it?”, A daily roundup of the most important stories in music. It worked. Your stage presence seemed to change after the Hail to the Thiefera. Hear Radiohead Talk About 'OK Computer' In A 1997 Interview : All Songs Considered In the summer of 1997, Radiohead's Ed O'Brien and Colin Greenwood … If my playing has evolved at all, it’s because I’ve vaguely kept doing the same thing for a long time. And I’m always blown away with what he does. I’ve explored sampling and programming a lot, and used bits and pieces of the guys’ recordings to make up the soundtrack for a documentary about a fashion designer friend of mine named Dries Van Noten [Dries, 2017]. Your lines on “Identikit” really stand out. It has a slight fuzz on the low end, so it sounds like a very mild distortion, and I plugged it in and started writing that part on it. My brother Johnny is really into reggae music, and he always shows me such cool dub bass parts, and I learn from those and they really inspire me. It would be futile and unnecessary for Greenwood to try to upstage his bandmates in the sonic spectrum of Radiohead. He leads from the front, and he’s very supportive — he wants to get lost in the vibe onstage. And on Radiohead’s latest album, A Moon Shaped Pool [2016], Greenwood doesn’t disappoint in the least. Thom is the main songwriter, and it depends where it goes from there. But you can tell that I’ve been told not to play too much for years [laughs]. When I worked on it with Nigel in France, he had me use my old P-Bass, and it sounded great on that track. I need to take some lessons for that and fully learn how to translate some upright facilities to electric bass. He did something that I wouldn’t have done. Tamino is a Belgian songwriter of Egyptian descent causing a stir in Europe and the Middle East alike. The chord sequence is really straight, so I somewhat over-harmonized it a bit. When you watch a guy like Phil Chen play and talk about his favorite Jamerson bass lines, he goes on about how he would drop down from open notes and how it was so amazing and powerful. TJECP: prob. Somewhere on a vast stage under thousands of colorful lights, rapidly flashing strobes, and bright screens suspended in the air, fixed between two drum risers and concealed within the shadows, stands Colin Greenwood. He was really heavy with the pick—amazing. Greenwood performed a rare solo bass set for a 2013 fashion show. “It might be me just doing bass versions of everything like, ‘Come on, you know this one!’ I’d have to play the bass part to ‘Creep’ five times.”, © 2021 Condé Nast. Colin Greenwood interview 2014. Radiohead plays in a lot of odd time signatures. What is Nigel’s process of capturing your bass tone? –BM, Radiohead,A Moon Shaped Pool [2016, XL Recordings], Basses Touring: 1963, 1972 & 1976 Fender Precision Basses; new additions: Sadowsky NYC Bass, Lakland Donald Duck Dunn Bass; home basses: 1962 Fender Jazz Bass, Sadowsky Metro Bass, South Korean student upright, Ned Steinberger electric upright, Rig Ampeg SVT-VR, Ampeg SVT 810, Ampeg B-15RW, Ashdown ABM 300 EVO II, Ashdown 410H & 115 cabinets, Pedals Lovetone Big Cheese, Tech 21 SansAmp Bass Driver, Colin Greenwood speaks at last about his playing & his role in the highly influential music of Radiohead. I had all of the shapes in my hand for the chord progressions, and it felt amazing. Obviously he’s using compressors and different tools to mix it, but I leave it entirely up to him. The most exciting part about music to me is that someone might hear that and not understand how I hear it. We recorded everything to tape and multi-track. But for such an influential player and idol to his contemporaries and fans, Greenwood has largely remained an enigma, as he doesn’t often do interviews or make public appearances away from the stage. I wanted basses that make it easier for me to play all of those faster, more difficult lines that we have. Interview by Tom Lanham first published in The Sunday Chronicle, San Francisco. Radiohead went on to release nine studio albums that have sold well over 30 million albums worldwide, and this year, will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Welcome to Morning Becomes Eclectic." It doesn’t end up sounding like that, because I’m not him — but that inspires it, and it becomes its own thing. Colin Greenwood was born on June 26, 1969 in Oxford, Oxfordshire, England as Colin Charles Greenwood. The two things I love the most are either sitting with Nigel and writing my bass lines with input from Thom and Jonny, or standing in the room and looking at everyone and working on song arrangements together in real time. What are you working on in your personal practice right now? I swear they haven’t aged a day [laughs]. Frontman Thom Yorke’s stage presence alone equates to at least four performers in itself, as he attracts much of the spotlight with his energetic charisma and constant changing of instruments. I like the idea that you plug into an Ampeg SVT head and it automatically sounds really good. Duration: 2 minutes Credits. Drummer Phil Selway was a year above Thom Yorke and Ed O’Brien, bassist Colin Greenwood a year below them, and Colin’s multi-instrumentalist brother Jonny a year below him. The brooding music of Radiohead is as ethereal as it is emotive, and each of the six stage members plays an equally important role in conveying such deeply impactful songs. And for fingers it's Leroy Hodges [Stax], Joseph “Lucky“ Scott [Curtis Mayfield], and David Hood [Muscle Shoals]. His playing with Portishead, Robert Plant, Roni Size, and Hawkwind is tremendous. I'm sure I missed some good moments so a sequel video may come later. Colin Greenwood: I was where I am right now, sitting down at home and watching the excitement on the old Google News. Colin Greenwood speaks at last about his playing & his role in the highly influential music of Radiohead Somewhere on a vast stage under thousands of colorful lights, rapidly flashing strobes, and bright screens suspended in the air, fixed between two drum risers and concealed within the shadows, stands Colin Greenwood. His luscious dark melodies have drawn comparisons to Jeff Buckley, Tom Waits and Dave Gahan and drawn the attention of superstar musicians such as Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood, who became a fan first, then a collaborator adding bass to Indigo Nights from Tamino’s debut album 'Amir', … So what is a Radiohead show like from your perspective? Featuring an interview of Jonny and Colin Greenwood, by Nic Harcourt … I try to get away from just standing in the back and being “the glue.” Now I want to go over and see what Jonny’s doing. We worked on it for a long time, and then it became one of our new songs. You might not always hear it in our music, but that stuff weighs in heavily on it. When I went out on our previous American tour, I wanted to follow up with both of them. But both are great fun, really. It forces you to have to make decisions in the moment; it’s very much the opposite of having your album stored on a terabyte hard drive. 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