Radiohead have had a spy in their midst for years. As his excellent new book, How to Disappear: A Portrait of Radiohead, reveals, bassist Colin Greenwood has been snapping candid, lovely photographs of his bandmates since the early 2000s — in the studio, in dressing rooms, and even, somehow, onstage during the middle of their concerts.
In the new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now, Greenwood — who just finished a tour playing bass with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds — talks about his book, looks back at highlights of his years in the band, and much more. He also makes it clear that he’d like to tour again with Radiohead, who haven’t played in public since 2018 — but isn’t sure if and when that will happen.
At book signings, he says, young fans keep asking, “When we’re going to play again, if we’re going to play again, whatever. I just think that it’s a really good reason to play, is to play for people who love your music, really. It sounds really obvious, but Nick Cave talks about it a lot, about serving your audience and your fans and people who love what you do.” But will it happen? ”I mean, it’s a collective decision…. I can’t speak for other people because that’s not fair on them. So you know, so we’ll just have to wait and see.”
To hear the whole interview, go here for the podcast provider of your choice, listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or just press play above. Some additional highlights follow.
Greenwood offers the most detailed account yet of Radiohead’s private reunion earlier this year. “It was just basically to check in with each other, I suppose, because we hadn’t done it for so long,” he says. “I guess it was also because I think maybe Thom and Jonny were going off to do some stuff [with the Smile]…. It was something we could all do cause we were all around that time. It was just really nice just to run through stuff… We ran through, like, The Bends. Kid A stuff. We ran through loads of stuff. We played for a day, maybe two. We had another two days booked as well, and then we decided to knock it on the head, not because it was bad, but because it was like, well, my brother said we could do this for like another week or so, and we could go out on tour if we wanted to. Not that we’re going to. But it would be fine. So, yeah, so we thought, well, rather than just like going around and around it again, we just thought, well, that’s good. We know we can do that. That’s fun. We enjoy being with each other. So let’s leave on a high.”
Greenwoods’ mother may well be Radiohead’s most incisive critic. “My favorite thing, she used to call our music ‘bompity bomp music,’” he says. “And then when we started doing more electronic stuff, she used to call it ‘blippity blop.’ That’s actually quite an accurate description of the creative arc of Radiohead — from bompity bomp to blippity blop. But she sort of missed out on the nuances and the fusion of traditional music with electronic sounds. I wonder what she’d call that, bompity blop or something. She was actually very supportive in her own way. She gave me the money to buy my first guitar. Bless her.”
If forced, he’d pick Kid A over OK Computer. “I really like Kid A,” he says, “and at this time of year, for some reason, it speaks to me as a sort of wintry record. Maybe it’s the artwork.”
He says “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” came together as spontaneously as “Get Back” does in the Beatles documentary. “That’s sort of coming in on a morning,” he says, “and then there’s like a backbeat and then some chords, and it all just sort of falls into place in a really nice way.”
He’s fascinated by the idea that Bob Dylan saw him play with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in Paris recently — at least if you believe Dylan’s tweet. ”Yeah, that is amazing,” he says. “He’s seen me make a mistake in one song. That’s all I can think about. But I must stop going on about it because it sounds really silly and and obsessive. But yeah, just think about that. Isn’t that incredible that Bob Dylan was a show that I played at? Maybe.”
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