TThe story of one of the biggest British bands of the last 30 years didn’t start with gyms or rock’n’roll music. It started with five school friends in a rural village hall in Oxfordshire, paying £1.50 per group member to a key keeper, moving rubber keys and plywood chairs to set up their equipment. In less than a decade, they were headlining arenas and festivals.
The sweet story of Radiohead’s rise is written within Why? Missinga new book by bassist Colin Greenwood, older brother of guitarist Jonny and lifelong friend of singer Thom Yorke, guitarist Ed O’Brien and drummer Phil Selway. Obviously a photo history of their work life after 2003, when they started taking the camera with them in the studio and on stage, includes a well-written 10,000 word account of the experiences they shared.
“The point of view is my own,” Greenwood writes of his photographs. “I have spent almost my whole life working on stage or sitting in a recording studio, where I tried to find my friends with my Yashica T4 Super camera, a black plastic analogue box that records light, like our vinyl does. sound.” These moments are also followed by long journeys in which the band members separate, he adds, which he reflects fondly. “When we meet again, it’s like falling into the latest season of a box that has been around for a long time: everything is the same but we’re all a little older … the music.”
I caught up with Greenwood after he was locked in his publisher’s books, just before he toured with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds (and contributed to their new single, God of the wildrepresents Bad Seed Martyn Casey, there’s no reason to be sick). With a gentle, generous spirit, Greenwood is touched when his writing and photography are appreciated, thanking two “old friends” for doing this: the editor Nicholas Pearson, who encouraged him to write a pen, and Charlotte Cotton, one of the three saxophonists when. The group began in the 1980s (when it was called Friday), who became the curator of photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum.
“He helped inspire and guide my interest in the early 1990s,” explains Greenwood, sitting on the corner of the sofa. His performance only took off ten years later because “everything was tight” for the group before that. As she struggled to figure out how to put these images into her words, she asked Nick Cave – an old hand at writing – for advice. “And he said, where do these pictures begin?” You can write down how you feel at the time, not to dwell on your success, but not to start over. What are you? Where are you going? So I started there and everything else followed. “
Radiohead’s 1990s were a whirlwind, as Greenwood continues to hold strong. Signed to EMI shortly after playing, their first single, 1992’s Creep, was in his words “a sugar rush”, its video was played frequently on MTV, a mixture of longing and fury in its lyrics and sound. it was lumped in, unfairly, with other songs of the grunge era.
Their second album, The Bendsarrived in early 1995, a year that arrived in the summer with Blur and Oasis battling for No 1 and Pulp headlining Glastonbury. Filled with incredibly beautiful songs about metal lungs, rubber men and falling skies, it was a little different from what was surrounding Britpop and took a while to take off. “I talked to a lot of songwriters who got it The Bends like advertising, they left it to gather dust on top of their PC platform, and didn’t bother to play it until word of mouth shook them,” Greenwood writes.
Four singles with powerful videos saw them climb the charts: their last since The BendsStreet Spirit (Fade Out), reached No 5, with Jonathan Glazer’s video (later to lead On the floor Skin and Zone of Interest). Backing up the scene are REM in the UK and Alanis Morissette in the US, and their music is being used in Baz Luhrmann’s. Romeo + Juliethe also helped. “It meant that when we released OK Computer [in May 1997] no one wanted to make the mistake of missing us again.”
OK Computer it went five times platinum in the UK and double platinum in the US, allowing the band to purchase and convert the Thameside barn and its buildings into a studio. This house is in the oldest pictures of the book and it appears a few years later: we see a studio board with the names of the songs from 2003. See you to the Thiefand a portrait of artist Stanley Donwood, painting the beautiful album cover in a cowshed.
The tone is mysterious, unpolished, dirty. Here’s Thom’s writing, Ed broke down after a night on the tour bus, the whole group walking on the sandy beach. There are many pictures of Jonny, who never thought about his brother’s actions: pushing a trolley through a quiet American airport, staring at a mixing desk, playing the viola in the shower to make a pleasant noise. He probably has the biggest cheekbones in the world.
This isn’t a complicated friendship, I say – Colin laughs when I mention the Gallaghers. “Well…we’re very English and conservative, really.” Then he speaks with an amazing warmth. “I love working with Jonny, and I love being on stage with him, watching him play and get angry.”
Based on photos such as Gaylord Oscar Herron and Tim Barber’s mid-2000s website Tiny Vices, featuring “small adventures, portraits of friends, road trips recorded with 35mm cameras like mine – beautifully captured by an expert eye”, details of the book . it’s fascinatingly quotidian, but their big ideas come through. It’s hard to miss the faded beauty of the 16th-century mansion on Jane Seymour’s Marlborough estate, the setting for their 2007 documentary. In the Rainbowlots of boxes of gig gear backstage, and a beautiful shot of Thom singing Specter – a song that was submitted but rejected for the 2015 Bond title – in the Air Studios, looking at the band.
The book ends with the shooting of mega-gigs in the US, Canada and Ireland after their last album, in 2016. Moon A Shaped Pool. Greenwood takes pictures on stage when his busses are not needed, but also writes about life on tour, enjoying reggae, beer, books and chess with a background band, and tea and toast while sitting and looking at “deserts and endless mountains … I felt dirty gloriously until the glittering skyscrapers appeared on the horizon, our next port”.
Radiohead toured together in 2018. Thom and Jonny have produced two albums such as Smile and Sons of Kemet singer Tom Skinner; O’Brien and Selway have their own careers; Colin is now busy with Bad Seeds. Does Radiohead exist now? “We had a rehearsal in, I can’t remember, June or May? Let’s say early June. We just went through some things this summer mainly to see how it went and just reconnect. It was great.”
He also talks positively about Ed’s 2020 album, The worldunder the name EOB, and Phil’s “amazing” gig with Portishead’s Adrian Utley a few years ago at Union Chapel. He said: “Everyone has been very supportive of each other’s work. It’s all about adult behavior.
Colin’s pictures – delicate, warm, beautiful – also help his friends, but I wonder what keeps him painting all these years. He thinks for a while, then the theory starts to explode. “Perhaps photography is a way to enjoy and remember moments together – moments shared by all the people on stage and all the people off stage.”
It’s also made him think about the blessings of being in the band all this time – it will be 40 years in 2025 – getting the chance to play with them, and the joy of catching them unawares when they’re about to make a hit or record. “Or when they’re preparing or meditating or yawning or doing whatever, really.” Greenwood smiles. “They still let me in there when the last thing they want is an idiot with a camera.”
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