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
concert electronic feels funny hall hear orchestra pieces plays sound time
It's funny, but to me, when you go to a concert hall and hear electronic pieces from the '60s, I think they sound really dated. But when an orchestra plays a piece from that period, and it's going to sound different every time, it feels more modern to me.
bizarre future imagine involving modern music people playing taking
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.
kids guitar play
I sometimes feel a bit embarrassed to play guitar. There's something - I don't want to sound ungrateful - but there's something very old-fashioned and traditional about it. You meet kids today whose grandparents were in punk bands. It's very old and traditional, but then, so is an orchestra and so is a string section.
stars war player
It's like that scene from The Player when they talk about merging Star Wars and Kramer vs. Kramer, or whatever. You could do that with music and it would just be awful.
play tree fake
I like playing the stuff where I don´t know what I´m gonna play. Like the end of Fake Plastic Trees or the end of Paranoid Android - stuff where I can do anything and no one notices or cares.
player college cds
Every American college student goes to college with a hard drive. They take their laptop. There's not a CD player in sight.
guitar bounds guitar-playing
Anything that has more of Graham's guitar playing, I'm bound to like.
band basically begging english-musician finally following
The rest of the band were basically friends, So it was me following them around and begging them to let me be in their band for two or three years. And they finally let me in on the harmonica, actually, and then the keyboards, and finally the guitar.
english-musician french recording soundtrack
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.
amazing cinema directors few minutes screen sitting strings three
There's nothing like sitting in a completely quiet room, and then the strings start up. It's like when you go to the cinema - the first two or three minutes of any film are amazing. Because the screen is so big. The scale. Directors can pretty much do anything for those first few minutes.
cds format seen though
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.
add along exit presented
Presented with a song like Exit Music, It's impossible to know what to add without actually making it worse. How can you play along when It's already there?
fact orchestras people realizing
What I really enjoy about writing for orchestras is realizing that - and it's kind of self-evident - but the fact that they are 48 individuals. It's not, you know, a preset on a keyboard. It's all these people who have opinions and who are making decisions about how to play.
english-musician far love quality terms time worse
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.