jonny greenwood: ‘what do I do?
I just generally worry about things’
words by rob young, photograph by michael
clement
// uncut, april 2011
:: thanks Ali @ MT for the scans
____________________
How does the most innovative guitarist of his generation
spend his spare time, then? By writing masterful film scores and trying
to reinvent how music sounds, it seems. Uncut penetrates the studio
lair of Jonny Greenwood and discovers, among other things, what RADIOHEAD
have been up to of late...
He carpulls into the courtyard of a small complex
of offices in the middle of a housing estate on the fringes of Didcot,
an Oxfordshire railway town. There are two doors into this unit, and
we take the right-hand one at first, which leads, like the proverbial
rabbit hole, into a warren of cramped rooms. Here's a drum kit, now
a stack of guitar amps, and finally, as the air becomes muggier, even
slightly fetid, we reach the control room, a windowless space piled
high with effects racks, keyboards, a crumpled black leather sofa
and mixing desk.
This is where Jonny Greenwood has been lurking,
putting the finishing touches this damp January morning to his soundtrack
for Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk
About Kevin, made for BBC Films and starring Tilda Swinton and
John O Reilly. Despite being enthused by the outcome-mainly music
played by Jean Kelly on a seven-string Irish harp.
Greenwood seems eager to get out of this lightless
place, and after manager Bryce Edge hands him a plastic bag of victuals
from the local Waitrose, suggests we retire to the awards-lined lounge
of his management's offices up the left-hand staircase. Looking at
the shiny discs, trophies and statuettes Radiohead have picked up
for OK Computer, Kid A and others over the years, one can't
help but wonder how is work progressing on the follow-up to 2007's
In Rainbows?
"It seems to be slow, but there's lots of
work going on," Greenwood explains. "We've been with each
other an awful lot. It's more about working out which is the right
path to go down for each of the songs and ideas. I don't think people
appreciate what a mess most bands' records are until they're finalised,
the songs are in order and you've left the right ones off and put
the right ones on, and suddenly it has something. We're quite incompetent,
I think, and always have been."
__________
Right now, Greenwood is representing his parallel
side, his composedly career which has run alongside (and fed into)
Radiohead for several years. This month his music-introspective orchestral
stuff — graces the soundtrack of Tran Anh Hung's Norwegian
Wood, a stately, melancholy, period-detail-soaked adaptation
of Haruki Murakami's coming-of-age novel. At just over two hours,
the film's hazy, atmospheric evocation of late-'60s Tokyo is strangely
static, and for much of the first hour the only music that's heard
is a sprinkling of early Can tracks.
"I told him about Can," claims Greenwood,
"because originally he had lots of Doors, and I had the Oliver
Stone heebie-jeebies about 'this is the '60s', Jimi Hendrix and so
on. I thought, Can, they had a Japanese singer, it sort of fits..."
Greenwood's music for films began in 2003 with
Bodysong, a wordless documentary about human motion and activity
with antecedents in films like Koyaanisqatsi.
"Jonny always wanted to go against the grain,
mess with expectations," recalls Bodysong's director,
Simon Pummell. "At one point he was looking into the possibilities
of soundscapes of extinct languages. The way the percussion in the
'Violence' section slowly shifts into a more synchronised, obsessional
beat — and moves from excitement to something oppressive, as
the images escalate from brawling to genocidal brutality — is
an example of the music really telling the story together with the
images."
He moved from art-house to mainstream theatres
with Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood in 2007,
with a harsh catgut accompaniment — "music about the characters
and the landscape", he says — that scaled the movie's epic
peaks and troughs with atonal introspection and wide-horizon scrape.
Partly derived from a standalone commission he'd written for the BBC
Concert Orchestra called 'Popcorn Superhet Receiver', it was a musical
language of understatement.
"It's recurring textures," explains Robert
Ziegler, who conducted the orchestra on both soundtrack recordings.
"Certain clusters that he used, especially in There Will
Be Blood, just nailed the quality of the film. And some of the
new music he wrote, propulsive, rhythmic things, worked out wonderfully.
He got that menace; on one of the most brilliant cues, "Open
Spaces", he played the Ondes Martenot [an eerie-sounding early
electronic instrument], and the whole conception of it was perfect.
Those huge Texas landscapes, and it was just this little cue, but
it lifted the whole film."
I ask Greenwood whether he needs something visual
as a starting point. "Yeah, I enjoy having something to write
the music for that's concrete but at the same time the luxury of it
not being that concrete, more an excuse to write music. My most exciting
days ever are the morning of recording a quartet or an orchestra or
a harp player, and knowing they're coming, and setting up the stands
and mics, and putting music out for them. And then after four hours
it's all over and you've got something. "I've had a real soft
ride. Traditionally film composers are way below the make-up people
in the pecking order. It's not seen as important, unless you find
enthusiastic directors. And I've been lucky three times in a row."
Is that excitement greater than coming out on stage
in front of thousands at a Radiohead gig? "Yeah, I think
it is," he says. "Because you've got weeks of preparation,
and it's just on paper and wondering what is going to happen. These
great musicians are coming in, and you can hand them something that's
fairly lifeless and they can make it very musical. That's been a big
discovery for me, you realise how much they put into it... they can
make things sound musical even if it's just a C major chord. It can
sound far more exciting than you thought it was going to. It's a big
secret, but you don't realise how much input comes from these people.
'I can do this four or five different ways — which way would
you like it?' Or 'You can get this kind of effect from the strings',
and so on." Robert Ziegler is in no doubt of Greenwood's talents
as a composer, citing Polish modernist Penderecki as an antecedent.
"Obviously he's got the same attraction to masses of sound and
big clusters of orchestral sound. As a film composer you have to be
careful not to 'frighten the horses' and the producers..."
There Will Be Blood led directly to Greenwood's
next commission, as Tran Anh Hung used some of it as guide music on
early cuts of Norwegian Wood. "When I saw There
Will Be Blood," says Hung, "I was completely seduced
by Jonny's music. It was a 'new sound' with a profoundness that I
have not heard elsewhere in films. The emotions coming from his music
were so... right, so mysterious and yet so obvious. No doubt for me
that Jonny's music would give a dark, deep beauty that Norwegian Wood
needed." Eventually Greenwood adapted another piece, 'Doghouse',
for the finished film. 'Doghouse' is a triple concerto for violin,
viola and cello, inspired by thoughts of Wally Stott's scores for
Scott Walker songs like "It's Raining Today" and "Rosemary"
languishing in the BBC library.
On a structural level, "as a toddler I was
once shown that the note D on a piano is between the two blacknotes,
and that's D because it is in a kennel, and that piece is written
with this symmetrical pattern that started on that note," Greenwood
explains.
The hands-on business of composing music might
seem diametrically opposed to rock's spontaneity. But since 2000's
Kid A, Radiohead have been moving away from the sound of
five men in a room playing live to a more laboriously constructed,
digitally processed approach. The forces of group and orchestra were
combined on the group's most recent offering, "Harry Patch (In
Memory Of)", a tribute to the last surviving WWI veteran (who
died in 2009, aged 111). How does Greenwood, who trained on the viola
at school, see these two methods complementing each other? "There
have always been bits of orchestration in Radiohead," he acknowledges.
"It's always been good to have the knowledge of music theory
and I've used it all the time. A big part of what we've always done
is slightly scientifically tried to copy something which we can't.
It's always been like that, whether it was bits of OK Computer
that in our heads we wanted to be like Bitches Brew, and
the fact that none of us could play the trumpet, or jazz, didn't bother
us. Which sounds like arrogance, but it's more that you aim and miss,
and don't let it bother you. And a lot of this film stuff is trying
to do something I don't really know how to do, so I'm scrabbling around
and getting a little lost and unsure, but it's been a nice way of
working." In person, Greenwood is reserved and modest. But all
the same, he becomes enthusiastic when discussing the more exciting
aspects of his job. Here is a man, it seems, who even uses his downtime
constructively in the pursuit of making music. "Touring's been
good for working on classical stuff," he explains. "I've
had hours and hours in hotel rooms. The silence..." So is there
such a thing as a typical day for him at present, and what does he
do when he's not working?
"I play the piano a lot at the moment,"
he says after a pause. "I don't know, I'm a bit low on hobbies.
I used to do lots of photography... I don't know. What do I do? What
do you do? I just generally worry about things, I think? And daydream
ideas for programming." That puts him back in his stride. "The
programming is really fun at the moment, very satisfying. I spend
half my time writing music software, computer-based sound generators
for Radiohead. Trying to bypass other people's ideas of what music
software should do and how it should sound, going back a step. It's
like building wonky drum machines, not using presets, basically. It's
like 'Mouse Trap', you construct things." Has he got a mathematical
mind, then? "I like a lot of popular science writing —
John Gribbin and stuff. Lots of nerdy science and linguistics books.
Yeah, I'm a bit trainspottery, let's not deny it."
"As a guitar player he's extraordinary: a
virtuoso, frenetic, and full of personality," testifies Bernard
Butler, who views Greenwood as one of a quartet of players with distinctive
styles who emerged at roughly the same moment, including himself,
John Squire and Graham Coxon. "We're all very emotional and slightly
deranged guitar players, and have an overwrought and melodic sensibility.
I can't think of any guitar players with those qualities at the moment.
It's a most un-Radiohead thing to do, but he probably did meet a devil
at a crossroads somewhere, along the A1 probably"
How, I ask Greenwood, would he like to be remembered,
as a composer or as a respected guitarist? "God, not as a 'guitar
stylist'!" he bursts out. "Helping to write some very good
songs, playing on them and recording them with this amazing band is
like nothing else. As to what people think years from now... You see
our record winning top album of the last whatever years, but then
you see shocking albums winning the same thing 20, 30 years ago and
you think, it's nice but... All that really matters is what we do
next, really."
Such a comment naturally leads to more gentle probing
about forthcoming plans for the Radiohead crew. "We've been recording
and working," he allows. "We're in the frame of mind of
wanting to finish things and then decide whatto do next. The old-fashioned
way of thinking, when we had a record label, was, 'You need to book
the tour today, even though you're only half way through the record.'
And we can't do that anymore. We just want to finish something and
be satisfied."
Leaving EMI to go it alone has meant, not surprisingly,
"you lose the structure, but then you are a bit freer. None of
us are very nostalgic for those days of waiting for somebody's approval
of your recording. But I've always said at EMI we had a good relationship
compared with some people."
But in the age of digital distribution, and the
increasingly invisible presence of music on the high street,
and given that In Rainbows was launched with its radical pay-what-you-like
policy — plus an extraordinary, free, televised late-night gig
at east London's Rough Trade store — chances are, however the
next record ends up, there'll be something of a fanfare.
"I don't like how music dribbles out,"
he announces as we wrap things up. "I like events, that's the
only thing, really." ®
Norwegian Wood is reviewed on page 109