English musicianFor the South African rugby footballer, see Colin Greenwood (rugby).

Musical artist

Colin Charles Greenwood (born 26 June 1969) is an English musician and the b*ist for the alternative rock band Radiohead. Along with his younger brother, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, Greenwood attended Abingdon School in Abingdon, England, where he met the future band members. Radiohead have since achieved critical acclaim and have sold over 30 million albums. Along with b* guitar, Greenwood plays upright b* and electronic instruments.

Contents

• 1 Early years
• 2 Radiohead
• 3 Other work
• 4 Personal life
• 5 See also
• 6 References
• 7 External links

Early years

Greenwood, whose father served in the British Army, lived in Germany as a child for enough time to become fluent in German. He is the older brother of Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood. The family has historical ties to the British Communist Party and the socialist Fabian Society. Greenwood credited his older sister, Susan, with influencing his and his and Jonny's taste in music as adolescents: "She’s responsible for our precocious love of miserable music. The Fall, Magazine, Joy Division. We were ostracised at school because everyone else was into Iron Maiden."

When Greenwood was 12, he met future Radiohead singer Thom Yorke at Abingdon School, an independent school for boys in Oxford. Their future bandmates Ed O'Brien, whom Greenwood met during a school production of the opera Trial by Jury, and Philip Selway also attended the school.

Greenwood bought his first guitar when he was 15. He studied cl*ical guitar under the Abingdon music teacher Terence Gilmore-James, who introduced him and the other future members of Radiohead to jazz, film scores, postwar avant-garde music, and 20th-century cl*ical music. Greenwood said: "When we started, it was very important that we got support from him, because we weren't getting any from the headmaster. You know, the man once sent us a bill, charging us for the use of school property, because we practiced in one of the music rooms on a Sunday."

According to Greenwood, he began playing b* out of necessity, teaching himself by playing along to New Order, Joy Division and Otis Redding. Among his musical influences are Booker T and the MGs, Bill Withers and Curtis Mayfield. He said: "We were people who picked up their respective instruments because we wanted to play music together, rather than just because we wanted to play that particular instrument. So it was more of a collective angle, and if you could contribute by having someone else play your instrument, then that was really cool."

Greenwood read English at Peterhouse, Cambridge between 1987 and 1990, and read modern American literature including Raymond Carver, John Cheever and other postwar American writers.

Radiohead

Main article: Radiohead Colin Greenwood with Radiohead in 2008

In late 1991, after a chance meeting between Colin Greenwood and A&R representative Keith Wozencroft at Our Price, the record shop where Greenwood worked, On a Friday signed a six-album recording contract with EMI and changed their name to Radiohead. By 2011, Radiohead had sold more than 30 million albums worldwide. They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March 2019.

Greenwood mostly plays fingerstyle, and described himself as "rubbish with a pick". He mainly uses Fender b*es and Ampeg and Ashdown amplifiers. He also plays instruments including double b* and synthesisers. He said: "My involvement is to play b* guitar, but our ideas and suggestions in certain areas, as to where the music should go or develop, are listened to. We are very much a band." In another interview, he said he did not think of himself as a b* player, and was "just in a band with other people".

On being in a band with his younger brother Jonny, Colin said: "Beyond the normal brotherly thing, I respect him as a person and a musician." On another occasion, he said: "It’s wonderful, it’s good, it makes my promise to keep an eye on him for my mother a lot easier, having him right next to me all the time. But he’s very easy to look after anyway, 'cause he’s very well behaved."

Other work

In 1997, Greenwood participated in a marketing campaign for his alma mater Cambridge University, posing for a photo with students from both state and private schools for a poster *led "Put Yourself in the Picture". The poster was "designed to break down some of the stereotypes that deter able students from applying to Cambridge and encourage more state school applicants".

Greenwood contributed b* to Jonny Greenwood's debut solo work Bodysong (2003), the score for the 2008 film Wood*. He played b* on the 2018 album Amir by the Belgian-Egyptian singer Tamino, and on the album World’s Strongest Man (2018) by Gaz Coombes. He also played b* on "Brasil" from Earth (2020), the debut solo album by his Radiohead bandmate Ed O'Brien. He contributed beat programming to Thom Yorke's song "Hearing Damage" from the soundtrack to The Twilight Saga: New Moon, and on a track from Yorke's album Tomorrow's Modern Boxes (2014).

In 2004, Greenwood participated on a panel in the annual sixth form conference run by Radley College in collaboration with School of St Helen and St Katharine, speaking on digital-rights management (DRM) from. In 2013, Greenwood soundtracked a Dries van Noten runway show, performing solo b* guitar. In 2018, he reviewed Michael Palin's book Erebus: The Story of a Ship for the Spectator.

Personal life

Greenwood enjoys writers such as Thomas Pynchon, V.S. Naipaul and Delmore Schwartz. In December 1998, he married Molly McGrann, an American literary critic and novelist. They have three sons, Jesse, born in December 2003, Asa, born in December 2005, and Henry, born in December 2009. They live in Oxford.

Greenwood is an amateur photographer. In 2003, he discussed his favourite photographs in the Victoria and Albert Museum, choosing images by Frederick Sommer and Harold Edgerton among others.

See also

• List of Old Abingdonians

References

External links

• Talk in Maths: Fansite
• How to Be Like Colin Greenwood – In Ten Easy Steps
• Colin Greenwood News

Other songs

• "Let Down"
• "Everything in Its Right Place"
• "The National Anthem"
• "Idioteque"
• "True Love Waits"
• "House of Cards" / "Bodysnatchers"
• "All I Need"
• "Reckoner"
• "Lotus Flower"
• "Spectre"
• "Lift"

Video albums

• Live at the Astoria
• 7 Television Commercials
• Meeting People Is Easy
• The Most Gigantic Lying Mouth of All Time
• In Rainbows – From the Ba*t
• Radiohead for Haiti
• The King of Limbs: Live from the Ba*t

Related albums

• True Love Waits
• Hold Me to This
• Exit Music: Songs with Radio Heads
• Radiodread
• Jaydiohead
• Amanda Palmer Performs the Popular Hits of Radiohead on Her Magical Ukulele

Related articles

• Discography
• Songs
• Awards and nominations
• Live performances
• Atoms for Peace
• The Smile
• Stanley Donwood
• Nigel Godrich
• Dead Children Playing
• Radio and Juliet
• Radio Rewrite
• Sericomyrmex radioheadi
• The Music and Art of Radiohead
• 2012 stage collapse
• "Scott Tenorman Must Die"
• "Get Free"
• Kid A Mnesia Exhibition

• Category