Sometimes Colin Greenwood — the bassist in Radiohead — struggles to take it all in: his talented friends, his era-defining band, his exceptional life.
“We took something all over the world that we started in a village hall in Oxfordshire. I took photos of us: on a bullet train in Japan, backstage in Mexico City,” he says, sounding surprised. “That’s what I’m trying to understand — how that happened, really.”
He’s trying to work it out in a book, How to Disappear — a lushly presented hardcover photography collection featuring myriad snaps of Radiohead, taken by Greenwood. They are backstage and in the studio, and show the band at ease. Greenwood has written an essay too, and their ascent is treated with a polite nonchalance that befits five friends from Abingdon School, who wrote pioneering, odd, beautiful music that made them, if not the biggest, then certainly the most respected band on the planet.
Greenwood, though, with the best will in the world, looks less rock star, more one of those genealogy historians on Who Do You Think You Are? When we meet in his London publisher’s offices, he is enthusing about the new Craig Brown book and seems to find life rather funny, telling me about a book signing he did in Didcot, near where he lives with his wife and three sons, where Theresa May also was autographing her memoir — “with her security and all that shenanigans”, he says, smiling.
How to Disappear — named after a sprawling ballad on the album Kid A — focuses on the band between 2003 and 2016, from Hail to the Thief up to A Moon Shaped Pool, their most recent album. Radiohead feature Greenwood, 55, on bass; his younger brother Jonny, 52, on guitar and unusual instruments; Ed O’Brien, 56, on guitar; Phil Selway, 57, on drums; and, of course, Thom Yorke, 55, on emotional overdrive and all the posters.
It has been eight years since A Moon Shaped Pool, in which time Yorke and Jonny Greenwood have made three albums with their side project, The Smile.
With that in mind, I ask if Radiohead are still going. “I think so!” Greenwood replies. “We’re just tying up loose ends, I guess. We rehearsed together a couple of months ago in London and had a really great time, running through all the songs. We spent so many years in each other’s pockets that it has been really good to do different things for a few years, but, yes, fingers crossed, we’ll get it together to get back in some shape.”
Yorke is also reworking Radiohead’s album Hail to the Thief for a new stage production of Hamlet opening next spring in Manchester, saying its songs There There and Go to Sleep “chime with the underlying paranoia of the play”.
Greenwood is effusive about Yorke, mentioning that moment in Get Back when Paul McCartney simply dreams up the titular song. “Like McCartney,” Greenwood says, “he’s a one-man hydroelectric dam of creativity.”
Now, I have never been among the chorus who say Radiohead are depressing — the early hit Street Spirit (Fade Out) has the coda lyric “Immerse your soul in love”, for Pete’s sake. That said, it’s nice, in Greenwood’s photos, to see Yorke smiling. “Yes!” the snapper says, beaming sweetly. That is its magic; it shows the friendship of men who met at school when they were 11. “We share history and humour; I’ve got a photo of Thom gurning furiously on a funicular in Valparaiso, in Chile.”
I do wonder, though, how much that sense of fun is due to the era in which the book’s photos were taken. In the 1998 documentary film Meeting People Is Easy, Radiohead are shown on tour in the wake of immense critical and commercial success, but make rock stardom look worse than having root canal.
“I wasn’t taking pictures much back then, as it was just too intense,” Greenwood says. “So encompassing, so consuming. Everything. Making music, touring, all the attention.” This autumn Greenwood tours with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in Europe. I met Cave in the summer, when he said he had heard that recording music with Radiohead was “not fun” — is that fair?
“Has it been fun?” Greenwood ponders. “I don’t know. Somebody once told me that if it was easy and fun all the time, everyone would be doing it.”
As he prepares for Radiohead’s future, we dwell on the band’s past via Greenwood’s photos. Did he have to ask his band for permission to publish the photos? “No, it’s not like there are pics of anyone pratting around in Wehrmacht regalia,” he says. “Just lots of out-of-focus pictures of people looking a bit grumpy backstage.”
I imagine the publicist squirming, but understatement is Radiohead’s calling card, and Greenwood has a habit of making an enviable life appear routine. “I had this crazy jeep ride with the Earl of Cardigan,” he says about the time when he was scouting stately homes in which to record an album. He talks about the time he and Yorke visited Allied Carpets because they needed to upholster the studio before recording the seminal, audacious Kid A.
The book is essential for fans, showing a group that always did it their way. Did anybody ever try to tell them what to do? “Well, we had a stylist once,” Greenwood says, smiling. “We were each given £300, but bought things that made us look like five different bands. Thom and Jonny bought plaid jackets. Ed got sparkly double-breasted denim, Phil white denim. And me? A navy suit from Paul Smith, as if I was thinking, ‘Well, if it doesn’t carry on, I can use this for a job interview.’”
And what did the stylist say? “They just despaired.”
How to Disappear by Colin Greenwood is published on Oct 15 (John Murray £26 pp136). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members