Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood has been talking about the differing guitar styles of two musicians whose styles he knows inside out – frontman Thom Yorke and his brother Jonny Greenwood.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone’s Brian Hiatt, the bassist has compared their two contrasting styles and has given Yorke – not generally noted as a guitarist per se – a seriously large compliment. “(Thom) takes it very seriously,” he said. “He's probably, for my money, one of the finest guitarists in the world.
“He's one of the best guitarists I know, like rhythm guitarists, because of the way he plays the guitar. The way he rolls with his shoulders when he plays, it's sort of (the guitar) part of his body. He's just incredibly physically connected, and always (has) been.”
Hiatt mentions that Jonny Greenwood, on the other hand, has a more “cerebral” approach to guitar, to which the bassist replies, “Yeah, I agree. They're very different, how they work, which is probably why they complement each other so well.”
Colin – currently playing as part of Nick Cave and Bad Seeds - then let slip a family secret: “(Jonny's) first record was Cool For Cats by Squeeze on pink vinyl that my mother threw away because she thought it was obscene,” he recalls when reflecting on how his brother developed his own playing style. “But he listened to anything, and I think he learned guitar by (listening to) the Pixies and Lou Reed's album New York.”
“Then he was in the Thames Vale Youth Orchestra playing the viola, which I always forget because I don't know how many times he went. So you know, he's one of these people who can just pick anything up and make something cool out of it.”
In the interview Greenwood also gave us an insight into how their mother regarded her sons’ music: “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.”
And as for the $64 million dollar of when we might expect some new Radiohead activity, Greenwood wouldn’t be drawn: “Genuinely, I've been so focused on Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds for the last two months. I don't know what plans are afoot in Radiohead land.”
