Colin Greenwood is not here to explain Radiohead. He’s here to show you what it looked like.
His new photo book, How to Disappear: A Portrait of Radiohead, captures the elusive middle years—post-Creep, pre-legacy act—when the band wasn’t trying to be massive, wasn’t flailing, just “getting on with business.” But since it’s Radiohead, business meant haunting derelict English manors and recording basslines in buildings once blown up by the American military.
“These weren’t studios,” Greenwood says. “They were places where the Mitford sisters used to live. The greenhouses had been bombed by the U.S. Army. One had baskets of dead flies and bird crap everywhere.”
Which is, apparently, the right reverb environment for In Rainbows.
The book covers 2003’s Hail to the Thief through A Moon Shaped Pool in 2016, with Greenwood as both participant and fly-on-the-wall photographer. The band wasn’t exactly keen on having their picture taken, “apart from my brother who is a shameless hussy,” Colin notes. “He just pushes himself to the front.”
Colin credits Nick Cave with helping shape the book. “We were on tour in North Carolina last fall,” he says, “and I was like, ‘What do you think about this idea of a book that’s not about being super-famous or washed up?’ He loved it. It’s the middle bit—where you don’t know who you are.”
It’s also the era when their longtime producer Nigel Godrich quietly staged a coup. While John Leckie was mixing The Bends at Abbey Road, Greenwood and the band snuck off with Godrich to cut “Black Star.” And from there? “Everything after that was Nigel.”
He loves soul music. Otis Redding was his entry point to playing bass. “I had a little Toshiba mono cassette player and I’d play ‘Dock of the Bay’ over and over,” he says. “The bassline was simple enough to follow.”
The band’s American obsession cuts both ways, of course. “The molecules of the air in America are different,” Colin says, describing the moment U2’s Joshua Tree made sense while speeding through Arizona. “This is not like a rainy night in Birmingham.”
He reminisces about Tiny Vices, a now-defunct photo blog that helped spark his love of photography. And about childhood friend Charlotte Cotton, a museum curator who taught him the ropes and vetted his negatives with a blunt “Colin, it won’t be crap.”
And yes, they’re talking. The band. About doing something. Maybe soon. They even jammed together last summer.
“I don’t know when it’ll be,” Colin says. “But if we hadn’t taken this break, I never would’ve gotten to tour with Nick Cave or make this book. So I’m grateful.”
And in the meantime, he’s hiking with Nick Cave. Buying sneakers with Warren Ellis. Playing sideman on Cave’s new record Wild God. Not a bad way to kill time until the next haunted manor appears.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
