Colin Greenwood Will Not Disappear
words by taran dugal. images courtesy of colin greenwood.
Odds are, Colin Greenwood is the most famous guy you’ve never heard of.
In fact, if you’re a fan of turn-of-the-century rock, there’s a very good chance that his music has been either the a) object of your worship, b) wellspring of your tears, c) soundtrack to your love, or, perhaps most likely, d) all of the above. He has been nominated for twenty Grammy Awards; he has won six of them. His records have sold tens of millions of copies across the world. He happens to be, for whatever it’s worth, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, that hallowed Ohio mausoleum. But his name recognition, or lack thereof, stems from two simple facts: 1) he is a bassist, and 2) bassists almost never get their dues.
To be clear, Greenwood is not just any bassist—he happens to play bass in a band called Radiohead. For the philistines reading this (welcome, by the way, and thank you for being here) Radiohead is a seminal rock band from England that has, in the course of their thirty-plus-year career, shifted the paradigms of their genre. Such a statement would, for most bands, be a sensationalistic exaggeration. For Radiohead, it is simply true—just give their third studio album OK Computer a listen, if you haven’t already, and try to name another musical act that was writing and recording material like that before the new millennium stumbled into frame. You won’t be able to. Marching to the beat of their own peculiar drum, the members of Radiohead have changed the landscape of rock music in more ways than one. Not too long ago, Greenwood and I met up in Manhattan to talk about everything but that.
Greenwood is something of a polymath. In some ways, music is the least fascinating of his talents. This is an individual who studied practical criticism at Cambridge and has been described as “perhaps the most academically inclined member” of “the smartest band in the world.” He is also a skilled photographer. This past October, he published a photo book titled How to Disappear, which features his intimate photos of the other band members, taken between 2003 and 2016. Naturally, the book also contains a ten-thousand-word essay about his life in Radiohead.
When I meet Greenwood, it is at a coffee shop on the Bowery, between first and second. He is dressed smartly, albeit casually, and is seated in the corner, coffee in hand. We shake hands, I order an espresso, and our conversation begins in earnest. Within fifteen minutes, he’s touched on everything from far-right, anti-immigration riots in England (“a lot of the main media newspapers have sort of stirred the pot over the past twenty years… I don't think it's a simple case of like, young, stupid white males“) to his recent reads (Janet Malcolm, historian Keith Thomas) and his bandmates’ camera shyness (“Except for my brother, who's this shameless hussy and will drop everything for the chance to pose before a lens, it'd be easier photographing some sort of endangered woodland species. I'd have to be some kind of weird paparazzi, covered in camouflage for about three or four days, with some food and a bag to pee in”).
Greenwood is an effervescent conversationalist when it comes to the things that he’s passionate about, and the depth of his knowledge on those subjects is impressive, to say the least. With photography, it’s clear that what might be a leisurely pursuit for most hobbyists is, in his not-so-idle hands, something of an obsession. Greenwood is a student of the art—he tells me that he's “not talented enough to be someone like Nick Knight,” who “photographs what he wants to see,” and that he’s “much more in the Garry Winogrand camp,” which means “taking photos to find something that you haven’t expected.” As far as How to Disappear is concerned, this kind of analytical approach extends itself to his writing, as well—he mentions that, when he sat down to create the “discursive commentary” accompanying his images, he turned to Janet Malcolm’s Diana & Nikon for inspiration. “I was thinking that it would help me,” he recalls, “but all the brilliance of her writing did was stop me in my tracks.” Though Greenwood is humble about his own capabilities with the pen, the essay in his book speaks for itself with unembellished, striking force. Take the following excerpt about music festivals, for example:
There’s a sense of something pre-electric and almost primeval, especially if you are playing as the sun dips down. Time passes differently in the flow of music – it slows down and you can pick out the stars in the settling twilight as you stream sound and light across an open field of faces, freed from the ringing metallic echo of an arena’s reverberation.
Sure, it might not read quite like Malcolm, but I’ll be damned if that isn’t evocative. Leonard Cohen and Patti Smith aside, Greenwood’s essays in How to Disappear feature some of the best music writing by an actual musician that I’ve yet to encounter, though Jeff Buckley’s liner notes for Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan’s The Supreme Collection, Vol. 1 give it a good run for its money.
When both my and Greenwood’s cups run empty, I suggest that we head to Codex, a secondhand bookstore down the street, and he agrees with all the enthusiasm of a kid being asked if they would perhaps like to stop by the ice cream parlor on the way home. While we walk over, I ask him if he thinks he might have pursued photography full-time, had he not ended up in such a successful band. “I don’t know,” he replies. “I think I would probably be doing something academic, maybe history, or something else, writing-wise.” The truth of this sentiment is imminently obvious once we reach our destination. Greenwood wanders over to the non-fiction section and starts pointing at spines. “Do you know this one?” he asks. No, I say, I don’t. “Oh, it's incredible, it's amazing. One of the angriest, most brilliant books about the Belgian Congo.” Another point, another spine, this time in the poetry corner: “That’s a great one—Ed Dorn. I had to study his poetry in school.” Greenwood closes his eyes, and guesses the opening words of a favorite verse (“Summer was dry, dry the garden…”) before flipping open the pages to see if he’d recited it correctly. He had.
About a half hour later, we march out of the bookstore with a select few titles in tow. I walk Greenwood toward the nearest subway station and we exchange a happy goodbye. As he vanishes into the swarming, vibrant throng of pedestrian traffic on East Houston—a singular individual swallowed by the urban singularity—I’m reminded of something he’d mentioned in the café, when I’d asked about the purpose of his new book. He’d aimed, he said, to tell the story of “how something that starts in a small room explodes, proliferates and arcs out across the world, and how something that's so interior—whether it's Thom songwriting or the five of us in a room—can become mapped out onto such a broad sweep of people.” I’d responded with a question that was meant to be rhetorical: that’s the great thing about music, isn’t it? But Greenwood nodded eagerly. “Yeah,” he said, “but it can still be singular and unique. People can have these experiences that are communal and solitary at the same time. You can share something that's just for you with a whole bunch of other people. That’s what I love.”
