Jonny Greenwood |
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 Jonny Greenwood in 2004 |
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| Birth name | Jonathan Richard Guy Greenwood |
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| Born | (1971-11-05) 5 November 1971 (age 52)
Oxford, England |
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| Genres | Alternative rock, electronica, art rock, experimental rock, classical |
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| Occupation(s) | Musician, composer |
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| Instrument(s) | Guitar, keyboards, ondes Martenot |
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| Years active | 1985–present |
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| Labels | XL, TBD, Sanctuary, Nonesuch |
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| Website | www.radiohead.com |
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Musical artist
Jonathan Richard Guy "Jonny" Greenwood (born 5 November 1971) is an English musician and composer best known as a member of the rock band Radiohead. Beyond his primary roles as Radiohead's lead guitarist and keyboardist, Greenwood is a multi-instrumentalist and also plays viola, harmonica, glockenspiel, ondes Martenot, banjo and drums, and works with computer-generated sounds and sampling; he is also a computer programmer and writes music software used by Radiohead. Noted for his aggressive playing style,[1] Greenwood is consistently named as one of the greatest guitarists of all time.[a]
Greenwood composed the soundtracks for the films Bodysong (2003), There Will Be Blood (2007), Norwegian Wood (2010), We Need To Talk About Kevin (2011), The Master (2012) and Inherent Vice (2014), and serves as composer-in-residence for the BBC Concert Orchestra. He is the younger brother of Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood.
Career
Radiohead
Greenwood is the only member of Radiohead to have been classically trained on any instrument, and the only band member without a university degree; he was three weeks into a degree in music and psychology at Oxford Brookes University when Radiohead, then known as On a Friday, signed a recording contract with EMI in 1991, and left soon after. Greenwood stated that hearing Krzysztof Penderecki during that time had a significant influence on his perception of modern classical music.[10]
Greenwood's influence on Radiohead's recording and writing can be heard in many songs, as he usually takes the traditional lead guitarist role. In the 1990s, Greenwood wore an arm brace due to a repetitive strain injury attributed to his aggressive playing, saying "it's like taping up your fingers before a boxing match."[11]
Greenwood is often credited as the second major influence on songwriting in Radiohead, next to Thom Yorke. He wrote the music for the closing track of OK Computer, ("The Tourist"), and the intro, chorus and outro sections of the song "Subterranean Homesick Alien" from the OK Computer album, as well as the final section of "Paranoid Android". According to Yorke, the track "Just" from The Bends was "a competition by me and Jonny to get as many chords as possible into a song". An example of Greenwood's versatility is his use of the ondes Martenot, which is featured on songs such as "The National Anthem" and "How to Disappear Completely" from the album Kid A, and "Pyramid Song" from the album Amnesiac. The song "Where I End and You Begin" from Hail to the Thief, which also features the instrument, was dedicated to the memory of Jeanne Loriod, a pioneer of the Marenot. Greenwood is interviewed by Suzanne Binet-Audet about his affection for the instrument and briefly plays it in the 2012 documentary film Wavemakers.[12]
Greenwood and Yorke also collaborated on the song "Arpeggi" which is a piece in a classical style centred around arpeggios for voice, ondes, and orchestra. It was performed with the London Sinfonietta and Arab Orchestra of Nazareth at the Ether Festival in March 2005;[13] the song would later be adapted for the full band to play in 2006, rearranged for guitar. A studio version (closer to the full band version than the orchestral version) appeared on the album In Rainbows as "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi".
Greenwood is a computer programmer and builds software used in Radiohead's music. He became interested in programming when he was young, "playing around first with BASIC, then these primitive hex assemblers. Just simple bits of machine code – the closer I got to the bare bones of the computer, the more exciting I found it." At the suggestion of Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, Greenwood began using the music programing language Max, and said: "I got to reconnect properly with computers ... I didn't have to use someone else's idea of what a delay, or a reverb, or a sequencer should do, or should sound like – I could start from the ground, and think in terms of sound and maths. It was like coming off the rails."[14] Greenwood wrote the software Radiohead used to sample their playing for their eighth album, The King of Limbs (2011).[15]
Solo and orchestral work
In 2003, Greenwood released his first solo work, Bodysong, the soundtrack for the movie of the same title directed by Simon Pummell and produced by Janine Marmot, featuring his brother and Radiohead bandmate Colin on bass. In March 2004, Greenwood's first work for orchestra, smear, received its premiere, performed by the London Sinfonietta. In May he was appointed composer-in-residence to the BBC Concert Orchestra, for whom he wrote "Popcorn Superhet Receiver" (2005), which won the Radio 3 Listeners' Award at the 2006 BBC British Composer Awards.[16] The piece was inspired by radio static and the elaborate, dissonant tone clusters of Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1960). As part of his prize Greenwood received £10,000 from the PRS Foundation towards a commission for a new orchestral work.[17] This would become Doghouse, finished in 2010.
A fan of dub reggae,[18] Greenwood released a compilation in collaboration with Trojan Records, entitled Jonny Greenwood Is the Controller in March 2007. This is the latest in Trojan's Artist Choice Jukebox series, to which DJ Spooky and Don Letts have already contributed.[19] Trojan Records provided Greenwood with its extensive catalogue of songs, of which he chose 17.[20] The title is a play on the first track on the collection, entitled "Dread Are the Controller", by Linval Thompson. The album contains tracks by artists such as Derrick Harriott, Gregory Isaacs, The Heptones and many more.
Greenwood composed the score for the 2007 film, There Will Be Blood, from director Paul Thomas Anderson. The soundtrack contains excerpts from "Popcorn Superhet Receiver". His work as the composer for this film was highly acclaimed by reviewers and earned him an award at the Critics' Choice Awards. On 21 January 2008, however, the score was declared ineligible for an Academy Award nomination under a rule that prohibited "scores diluted by the use of tracked themes or other pre-existing music."[21][22] On 4 February 2008, it was announced that Greenwood had won the trophy for Best Film Score in the Evening Standard British Film Awards for 2007.[23] In its 2009 end-of-decade round-up Rolling Stone magazine named the film the best of the decade and cited Greenwood's score as a major element in its success, "redefining what is possible in film scores".
In 2008, Greenwood wrote the title music for Adam Buxton's pilot sketch show meeBOX,[24] and collaborated with Israeli rock musician Dudu Tasa on Tasa's Hebrew-language single "What a Day".[25]
In February 2010, Greenwood debuted a composition entitled "Doghouse" at the BBC's Maida Vale Studios. In an interview following the performance, Greenwood and conductor Robert Ziegler revealed that the composition would be extrapolated into a score for the upcoming film Norwegian Wood directed by Anh Hung Tran, based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Haruki Murakami. Greenwood described the writing of the piece to the BBC, "I wrote this piece mostly in hotels and dressing rooms while touring with Radiohead. This was more practical than glamorous – lots of time sitting around indoors, lots of instruments about – and aside from picking up a few geographical working titles, I can't think that it had any effect where, on tour, it was written." The premiere of the entire score took place on 19 March 2010.[26]
In 2011, Greenwood composed the score for the film adaptation of Lionel Shriver's novel We Need to Talk About Kevin.[27] In 2012, he composed the score for Paul Thomas Anderson's film The Master.[28]
On 13 March 2012, Greenwood and Krzysztof Penderecki released an album together on the Nonesuch label. It includes Greenwood's "Popcorn Superhet Receiver" and a new string orchestra work, "48 Responses to Polymorphia" (a homage to Penderecki's "Polymorphia" of 1961).[29]
Water was commissioned by the Australian Chamber Orchestra, and is premiered by them on their European, Australian, and US tours in 2014/15. In an interview, Greenwood said: "With Radiohead, it's about arranging and recording songs as well as we can, and every time you hear them back it's gonna be the same, and it's the best you can get it. With orchestral music it's different. You can't pin it down, it's too strange to pin down. You can't commit it to coming out of two speakers and that's all it is. It's a bigger, stranger thing than that."[30]
Musical influences
Greenwood is influenced by jazz and classical music; his favourites include Lee Morgan and Miles Davis. He is a major fan of the Mo' Wax label (onetime home of Blackalicious, DJ Krush, DJ Shadow and Dr. Octagon). Along with other Radiohead band members, he loves singer Scott Walker,[31] Krautrock band Can and Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. Greenwood has stated that his all time favourite piece of music is Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony, a gigantic piece for orchestra that features an ondes Martenot, an instrument he discovered as a teenager through the symphony.[32] According to one of his entries on Radiohead's blog 'Dead Air Space', Greenwood has become a dub reggae aficionado, listening as of late 2005 to little else.
Personal life
In 1995 he married Israeli-born Sharona Katan, a visual artist whose work (credited as Shin Katan) appears on the covers of the Bodysong soundtrack as well as the There Will Be Blood soundtrack. Their first son, Tamir, was born in 2002 and the 2003 Radiohead album Hail to the Thief was dedicated to him. They also have a daughter named Omri, born in 2005, and a second son, named Zohar, who was born in February 2008.[citation needed]
He is red-green colorblind.[citation needed]
He listed his favourite video games on the band's website in 2010, including Ico, Elite and Red Dead Redemption.[33]
Collaborations
For the 1998 film Velvet_Goldmine, Greenwood formed Venus in Furs with Radiohead's Thom Yorke, Suede's Bernard_Butler, and Roxy Music's Andy_Mackay and recorded covers of the Roxy Music songs "2HB", "Ladytron" and "Bitter-Sweet". Greenwood played harmonica the tracks "Platform Blues" and "Billie" on Pavement's final LP, Terror Twilight (1999), produced by Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich. Greenwood appears on the track "Hiroshima" from the Frantic album.
For the film Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Greenwood played lead guitar in The Weird Sisters with Radiohead drummer Phil Selway, former Pulp members Jarvis Cocker and Steve Mackey, electronica artist Jason Buckle and Add N to (X) member Steve Claydon. They performed three tracks composed by Cocker. Along with Thom Yorke, Jonny contributed to MF DOOM's 2011 track "Retarded Fren". Greenwood played harmonica on Blind Mr. Jones's Crazy Jazz EP.
