Jonathan Richard Guy "Jonny" Greenwood 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, Greenwood is
consistently named as one of the greatest guitarists of all time.
Greenwood composed the soundtracks for the films Bodysong, There Will Be Blood,
Norwegian Wood, We Need To Talk About Kevin, The Master and Inherent Vice, 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. 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."
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,, 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 Martenot. Greenwood is interviewed by Suzanne Binet-Audet about
his affection for the instrument and briefly plays it in the 2012 documentary
film Wavemakers. 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; the song
would later be adapted for the full band to play in 2006, rearranged for guitar.
A studio 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." Greenwood wrote the software Radiohead
used to sample their playing for their eighth album, The King of Limbs.
= 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", which won the Radio
3 Listeners' Award at the 2006 BBC British Composer Awards. The piece was
inspired by radio static and the elaborate, dissonant tone clusters of
Krzysztof Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. As part of his
prize Greenwood received £10,000 from the PRS Foundation towards a commission
for a new orchestral work. This would become Doghouse, finished in 2010.
A fan of dub reggae, 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. Trojan Records provided Greenwood with
its extensive catalogue of songs, of which he chose 17. 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 by
director Paul Thomas Anderson. The soundtrack contains excerpts from
"Popcorn Superhet Receiver", making it ineligible for an Academy Award
nomination, which prohibits "scores diluted by the use of tracked themes or
other pre-existing music." The soundtrack won an award at the Critics'
Choice Awards and the Best Film Score trophy in the Evening Standard British
Film Awards for 2007. 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, and collaborated with Israeli
rock musician Dudu Tasa on Tasa's Hebrew-language single "What a Day".
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.
In 2011, Greenwood composed the score for the film adaptation of Lionel
Shriver's novel We Need to Talk About Kevin. In 2012, he composed the score
for Paul Thomas Anderson's film The Master.
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".
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." In 2014, Greenwood composed the score
for Anderson's film Inherent Vice. In Pitchfork's review, the author wrote:
"It's exciting to hear Greenwood stretch into new styles, and "Adrian Prussia" is
incredible, a crunching meeting point between digital static and strident
violins." In 2015, Greenwood recorded an album
with Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur and a group of Indian musicians at the
15th-century Mehrangarh Fort in the Indian state of Rajasthan. The sessions
and Greenwood's 2015 India tour were filmed by Anderson for his documentary
Junun. The film premièred at the 2015 New York Film Festival.
Musical influences Jonny Greenwood is influenced by music
from many genres, including jazz, classical rock, reggae, hip-hop, and
electronic music. His jazz favourites include Lee Morgan and Miles Davis. He
is a major fan of the Mo' Wax label. Along with other Radiohead band members,
he loves singer Scott Walker, Krautrock band Can, American band Sonic Youth, and
Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki. Greenwood has also stated that "no
guitarist inspired me more than John McGeoch" of Magazine, after seeing their
reunion show. 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. According to one of his entries on Radiohead's blog 'Dead
Air Space', Greenwood has become a dub reggae aficionado.
Legacy Greenwood has inspired many with his
guitar playing and style. He is also known for his aggressive guitar playing
style. Guitarists such as Russell Lissack of the English rock band Bloc
Party and many others cite Greenwood as an influence. Greenwood was also ranked
number 48 in Rolling Stone magazine's "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time".
When Rolling Stone Magazine updated their list in November 2011, Greenwood's
rank had remained at 48. Personal life
In 1995 he married Israeli-born Sharona Katan, a visual artist whose work
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. He is red-green colorblind.
He listed his favourite video games on the band's website in 2010, including
Ico, Elite and Red Dead Redemption. 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, 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 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.
Soundtracks 2003 – Bodysong
2007 – There Will Be Blood 2010 – Norwegian Wood
2011 – We Need To Talk About Kevin 2012 – The Master
2014 – Inherent Vice Concert works
2004 - smear for 2 ondes Martenots and chamber ensemble of nine players
2004 - Piano for Children for piano and orchestra
2005 - Popcorn Superhet Receiver for string orchestra
2007 - There Will Be Blood live film version
2010 - Doghouse for string trio and orchestra
2011 - Suite from 'Noruwei no Mori' for orchestra
2011 - 48 Responses to Polymorphia for 48 solo strings, all doubling optional
pacay bean shakers 2012 - Suite from 'There Will Be Blood'
for string orchestra 2014 - Water for two flutes, upright
piano, chamber organ, two tanpura & string orchestra
Notes References
External links Radiohead.com: Official band website
"Radiohead’s Runaway Guitarist," New York Times Magazine, 9 March 2012
StringsReunited.com : A website by Plank, the guitar technician for
Radiohead Faber Music Ltd : Jonny's composer page
at his publishers, Faber Music Ltd