Jonny Greenwood
Jonny Greenwood
Jonathan Richard Guy "Jonny" Greenwoodis an English musician and composer best known as the lead guitarist and keyboardist of the alternative rock band Radiohead. A multi-instrumentalist, Greenwood also plays instruments including the bass guitar, piano, viola, and drums, and is a prominent player of the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument. He works with electronic techniques such as programming, sampling and looping, and writes music software used by Radiohead. He has been named one of the greatest guitarists of all...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth5 November 1971
It's no longer unusual for real avant-garde composers to have been in a band, and for bands to be interested in a wide range of music. Look at how artists like Aphex Twin are influenced by Nancarrow and Stockhausen.
It's kind of not about the quality of the art, as much as this is what I love doing and I'd have a worse time doing anything else. That's kind of as far as I think in terms of philosophy.
I've seen 13, 14-year-olds opening CDs as though they're records from the 1920s, going 'Look at this - there's a little book!'... That makes me think the format has probably had its day.
If I think about music in the future, I imagine it often as not involving electricity, in some dystopian, post-apocalyptic future. And that's what I get from Penderecki: people making music by taking these instruments out of boxes and playing them. That's a very bizarre and modern thing.
Right now my mind is on the people who stole our instruments,and, specifically, the person with my guitar, which will no doubt end its days having Green Day songs worked out on it. A better fate was deserved- and while the reverence given to guitars annoys me, I shall miss it.
There's the soundtrack to The French Connection II'I think It's my favorite soundtrack. It hasn't been released. I actually had to go and get the film and just make a recording of it to get the music.
If I'm on a train, with headphones, MP3s are great. At home, I prefer CD or vinyl, partly because they sound a little better in a quiet room and partly because they're finite in length and separate things, unlike the endless days and days of music stored on my laptop.
I think rhythms can be more satisfying in the short term - like, more immediately. It can be kind of obsessively and compulsively rewarding.
When I saw the Penderecki concert in London, in '92 or '93, I thought there were speakers in the room. It was just strings. But I could hear these kind of buzzings and rumblings, and I was like, 'Where is this all coming from?' And that was just better, to my ears. Odder, stranger, more magical.
I'm quite into listening to music and not doing anything else.
I was happy using cassettes when I was fifteen, but I'm sure they were sneered at in their day by audiophiles.
Everything I do feels like It's going to end up being in Radiohead.
Every American college student goes to college with a hard drive. They take their laptop. There's not a CD player in sight.
I suppose all of us - we have the old Protestant work ethic of feeling guilty when you're not working, and getting a buzz from feeling like you're really busy. That's the reason to sort of carry on.