Since 2003, Radiohead’s bassist, Colin Greenwood, has taken his camera to the studio and on stage to document the rise of one of the world’s most cherished bands. He joins to discuss his legendary musical career and his beautiful new book, How to Disappear, capturing intimate photographs of his bandmates at work.
Colin Greenwood:
There was one point we were playing, I was playing with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds and Nick’s playing the piano next to me on stage, and he turned around and he said, are you taking photographs? Because I think he must’ve heard a clicking sound or something, and I was like, no.
Announcer:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. On Design Matters, Debbie talks with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, Debbie talks photography and music with Colin Greenwood, the bass player for Radiohead.
Colin Greenwood:
Our first few records are more bompity bomb, and then perhaps our later records are more sort of blippity blob.
Debbie Millman:
Let’s say that you’re in a world-famous rock band and you, the bassist, are a shutterbug. For years, you’ve been taking pictures with a small black camera in hotel rooms and bars, backstage, and even on stage. And then the time comes when you release a book of those photos and many unguarded fugitive moments of your band are on display as never before. I’m speaking about How to Disappear: A Photographic Portrait of Radiohead by Colin Greenwood, the bassist in Radiohead, one of the most important, successful, and experimental rock and roll bands of the last 40 years. Colin Greenwood joins me today to talk about his career in music and his brand-new beautiful book. Colin, welcome to Design Matters.
Colin Greenwood:
Debbie, thank you so much for the invitation and for that wonderful introduction.
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely my pleasure. Colin, you were born in Oxford, England, but because your father served in the Royal Ordinance, your family moved to Germany and then to Didcot, Suffolk, Abingdon and Oakley. I believe you attended five primary schools and even lived in Germany long enough to learn the language. Can you still speak any German?
Colin Greenwood:
I spoke some German, and sadly I did it at secondary school, high school, but I didn’t have a very good teacher and sadly not, but I did do French A-level so I can order a baguette in Paris. So the thing about what you talked about all those schools, I guess when you say that, I think you could either become a raging introvert or you just get very good at making friends all the time, and I think that’s a quality that can be part of being in a band too. Like Michael Stipe, there’s a bunch of people, Mark Eitzel, some people I know like that, they were like army brats as you like to say. So I think there’s an interesting correlation there could be perhaps between people who moved around a lot like that and worked in entertainment.
Debbie Millman:
You grew up in a home with music always in the background, and I understand your parents’ favorite records were by musicians including Burl Ives, Scott Joplin, Simon & Garfunkel, and even Mozart’s Horn Concerto. That’s quite a range.
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah, I guess my parents would’ve liked the kind of music that was just sort of described as classical music and more of the pop stuff would’ve been Simon & Garfunkel and me and my brother’s first record was probably Burl Ives’ Junior Choice, which is a American sort of children’s little folk song, “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” do you know that, obviously?
Debbie Millman:
Yes. Yes.
Colin Greenwood:
So those are kind of our first records, me and my brother, growing up in Germany, because there was no television while we were in Germany that was in English. So we didn’t have a television, so we just had to entertain ourselves with records and books and writing.
Debbie Millman:
Your parents brought you, your older sister Susan, and your younger brother Jonny musical instruments and encouraged you to play them, and what instruments did they get you all?
Colin Greenwood:
Well, my sister is a bit older, so her musical contribution, I suppose, is she brought music to the house, so we listened to records that she would buy, whether it’s like Dylan or Beatles or reggae or whatever, post-punk. And then in terms of musical instruments, my brother, I think his first instrument was a recorder, and I had a guitar, and then my brother made a viola and I carried on with the classical guitar. That’s kind of what we did really until Radiohead kicked off when we were in our teens.
Debbie Millman:
Now you mentioned your sister and the music that influenced you. What did that include?
Colin Greenwood:
She brought lots of different kinds of records into the house, which was really great. Like Ska, soul, reggae, quite a Catholic taste, but I would say a record that was big for me, which she probably didn’t bring into the house, was Joy Division. I loved, that was my favorite when I was about 13, but lots of different kinds of music to be fair to her. And we’d sort of bop around the front room and my mother bought a Sony receiver, one of those sound systems, but that was the main musical influences of me and my brother growing up.
Debbie Millman:
Tell us about your Toshiba radio cassette player.
Colin Greenwood:
It was a single speaker, probably about, what’s that? About three-inch size speaker and a little black receiver thing with a cassette. And that was kind of my gateway to my gateway drugs of music and it was cassettes, it was Cocteau Twins, listening to EPs. Everything was on cassette. That was the thing that I found music through. And then after that I had a little tiny little JVC stereo receiver, tiny. I’d call it a beatbox or a boombox, but it was more of a sort of murmur box, it was so small, but it was just fabulous. And since then I’ve spent my life in front of speakers, whether it’s in recording studios or at home.
Debbie Millman:
You attended Abingdon School wherein you had a lot of after-school activities, options, and you took classical guitar lessons with the same teacher as your classmate, Tom Yorke. Was the teacher Terrence Gilmore James?
Colin Greenwood:
He was the director of music at my school and he was actually our neighbor where I lived. He was just a wonder. He is wonderful, inspirational, full of energy, one of these people who’s very driven and positive and I was kind of outside of the music system, I felt outside it because I wasn’t doing music to study. I was just, Exams, I was just doing classical guitar. But he was a fabulous leader for music at my school and I have very fond memories of him.
Debbie Millman:
He introduced both you and Tom to 20th-century classical music, avant-garde music of the post-war era, classic jazz and film scores. And I read that your first experience in a band together was when Tom joined the punk band, TNT that you were in. Was that your first band? I read that you were in three different bands before Radiohead.
Colin Greenwood:
I wasn’t really in that band, TNT, and I don’t know if they were just like a couple of kids at the school. I think Tom did something with it, but it was all early days. And then Tom was in a band after my school when he was at college called The Headless Chickens. They put out a single call, “I Don’t Want to Go Back to Woodstock,” I think, which is fun. But when we were at school, it was just basically Radiohead from the ages of about 14, I guess, and we may have jammed at some other people, but that was kind of the thing.
Debbie Millman:
Why were you only able to play and rehearse on Fridays?
Colin Greenwood:
I don’t know why. It was probably because that was when the music school was free to practice or whatever.
Debbie Millman:
So the first name of the band was On A Friday. After TNT, Tom invited you and Ed O’Brien to start a new band, which was named On A Friday. Is it true that your headmaster of your school once sent you a bill charging you for the-
Colin Greenwood:
60 pounds.
Debbie Millman:
Why would he do something like that?
Colin Greenwood:
Well, as I get older, as most people when they get older, well perhaps some people, they get more sort of hard in their opinions and stuff. My recollection of what happened has sort of softened as I’ve got older and I understand that my Sundays, his house is quite near the music school and we were rehearsing on a Sunday, not a Friday, I think we probably disturbed his weekend, so he sent us a bill for practicing on a Sunday. But the director of music tore it up and left it on his desk, which I think is brilliant. And the facilities at the school were amazing, and I will always be very grateful for that. One of the things they did was this thing I realize now it’s called, do you know active listening? Do you know what that is?
Debbie Millman:
Yes. That’s a little bit what I have to do with the show.
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah, it’s like an educational tool that was developed maybe after the war. It was a way of teaching people about music, the idea of that you just let it wash over you. So we had these music lessons, which we’d be listening to Tomita’s version of “Mussorgsky’s Pictures At An Exhibition” or something like that. I realized what we were doing was we were having these lessons in active listening, which is of course what you do a lot when you’re making a record.
Debbie Millman:
And it’s hard. It’s not something that you just sort of tell yourself you’re going to do. I’m going to listen really hard. It takes a lot of training.
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah, well it takes some energy, but I think maybe what Samuel Johnson said about books could apply to this too is if you listen to something and it’s kind of boring, that’s fine, you can just turn it off like you would say about a book. But I love listening to things that are satisfying in lots of different ways and don’t just sort of modulate mindlessly.
Debbie Millman:
Because Ed already played guitar, you became the bass player.
Colin Greenwood:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Did you know how to play the bass at that time or did you pick it up once you were sort of-
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah, my mother I think probably got me a bass, a black bass called a Westone DX Spectrum. Most important thing about it was black and I played along with my little Toshiba thing, I managed to plug it into the microphone input of the thing to lots of Otis Redding and Booker T because their bass lines are fairly straightforward and that was a way for me to learn, really. And then other stuff after that. So that’s how I started.
Debbie Millman:
You said that the decision to play bass allowed you to dodge a bullet?
Colin Greenwood:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Why is that?
Colin Greenwood:
Well, I think it’s because there’s three brilliant guitarists in my band. I think it would’ve been very difficult for me to get a note in edgeways with all the other people, so it was a good thing. I was fortunate and I’m grateful to everyone for giving me the opportunity to play bass with them.
Debbie Millman:
The first gig you played was at a drunken school party with Ed and Tom and a drum machine.
Colin Greenwood:
Oh yeah, that’s right. It was at West Hinksey Rugby Club. It was with a drum machine, Dr. Rhythm drum machine, and we were stood in the middle with all these sort of drunk sort of, I don’t know, 17, 18-year-olds and it was just the 3 of us. It was quite fun.
Debbie Millman:
When did Phil Selway, your drummer, join the band?
Colin Greenwood:
Well, he was like three, two or three years older than us, so we thought he was cool because he was already in a band, Jungle Telegraph, so we poached him.
Debbie Millman:
And I read that your younger brother Jonny begged you to join the band?
Colin Greenwood:
Yes, that’s right. And we briefly had another keyboard player as well, but then my brother came in, my brother came in to play keyboard. I think that’s what he did, originally. He had a keyboard.
Debbie Millman:
Wasn’t he also playing the harmonica?
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah, harmonica, recorder, pennywhistle, maybe there’s one track where the [inaudible 00:12:36] plays viola on an old track. It’s a beautiful song actually called “Chains,” and then he picked up the guitar listing to the Pixies and Lou Reed. We loved this album by Lou Reed called New York.
Debbie Millman:
Did you sense at that time that he would end up becoming the sort of musical genius he is today?
Colin Greenwood:
Well, he’s always been into his music. He had a scholarship when we were at school, so it’s been his thing since he was a little boy, so it’s something he’s always loved.
Debbie Millman:
I read in your book that you’ve never let him forget that it was you that got him into the band.
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah, that’s right. I call him up every so often, remind him. No, it’s really good. It’s been really nice. We’re not like other brothers, perhaps, in music who’ve been in bands together and might have a sort of fraught relationship. It’s always been very good.
Debbie Millman:
You played your first public gig at the Jericho Tavern on Walton Street in Oxford on August 14th, 1986. You were 17 years old and you shared the stage with your bandmates and 4 other bands, and you write in the book that this experience gave you the ambition to make a life in music. What was it about that night that solidified this for you?
Colin Greenwood:
I think it was just the excitement and the culmination of the rehearsals of being on the stage, the volume, like noise, the sheer sort of physical, visceral sound of everything is so thrilling. It was just great to be part of something in the band that there was then part of a scene in Oxford. In some way, some kind of a connection with all the music that we were listening to at the time, whether it was ska or post-punk or whatever. So it was just a really wonderful way to spend time. As our mother said, she used to say, well, at least it keeps you off the streets.
Debbie Millman:
Didn’t she want you to be a lawyer?
Colin Greenwood:
No, I don’t know what she wanted me to be, but what I loved about my mother’s take on our music is that she didn’t sort of care for it per se, but she called it bompity bomp music. And then when we went to more sort of electronic stuff, which she obviously had heard sort of some modern classical, I think she called it blippity blop. Something like that. And I like to think that’s actually a very accurate description of Radiohead’s musical sort of creative arc.
Debbie Millman:
In what way? How would you-
Colin Greenwood:
Well, I’d say our first few records are more bompity bomp and then perhaps our later records are more sorts of blippity blop, more as in electronic bleeps and bloops, bleeps and … In many ways, I think my mother’s commentary foreshadows a lot of the finest music journalists who’ve written about Radiohead and 20 years ahead. So well done her, I say.
Debbie Millman:
Would you say your bass playing has changed between boppity bop and blippity blip?
Colin Greenwood:
It’s always been trying to find somewhere to fit in, I suppose. But no, I think that’s my bass playing is one of the reassuring sort of reliable staples of the sound, something you can rely on.
Debbie Millman:
Well, I mean if you listen to songs like “15 Steps,” “Weird Fishes,” those songs would not be, I mean, there’s so many songs that wouldn’t be the same without your bassline.
Colin Greenwood:
Very kind of you.
Debbie Millman:
No, no. “15 Step” is one of my all-time favorite Radiohead songs.
Colin Greenwood:
Oh wow.
Debbie Millman:
And I listened to that song to feel the bass, to actually feel, there’s this crescendo when the bass comes in, that just kills me.
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah, it’s great. Isn’t it fun? Yeah. Well what happened was it was on a, had got a 909 drum machine a few years ago and then we just had it set up in rehearsal and then we just used it as a sort of rough pattern for that and then basically sort of wrote around the pattern, I think it was.
Debbie Millman:
And then “Lotus Flower” as well. That song would not be the same without your bassline.
Colin Greenwood:
Oh, thanks. I think that’s like, I can’t remember. That’s like a keyboard and then I played it, or it’s a keyboard and then I played it live. I can’t really remember whether Tom did a keyboard bassline on that or whether I did.
Debbie Millman:
It sounds like your bass, but that’s just my understanding of it.
Colin Greenwood:
Well, it is live. It’s fun playing live. Yeah, there’s this guy called Joseph “Lucky” Scott who played with Curtis Mayfield, and there’s another guy whose name I always forget, so that’s not very helpful, who played on “Move on Up” “and stuff like that as well. And I bring them up because that would be the kind of thing that I would, in my dreams, aspire to is that kind of playing that combination of groove and melody.
Debbie Millman:
I read that you learned how to play by listening to Duck Dunn, Peter Hook, Lee “Scratch” Perry.
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah. And then people who played with James Brown, like Charles Sherrell, and I can’t remember all these other people. And the Motown book about James Jameson, I learned about two-thirds of those, so that was amazing. So bass, it is a very sympathetic instrument. It’s the bridge between the rhythm and the melody, the drums and the voice and the top line, that’s what’s so amazing about the bass is the ability to sort of combine rhythm and emotion, I suppose, and to change the emotional weather underneath the chords, which you can do with the bass as well.
Debbie Millman:
Oh my God, yeah, especially in “15 Steps.” Kills me.
Colin Greenwood:
Thank you.
Debbie Millman:
Now you all, you had an opportunity to sign a record contract, but decided to go, you all decided to go on to college?
Colin Greenwood:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
Instead of sign with a regular company?
Colin Greenwood:
Well, we didn’t have a contract before university, but we decided to go to university first before we tried to get a contract in that very, very sensible way of thinking, well, if it didn’t work out, we’d have university degrees to fall back on, so that’s why we went to university first perhaps. And also just to have fun and try different experiences. So that’s what happened.
Debbie Millman:
You studied English literature.
Colin Greenwood:
That’s right.
Debbie Millman:
Any particular authors that you found to be?
Colin Greenwood:
I really like lots of modern American writing and I like a lot of 17th-century writing and poetry. 17th century like Milton, Marvell, poetry, stuff like that, Shakespeare, and then I really like modern stuff. I mean, I don’t know, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Edith Wharton, just lots of stuff. Willa Cather, but lots of history as well. So big history buff as lots of people are now with the podcast.
Debbie Millman:
Were you still playing together through college?
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah, we would meet up every holiday and we’d rehearse in the village halls around Oxfordshire and we’d keep in touch whilst we were at college sending cassettes, automaton cassettes of new songs that we would listen to and think about and then we’d get together and work on them.
Debbie Millman:
By 1991 you recorded your first demo tapes? The Manic Hedgehog demo was passed to Parlophone A&R rep Keith Wozencroft, and he did that after seeing you play live at Jericho’s and I believe that’s when you got your record deal with EMI, and I think that was another connection that you made.
Colin Greenwood:
I was working in a record store and Keith Wozencroft was going to get a job in A&R at EMI and he was working as a rep selling records out of a rusty white van, so I gave him our demo cassette. I used to give our demo tapes to any record company sales rep who was interested, and they generally weren’t, fair enough, but it was also our management had a connection, so it wasn’t just me and Keith, it was our management. We’re friends with this guy called David Ambrose. He used to be in a band called Brian Auger Trinity. He basically signed us to EMI together with a guy called Nick Gatfield. He used to play with Dexys Midnight Runners. So that was how we sort of got our first contract.
Debbie Millman:
You write in your book that you were probably one of the last bands to sign a traditional record deal, and I’m wondering is that a good thing or a bad thing?
Colin Greenwood:
I mean, I’m sure that other bands would sign record deals after us, and you used to think what would it been like if we had been signed to the record label 20 years earlier or 10 years earlier? Because you could see at EMI vestiges of what the business used to be before, when you had artists like Queen or Beatles or whatever, it was like a big international company. We signed to Parlophone, which was the one half of the company. The other half was EMI, there two marketing labels, EMI and Parlophone.
Yeah, so we signed Parlophone, which was amazing. So we had all these, home of the Beatles, and then through the American company it was Beach Boys, Beastie Boys, any B with Boys in it basically was on capital. So we were going to become the Radiohead Boys in America on capital and obviously just Radiohead EMI in Parlophone in the UK. It was very exciting to be part of this British institution. The records that my sister bought when I was nine, 10 years old, I don’t know if you know the Beatles Red and the Beatles Blue albums, which sort of compilations of their songs, and they have pictures of them looking down over the center like stairwell of EMI office in Manchester Square. Well, that’s where we signed. That’s where we went.
Debbie Millman:
Wow, yeah.
Colin Greenwood:
That sort of artistic cultural heritage is incredibly exciting.
Debbie Millman:
As I was growing up, I would look at those album covers, and I’m sad that album covers aren’t as big as they used to be, but I would get lost in the photographs and I would get lost in the worlds that these bands created with their visuals. Another band that I loved at the time and still love was Yes, and Roger Dean was doing all their artwork for their albums and they were otherworldly. I felt that they were cosmic.
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah, well, I just met Anton Corbijn with Nick Cave on tour and I think he was doing some project with Hipgnosis, which I want to check out, but I think it must be some kind of documentary that’s out. But yeah, I mean, there’s brilliant. They had the photographs of the band on the stairwells. They had all the artists depending on where you were in terms of, I guess, sales and success, the least popular, least selling ones was some 80s hair bands down by the drinks vending machine in the basement. Upstairs, each floor as you got to the sort of lofty heights of [inaudible 00:24:25] or whatever, you’d get shots of Paul McCartney or whatever, or Beastie Boys or I don’t know, Tina Turner or something like that.
Debbie Millman:
Wow. There was a hierarchy to the stairs.
Colin Greenwood:
That’s what we all aspire to.
Debbie Millman:
Now, your first album, Pablo Honey included the worldwide hit “Creep,” and I don’t want to talk too much about, I don’t want to talk about that song really at all, but I’m curious to know how it felt to go from a small local, hardworking band with your schoolmates to essentially an overnight global sensation. Did it make you feel differently about who you were at the time?
Colin Greenwood:
Well, it was all happening far away. It was like Star Wars somewhere long ago and far away, I suppose, because it was happening in San Francisco and in Tel Aviv and where we had our first radio plays for that song. What it meant, though, was that when we went on tour for the first time, say in America, we never toured in a van with the trailer. Our first tour, we had our own tour bus with beds because we played all these clubs, which you would normally do with a van.
Debbie Millman:
Bringing in your own equipment and so forth.
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah. But I guess because we had some money from the record company to advance the touring and also because we seemed to be selling the shows, there was a budget for a tour bus, so we were playing these clubs around America and arriving in a really nice American Eagle tour bus. So we were spoiled really, but it was just the best experience, just fabulous.
Debbie Millman:
You write in your new book that the sugar rush success of your first single probably saved you from being dropped by EMI and granted you the grace to record the album The Bends in 1994. And that album was initially overlooked when it first came out and some dismissed Radiohead as a one-hit wonder, which just sort of baffles me now. Did you worry about the notion of becoming a one-hit wonder at that time?
Colin Greenwood:
No, because I wouldn’t say that we would think about what we do in terms of individual songs. When we were making our second record, The Bends, we spent a long time in RAK Studios in London, which is a fabulous studio, And St. John’s would round the corner from Abbey Road, super famous plays, so many brilliant records and artists have recorded there. Al Green, Robert Plant. We had the time to make that record too, and that was one of my favorite albums.
Debbie Millman:
Mine too. You and the band went on to release seven additional studio albums that have changed rock and roll. You’ve sold over 30 million albums worldwide. You’ve won six Grammys. In 2019, the band was included into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Now, in addition to your work as a musician and a member of Radiohead, you are a photographer and I read that the first book of photography that captured your imagination was the book Vagabond by Gaylord Oscar Herron. What was it that intrigued you most about that book?
Colin Greenwood:
I think it’s that thing where you see a book of photography that’s like the first book that you see. So anything, whether it’s your first record or your first painting or whatever, it stays with you. But I think what I loved about that book was how he managed to make a documentary book about his family neighborhood and sort of turn it into something engaging. And there’s a text as well where he quotes, I think, from the Bible about Cain and Abel, I think. But I think it’s the idea that as a photographer you are basically something sort of solitary about what you’re doing, but at the same time you are capturing other people, collective crowds, or their portraits and things like that.
So it’s quite romantic I suppose, as well, that idea of how you see the world. I loved it. I loved the different types of photography in the book. There’s landscape, there’s groups, there’s portraits, there’s documentary, there’s sort of abstract, but closeup photography, it’s just a great book and I was very lucky to see that. And yeah, it’s very beautiful and I recommend it to anybody, and it was a very influential book as well for Larry Clark. You know Larry Clark?
Debbie Millman:
Yes, I do. I have a photograph of his in my bathroom of naked people.
Colin Greenwood:
Larry Clark’s in Tulsa I think, and Gaylord Oscar Herron is from Kansas too, so not that far away, I don’t think. But I think he was a big influence on all those people.
Debbie Millman:
What motivated you to start taking photographs?
Colin Greenwood:
Well, my friend Charlotte, who was in my band when we were in Kids, she’s a curator of photography and she did art history and then to work at the Victorian Albert and she’s museum in London and she’s written some beautiful books on fine art photography for Thames & Hudson and other aperture. And she very kindly, patiently indulged my limited ability but interest in photography, and I think it’s through her I met some very fantastic photographers, so I have got a lot to thank her for.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that the photographs and Vagabond influenced how you captured your experience of the Radiohead crowds, and I’m wondering if you can talk about in what way it did that.
Colin Greenwood:
Well, I think what’s cool about when you take a picture of a group of people, you can get a sense of how music works too in that you can look at people individually, but you can also see how they’re interacting with the people around them, as well as how they’re reacting to the music that they’re listening to or the experience that they’re having. Because when people listen to things or look at things with other people, both those things are going on at the same time. There’s sort of communal collective, and there’s the individual solipsistic as well.
That’s how music and those things work, and they’re amplified by being shared with all those people. So I just really like that and I like photography. I like typological photographs, photographs, collections of things as well. So what is a crowd if it’s not like a collection of people? It’s been assembled and as human beings, as animals, we’re always looking to make connections or combine what we see and make sense of things that are put together in nature, and that’s what you do with crowds, either by seeing what they have in common or what they look that’s different, what’s different about them. So that’s kind of why I like all that stuff.
Debbie Millman:
Was the band your first subject or were you shooting other things before that?
Colin Greenwood:
No, I think it was the band, really. And in fact, the beginning of the book, I’m using a camera similar to the one that, what’s it, Gaylord Oscar Herron was using, it’s like a simple Japanese SLR camera. One of my regrets is I couldn’t have used it on stage because it’s too heavy, but I wish I just kept that one, really. But I still have it. It’s amazing.
Debbie Millman:
I read initially that you took a lot of photographs with remote cameras and GoPros.
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah, I did. I’ve got those photographs and the colors are kind of cool. I placed them all around the stage before we played, but the point of view is kind of weird because obviously, I couldn’t have them in people’s faces, so I’ve got them on the floor or strapped to some mic stands and things.
Debbie Millman:
What kind of camera do you currently use?
Colin Greenwood:
Well, I’ve splashed out, I was in Australia, and I went to Leica in Melbourne, and they had the shop demonstration of Leica Digital M11, and I’ve been using that and it’s actually, I really like it. It’s my first, well, it’s my second digital camera I suppose. I’ve been using it. I’ve been photographing Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds with it, and I think I’ve got some nice pics.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve said that an analog camera records light like a vinyl does sound.
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah, I suppose an analog camera records light-like photons landing onto a chemical paper, sensitive photosensitive paper or film, rather. And then vinyl obviously records vibrations. It’s kind of similar, but yeah, I think I love both. I mean, I’ve just been listening to two records this morning here. I keep going back to vinyl because I find something about the process of playing a record goes back to that active listening when we were at school, I suppose. There’s something sort of engaged about it that I really like. And then whereas I love digital as well, don’t get me wrong, but there’s just something about records that makes me happy, other than the price.
Debbie Millman:
Well, in addition to the active listening, there’s sort of a physicality to it because you’re constantly having to move the needle back if you’re sort of obsessive listening like I used to do and then turning the album over, and the sequence was so important as well. What two albums were you listening to this morning?
Colin Greenwood:
I was listening to Schubert’s Amadeus Quartet, playing some Schubert, and then I was listening to some lute music played by Jacob Lindberg playing the Rauwolf Lute playing, a guy called Jacob Lindberg. I listened to records of music more than I look at the television. I don’t really look at the television.
Debbie Millman:
You’ve collected quite a lot of your photographs and have published a new book. It’s called How to Disappear.
Colin Greenwood:
Yes.
Debbie Millman:
And it just came out and it is a beautiful collection of your photographs of the band between 2003 and 2016 from the albums Hail to the Thief until the most recent studio album, A Moon Shaped Pool, and the title of your book is taken from a partial title of a song from the album, Kid A, the song “How to Disappear Completely” and the song also contains the lyrics, I’m not Here, this is happening, which I know was inspired by a conversation that Tom had with Michael Stipe. Now, does the title have anything to do with the sort of way in which you were photographed and the desire to not be intrusive?
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah, absolutely. You’re completely right. I think it’s a joke. It’s a cheap harm. It’s a gag for the title, I suppose. It’s about the fact that I’m not really in the book. There’s one picture of me in the book that my brother took, and so I haven’t completely disappeared. But yeah, it’s just how to disappear. The joke is, of course, I can’t be in the picture because I’m taking the pictures. I kind of had the title for the book and I had the cover for the book way ahead of anything else because, in fact, the cover of the book, which is all these flight cases that we had all done in purple when we started, because we thought that no one would steal an ugly purple flight case we had on the Radiohead website. We had that for about-
Debbie Millman:
A long time.
Colin Greenwood:
Three years in our really sort of very graphical image to have on the website.
Debbie Millman:
Now, you weren’t taking photographs from the outside in the way that a cameraman might be filming a concert. You were actually in the middle of all the activity and the performances.
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
Did you take photographs covertly or did your bandmates or crew or audience see you at the beginning?
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah, I never took anything covertly, but I always felt really awkward about taking photographs. I still do probably, but I think a lot of photographers do. I was talking to one of my heroes in New York, a guy called Paul Graham who’s just an incredible photographer, and he said the same thing to me. There’s sort of awkwardness and reticence that he has about interrupting people. When he makes a photograph, somebody, if he’s on the street in New York, he will show them all to see if it’s okay because of course what you can do that with digital, you can show them and then if they don’t like it, you just go, okay, and you delete it there and then, rather than film. I kind of wish I’d been more upfront with it, but I never see it as a sort of career plan because my career was planned to be music.
Debbie Millman:
In my prep for this show, I came across an interview where you stated that one of your regrets is that you haven’t been bolder with the lens, got closer or taken more photographs, and you said you’re shy with the camera. Do you still feel that way or has it changed at all over the years?
Colin Greenwood:
No, I’m still shy, but then I also know that there are things that if you’re interested in something and you think there’s something there, there’s this great title by one of my favorite photographers, Wolfgang Tillmans, It is called If One Thing Matters, Everything Matters. If you see something that you want to photograph, then the question really becomes not should you take a picture of it, I guess you’d have to think about how you want to frame it or what is it about it that you see. My other favorite quote my friend taught me was Nick Knight, you know who Nick Knight is? He’s an amazing, he’s a super famous photographer. You know the cover of Björk’s album Homogenic?
Debbie Millman:
Yes.
Colin Greenwood:
So he did that and he has a great quote, which is one of those things, it’s a very simple thing to say, but could be very difficult or very liberating, is photograph what you see or photograph what you want to see. And all those two statements, they’re two different things or how you combine those two things is what could make a successful image.
Debbie Millman:
You photographed your bandmates in the recording studio, in dressing rooms and tour buses, yawning, meditating. There are even photographs in bathrooms. You shot Ed playing a guitar in a white tile box of a bathroom and Jonny playing a viola in the bathtub. There’s even a shot of Jonny photographing Tom, and they’re all candid, but there’s a real intimacy to them that makes them more than just band photographs. They almost feel private. Was that intentional?
Colin Greenwood:
Well, I love that book. I mean, I’m not making any great claims as a photographer, but like with the music you are obviously influenced or inspired by great photographers. One of my favorite photographers is a guy called Robert Frank. He made a book called The Americans. He was a Swiss-German photographer and he was like a sort of photographic survey road trip of America, and he managed to make this book of photographs that was sort of intimate glimpses, really, of a nation. Do you know what I mean? If you ever see that captured sort of moments across the country. So I’d like to think that, but then I’m not very technically very good. So all the ones that I really wanted to take generally were too, were underexposed or blurry or both.
Debbie Millman:
I am imagining that you’ve probably taken thousands of photographs.
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah. And my understanding of professional photographers who I work with, who I’ve met, rather, is when you look at contact sheets, if you have say one image and a role of film that you like, that’s good. I’m very lucky, I suppose. I had some lucky moments where I pointed the camera and it worked out.
Debbie Millman:
The photographs feel like they’re markers in time and evidence to what happened, and they’re sort of cast in time, so to speak. They’re memories, but they don’t feel nostalgic.
Colin Greenwood:
No. Well, I think that a photograph is a recording of something using time like shutter speed of the camera, but there’s another dimension of time, which is the time you leave the image that you take and the next time you look at it, which could be like five years later. And when you look at it, the passage of time has had an effect upon the image, so it’s not actually the same photograph that you took five years previously. And then of course, you can make an edit and combine it with other images. That’s another layer of meaning that you add to it that it may not have had when you took it originally. So there’s all those different processes that are going on, which I think is very interesting.
Debbie Millman:
One of the things that I love about photography is how it gives you an accurate memory of something when you think about your past and it’s just an idea or a thought. You have memories of memories, whereas a photograph stays the same. You might have different ways of interpreting it, but the image is the image frozen.
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah. Well, and I think anything, if it works as a, depending on what kind of photography, I suppose, if it works as an image, it sort of will resist becoming dated. Like someone like Alfred Stieglitz who’s probably my favorite photographers, or Berenice Abbott, they can make a photograph that is fresh, freshly minted as the day it was taken.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I listened to an interview with you on, I think it was on YouTube where you said that the idea for the book began when you were in a car with Nick Cave in Asheville, North Carolina.
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah.
Debbie Millman:
So how did he help solidify the idea?
Colin Greenwood:
Well, he’s just such a brilliant, engaging, curious, super smart person who, I was in a car. We were doing these shows where I was supporting him whilst he’s playing the piano. So we just had these conversations and I was struggling to find a way into the book and how to start writing it. And then he just said to me, when did you start? When were the pictures starting from? And I said, well, they start from this period, 2003. And he said, well, what were you doing as a band then? And he said, well, we were sort of in the middle of our career from where we are now, I suppose. And he said, why don’t you write about what that was like, what that’s like? I was like, oh, yeah. I told him, I thanked, I think I gave him a credit in the book, and he was surprised. And I had a great chat with Warren Ellis. You know Warren Ellis?
Debbie Millman:
Yes I do.
Colin Greenwood:
The Dirty Three and The Bad Seeds, obviously, and co-writes with Nick, and Warren is telling me about when he wrote his book on Nina Simone’s gum and what that was like.
Debbie Millman:
That book is amazing. I mean, even the idea, let’s make a book about Nina Simone’s chewing gum.
Colin Greenwood:
Yeah, so they’re both really supportive and I have nothing but gratitude and respect for both of them, and I’m very lucky that I’ve had the opportunity to work with them.
Debbie Millman:
A very dear friend of mine is very good friends with Nick Cave, and I asked her to ask Nick for a question to ask you today. So my next question is from Nick Cave. Colin Greenwood is one of the most unassuming and humble people I’ve ever met. I have long suspected that his ever-present camera is a way of diverting attention away from himself and back towards the person he’s photographing. Is this true? Is his camera a way of holding people at bay?
Colin Greenwood:
I don’t know if that is true, because I think that feels like an egotistical act in itself, really. And you know what it’s about? It’s about light. It’s like where lights works and falls and somewhere on someone or something. I mean, I don’t think I use a camera to keep people away because I think you’d have to be quite egotistical to think of it like that, really. And it’s like I’m more apologetic when I pick up a camera. Less sort of self-protective. I don’t think so. But he’s probably right. I don’t have any confidence in doing that, but as I said, I’ve met my heroes. They seem to share that lack of confidence. So no, I wouldn’t want to do that. I love people and being with people, so I wouldn’t keep people at bay with a camera. I don’t think so. Does that give you an answer?
Debbie Millman:
Absolutely. You’ve been touring with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, and you mentioned that you’re also taking photographs of the band as well. When you’re taking photographs, do you take a lot of photographs and then decide once you’ve seen them, which are good, or do you have a sense as you’re taking them that this is the moment?
Colin Greenwood:
Well, both. Well, I wasn’t taking pictures on stage because it’s not my band, unlike Radiohead. There was one point we were playing, I was playing with Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, and Nick’s like playing the piano next to me on stage, and he turned around and he said, are you taking photographs? I think he must’ve heard a clicking sound or something. And I was like, no. And the other thing is I can’t take photographs with them really, because I’m playing all the time, I have more photographs of the Bad Seeds of Warren, well, of everyone really, except Nick, because I just didn’t want to intrude too much. I’ve got more candid pictures of Nick rather than sort of stage pictures of Nick, if you like, more backstage and working pictures. I don’t have any working pictures, but they’re all such lovely, welcoming, kind, creatively open people who, when they’re dealing with stuff like musical stuff on stage, they all talk to each other. It’s been just a real education and a privilege.
Debbie Millman:
In addition to photography, the book is also a beautiful object. How did you decide on the design and the layout?
Colin Greenwood:
Oh, well, that’s a fantastic question because it’s something I care about and I’m so proud of as well. The book was all printed in paper, and the printing was all done in Verona, and it was designed by this amazing guy called Duncan White. He’s from London, but he lives in France, and he’s a really incredible book designer who’s made some beautiful photography books over the past few years. And he’s also worked with a really famous photography bookmaker called Gerhard Steidl, who’s made some of the most beautiful books in the world.
So he worked with him in Hanover, and I found Duncan through an old friend of mine called Michael Mack, who has a beautiful publishing photographic book imprint called Mack Books, who publishes people like Paul Graham and basically tons of amazing people. And one of my favorite photographers is this woman called Collier Schorr, makes these beautiful portraits. And I briefly was in touch with her in the 90s. And yeah, I’m a big fan of hers, and that’s what’s great about Instagram. You can find all this work still. So the book was very much, we basically did what Duncan said in terms of the design and layout, and I’m just thrilled with it. And it was published by a fabulous house called John Murray, who also published Slow Horses. Do you know Mick Herron and Slow Horses?
Debbie Millman:
Yes, I do. Yeah.
Colin Greenwood:
And my old friend Nick Pearson published it, John Murray, who, he’s one of my oldest friends, and he published people like Jonathan Franzen, Larry Mantel, people like that. He’s just an incredible publisher and editor. So I’m just so flattered and grateful that he would consider working with me. And yeah, the whole experience has been an unalloyed joy from start to finish.
Debbie Millman:
How were you able to choose the photographs and this sort of narrative arc of the book?
Colin Greenwood:
Well, the edit was, we had to have about 350 photographs, and then we boiled it down to about a hundred odd, I suppose. But it was like Duncan, the editor. We had them in a pile of rough prints, but yes, yes, no, no, yes, yes. And then from that rough selection, Duncan basically helped with making edits where the flow of images kind of goes from the studio and the songwriting, the music writing, working on the songs to the recording, to the promotion to the stage. So there’s a nice sort of outwards sort of funneling outwards of the images, which I think is really beautiful. And then it’s interleaved with three sections of text of around 10,000 words where I sort of act as sort of commentary, I suppose, to how we started as a band and describes some of the situations that some of the photographs show you.
Debbie Millman:
I think it’s more than commentary, though. It’s almost diary. It’s very in the moment. What was the process like as you went through?
Colin Greenwood:
Well, I had a sort of setup where I would try and write around 300, 500 words a day, and then I’d send the writing off to Nicholas, who’s famous for his Christmas cake baking, and he bakes two a year, and he basically, the analogy, he was folding what I’d written into the rest of the ingredients. So instead, he was making a sort of Christmas cake with my photography book.
Debbie Millman:
I love that analogy. I’m wondering if you would consider reading a short excerpt of your essay from How to Disappear: A Portrait of Radiohead. I’ve chosen the excerpt because I think it’s one of my favorites in the book.
Colin Greenwood:
I’d love to, and it starts like this. There’s a photograph of Tom with his hands held together in front of him. It’s the end of the night somewhere in America. I can’t be sure where, because the image is so murky and the vast blacked-out caverns are so similar. Let’s say it’s New Orleans Smoothie King Arena, 3rd of April, 2017, around 11 P.M. We finished our second encore, and Tom is here thanking the 20,000 people out front. The white strip to Tom’s left is his black and white Rhodes piano wheeled on and off on a riser like a musical prop. I’ve stayed on stage while the others have drifted off, and I’m standing stage left closer to Ed’s microphone to take in the image of Tom and the crowd. The preceding two and a half hours were full of light and color. Acid blues, greens, and yellows, near-ultraviolet purple that lends everything on stage an extra 3D glow.
There are remote-controlled spotlights, cameras, multiple mirror balls, and film projections from the front of the house onto a stage-wide silvery surfboard screen that is studded with thousands of light-emitting diodes. 30 years ago, you could burn your leg on a floor lamp, and now the white-hot heat of technology runs cool is pixelated and fiercely bright. One day, this back screen will have more resolution and fidelity than the performers in front, but at the end of the show, the stage lights go down, the house lights stay low, and we are finally left alone without our force field in front of all those people.
They have their phones raised up like cigarette lighters for the last power ballad. Their LEDs are lit this time to help illuminate the sudden darkness as the audience records the scene. Many are live-streaming from their phones, thousands of one-person outside broadcast units for the web kids across the world, and all its time zones. These haloed points of light throw up weird phosphorescence-like creatures from the deep hailing each other from inside the black belly of the Smoothie King rippling up from the arena floor all the way to the nosebleed rake of the gods. In another 60 seconds, the house safety lights will flood this scene and wash it away until it ebbs back two nights later at the Dunkin Donuts Center.
Debbie Millman:
Colin Greenwood, thank you, thank you, thank you for making so much art that matters, and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters.
Colin Greenwood:
Thank you, Debbie. It’s been fun to talk to you. Thank you so much.
Debbie Millman:
Colin Greenwood’s new book is titled How to Disappear: A Photographic Portrait of Radiohead. And to read more about Colin’s work, you can go to Radiohead.com or WastedHeadquarters.com, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference. We can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Announcer:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest-running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.