EP.256 - COLIN GREENWOOD

I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin.

Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening.

I took my microphone and found some human folk.

Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke.

My name is Ad Buxton, I'm a man.

I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

Hey,

how are you doing, Podcats?

It's Adam Buxton here.

It's not the most beautiful morning out here in Norfolk in early September 2025.

But it could be worse, couldn't it, Doglegs?

One way it could be better is if I was back in the kitchen on the sofa and I was dry.

Well, it is a little damp out here, I'll give you that, but it's only drizzle, Rosie.

Chisel, more like.

All right, Snoop Dogg.

But how are you doing, podcats?

Hope things are all right where you are.

But look, let me tell you a bit about podcast number 256.

This one features a rambling conversation with British musician and photographer Colin Greenwood.

Here's some colin facts for you.

Colin facts, Colin was born in June 1969, just 19 days after me, and over two years before his brother Johnny.

It was at Abingdon School in Oxford that the members of Radio Head met in the mid-1980s.

Colin was in the same year as lead singer Tom York.

Guitarist Ed O'Brien was a year above them and drummer Phil Selway was two years above.

Colin's brother, guitarist and keyboard player Johnny Greenwood, the last to join the band, was three years below Tom and Colin.

That's info for all those people who really want to know what year people were in at the school.

Back then, the band's name was Honor Friday, because that was when they rehearsed.

It was, said an otherwise positive 1991 live review in the Melody Maker, a terrible name.

And when the band signed to EMI later that year, they changed it to Radio Head, after a song on the Talking Heads album, True Stories, as you know if you listened to last week's episode with David Byrne.

The band's first album, Pablo Honey, which contained the hit Creep, was was recorded in 1992 and produced by Paul Calderi and Sean Slade, who had previously worked with Radiohead favourites Pixies at the start of their career.

But despite the huge success of Creep in 1993, it quickly became clear that Radiohead were not to be the next big thing in the grunge movement that the Pixies had helped spawn and Nirvana dominated.

Instead, producer John Leckie and engineer Nigel Godrich helped the band mine more epic and spacey sounds on their second LP, The Bens, released in 1994.

Godrich produced the next album, 1997's OK Computer, and the six albums that have followed up to this point.

Kid A, Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief, In Rainbows, King of Limbs, and 2016's A Moon-Shaped Pool.

Radiohead's last live shows were in 2018, while Johnny has been playing with Tom York in The Smile and Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway have toured their solo music, Colin joined Nick Cave on tour with longtime Cave collaborator Warren Ellis in Australia in late 2022.

He fitted in so well that he has since become a recurring replacement bassist for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds due to the illness of longtime bassist Martin P.

Casey.

But in November and December of this year, 2025, Colin rejoins his Radiohead brothers for a handful of live residencies in European cities.

Yes, Radiohead are touring again.

As if that wasn't enough good news for Radiohead fans, last month saw the opening of an exhibition of artwork by Tom York and cover design collaborator Stanley Donwood at Oxford's Ashmoleon Museum.

I provided the voiceover for the audio guide.

which I think you can download to your phone.

And then you can have me doing my serious art voice as you walk through the gallery, interspersed with interviews with Tom and Stanley.

An even more insight into the world of Radiohead comes in the form of Colin's book of photographs, How to Disappear, which features candid photos of Radiohead taken between 2003 and 2018.

That was published earlier this year.

Well, it's quite rainy now.

Should we just shelter for a little bit, doglegs?

Rosie?

Here, let's pause here while I finish this intro.

My conversation with Colin was recorded face to face in London back in April this year, and it was great to get nerdy with him about life in a band that I've loved since the mid-90s.

I would say that Colin has a tendency to deflect investigations into what he does out of modesty, but the sinewy groove of his bass lines for Radiohead is a fundamental part of what makes many of the band's best songs so good, and we dug into a couple of those, as well as memories of crumbling buildings and spooky stately homes where Radiohead recorded OK Computer, Kid A, and In Rainbows.

Colin also told me what it was like to be on stage playing live with the band and what people can expect from this year's live shows.

We also talked about photography and Colin took me to task about what my problem is with photos anyway.

We began by hearing about Colin's life as a bad seed.

Back at the end for a bit more waffle, but right now with Colin Greenwood, here we go.

Ramble chat, let's have a ramble chat.

We'll focus first on this, then concentrate on that.

Come on, let's chew the fat and have a ramble chat.

Post on your conversation hope to find your talking hat.

How many people on stage with the bad seeds?

There's loads.

I think there's about one, two, three, four,

eight or nine.

I think.

So many bad seeds.

There's lots.

Well, I'm not a bad seed.

I'm standing in for a while whilst Marty gets better and stuff in Australia.

Martin Casey.

That's right.

So I'm just here for that period of time.

But it's just been an extraordinary experience and I've had the best time.

I mean, it's kind of two stories with me.

It's playing with them on tour with the bad seeds, but also I've been doing these solo, piano, and bass concerts with Nick around America.

And then we're going to do a whole bunch around Europe as well.

So that's literally just you and he on stage is it?

That's right yeah he asked me if I'd be interested in doing it a couple of years ago he invited me for some lunch in London and he said now then Colin obviously you can wear whatever you like but I was thinking that it would look great if we both wore suits and I was thinking, you know, I've been wearing my same double denim dad look with radio head for like 20, 25 years.

So I got all excited.

I thought

something that my mum would approve of finally.

So if I I wear a nice suit.

So I said, yeah, that's that would be great.

His wife is a fashion designer, right?

She is, that's right.

She's Susie.

Well, she's made these beautiful, sparkly sequin clothes for the singers who sort of float above the stage and they just shimmer and they look like they're suspended in the air whilst they're singing.

And it's just so fabulous.

I love my wife, but there's no question of her doing anything sartorially for me.

Oh, yeah.

I don't think, I mean, like, she recently has been buying what she calls tech bro jerk-in things for the boys.

Yes.

So she's dressed them up as tech bros, and that's how I would look if she had her way.

I mean, already I wear a lot of fleeces.

Yes.

It's a lot of fleeces with buckles.

So if I ever went on tour

and did some shows to promote my new album, which I have coming out this year, then...

Yes, outfits.

Something sparkly?

Do North Face do anything sparkly?

I just...

I don't know.

Sparkly hiking shorts.

Yes.

Stuff like if you're in a city and it's dark and you don't want to get hit by a car.

High viz, yeah.

High viz.

That's more my speed.

Yeah.

But what fun to be on stage to look great.

Yeah, right?

To be playing with someone like Nick Cave.

How did the association come around?

Like, were you already pals?

Well, no, not really.

I mean, I wasn't that...

gemmed up on the music because I always felt that the bad seeds were like far too cool for me.

I I mean, let's face it, a bit edgy, a bit naughty, a bit druggy.

And the birthday party, have you watched that documentary about the birthday party?

I did.

They're so naughty.

Yeah.

And they're pushing people around and they are just totally off the chain and they're living in squats and smoking all the eggs.

Yeah, that all that stuff was way out of my

comfort zone.

Comfort zone.

Exactly.

But I loved it.

Let Love In, that album with Do You Love Me on it and Red Right Hand and stuff like that, which came out I think in the 90s and I I sort of thrashed that record to death so I you know I did know them and did love the music but as you say I was a bit nervous about you know introducing them to my mum

so so yeah we have got the same manager basically all right yeah so what a showman what a performer what a what an amazing person who can like bring everyone in and create a congregation out of a crowd I would say right there you go have you have you learned anything do you are you gonna go back to your bandmates in radiohead and say now look guys the bad seeds do this thing that i think we could really benefit from

well actually the one thing i would say that i would not want to do that i've i've had to deal with with the bad seeds that i don't want to do with radiohead is eat late

they all have this sort of last supper type set up after the show because nick doesn't they don't really eat before the show because get too nervous and jumping up and down Yeah.

And we so we all finish the show and we all start having food around 11-12 o'clock at night.

That isn't good for the old gut.

It's you're just rolling around at two in the morning.

Yeah.

It's just like you can't sleep or anything.

But so that's that's if I'm not saying it's a negative, but it definitely is a something I won't be taking back to Radiohead.

So with the bad seeds, because you've been touring fairly recently with them, right?

Yes,

I'm on tour with them basically for on and off most of a lot of this year.

Okay.

Yeah.

And how does that compare to the olden days of touring when you were first out in America with Radiohead, for example?

Yeah.

Which would have been mid-90s?

That's right, yeah.

Well, I was just in Los Angeles, actually, and I walked down the Sunset Boulevard, walked past the old Hyatt Hotel, which used to be called the, was it the Riot on Sunset or the Riot House?

And we stayed there.

We were picked up by a wide-stretch limo.

This is you with Radiohead.

92, the Radiohead.

And they drove us to the Hyatt, which is where everyone would have stayed.

And I guess an anthrax were having an album launch party on the roof when we arrived, to which they cordially, we didn't know them from Adam, but they cordially invited us if we wanted to

rock up on the roof.

But it was an alcohol-free album launch party, so there were these like plastic tubs of sodas, of soft drinks.

And that's the first time I ever had smoked salmon and a bagel with capers and red onions for breakfast at the Hyatt, which was just just

all incredible.

And because we'd had this hit with creep, we had this sort of five-star introduction to American club touring.

But we were playing these, you know, tiny clubs, like I don't know, 500, 800 people.

We'd turn up, say, at Dallas, and there'd be this huge queue stretching around the block to get into this club to come and see us because we'd had this hit with creep, you know.

So it was just the most incredible experience to have this sort of sort of luxury grassroots experience of this this amazing country.

But did you all find that incredibly exciting and were you in a good mood about it?

Or was it

weird?

No, I think we all loved it.

You know, I think Ed in the band was really into what you two had done, this sort of romantic idea of America.

And Ed had done a gap year before college.

I think he'd done travelling in America on the Greyhound.

Plus, he had some family in America.

So we were like, great, you know, because there'd be some other artists.

We were on EMI UK at the time.

And what had seemed to happen is that some artists from the UK would like play like the coasts and not do anything else.

And we were like, we want to go everywhere and play to anyone.

And the other thing is, of course, when you go to America, do you find this that the way music sounds different in America?

The things you know here, they're rearranged by the American molecules in the air.

So you listen to, like, I don't know, where the streets have no name or something, or some hip-hop or whatever.

And suddenly, it's like, this is the soundtrack for this country and it all makes sense yeah in the hot environment with like with the sun beating down and the big wide streets that's right yeah yeah sure I know what you mean yeah so what is it like now when you're touring around with Nick Cave

Well, most recently in America, I've done this tour with him, which is in a weird way, actually, it's sort of a throwback to, remember when David Bowie was doing those tours of America?

Was it when he was doing The Man Who Fell to Earth?

Is it the Nicholas Rogue film?

And there's lots of stuff of him in the back of a car driving through.

In the Alan Yentob dock.

That's it, in the American landscape.

Cracked Actor.

Yeah, cracked actor.

Stuff like that, you know.

And it's like, Nick's like, that's how we get around from gig to gig.

We get into like an SUV and sit in the back and we've got some like snacks, like some nuts and crisps and things.

And maybe not crisps.

And fruit and stuff.

Crisps is going a bit far.

It is pushing the...

They're bad boys, but

there's limits.

Well, I'll eat them if they're there

but anyways we leave the hotel at 9 10 in the morning and then we'll drive from I don't know Cincinnati to Minneapolis or something and we'll do like seven eight hour drives oh

what's that like and you're just sat in the back with Nick Nick yeah that's right and just shooting the breeze he's working he's on the laptop okay right maybe he's pretending to work

typing away to someone to like listen to me gassing on he puts his headphones on and says like i'm just gonna listen to a podcast are you allowed to do that oh yeah and then uh we listen to some tracks sometimes we played in atlanta georgia and i we were going out for dinner the night before this like new southern cooking place you know food from the south like alabama and stuff

And I thought, I was thinking, I really wanted to talk to him about his screenwriting and his scripts and

writing dialogue.

Because he's, you know, he's such an amazing writer.

You know, how do you do that?

How do you write words for actors to say?

I just it's such an amazing because I've read scripts, I'm sure you've read them, and everything when you read a script, it seems so bald, doesn't it?

So, I wanted to ask him about that, and he was telling me about this film he made called The Proposition.

Yeah, I love it.

John Hillcoke directed it.

That's right, with Tom Hardy.

Yeah, it's a good film.

Yeah, it's great.

Anyway, so he was telling me about this scene where Tom Hardy's having his throat cut.

I don't know if you remember, but it goes on for quite a while because the guy is like soaring it, but that's you know, part of the direction to make it even more lurid.

And uh, you know, and he's telling me about that scene, and about you know,

and this voice says over our heads, he said, I was the actor in that scene with the knife at um, Tom Hardy's throat.

We looked up, and it was this guy who lives in Atlanta, who was working in the restaurant.

He was the actor from the scene.

That's weird, I know.

So, then he joined in the conversation about what you know, it was complete like random coincidence.

Whoa, you know, how does Nick process something like that?

Is he into

crazy universal alignments and spiritual strangeness?

Or does he go, oh, that was a weird coincidence?

I think he sort of just takes everything in as it happens.

So I've got this like photo book out about Radioheads called

How to Disappear, How to Remember What It's Called.

I've been doing some promo on the bad seeds tour around England, you know, and I went to Waterstone's bookshop in Glasgow, in the UK.

So this was in Scotland in Glasgow.

And the manager said to me, we had that Nick Kaye from the Bad Seeds through with his book about a year ago.

And I said, oh, how did that go?

You know?

And he said, well, it was his birthday.

So we had around 250 people turn up.

And a lot of them brought cake in the queue.

And he arranged for someone to come and cut up all the cake into slices.

Everyone got a slice of cake and he hugged every single person.

Whoa, that is not the bloke that I saw in the birthday party documentary.

No, and what does it feel like?

What does it feel like in America at the moment, Colin?

Tell us.

Well, it's a weird one because it's like people don't really want to talk about it.

Okay.

It's like they just look slightly pained and just don't want to discuss it.

That's what Colin Tobin said when I asked her.

Man, I love that podcast you did with him.

Oh, good, I'm glad.

I was working.

I'm sorry, I'm shouting at you about it now.

I was working, I was on tour with

the bad seeds.

We were playing in Lisbon, and I was like going for a run, and I was listening to Colm Tabine talking to you, and just I bloody loved it.

He's such an amazing writer.

Yeah,

no, he is, but I started by saying, because it was a few months before the election, and I was saying, you know, are people talking about it a lot in New York?

And he said, no, no one's talking about it because

they don't want to deal with it.

I was in America over the summer when the Democrat conventions were taking place in Philadelphia and in the Midwest and stuff, and you know, it was amazing.

I just watched it and thought, well, she's going to win, obviously.

Camela, that's right, not going back, we're not going back, all the chants and stuff.

And it was just so powerful, and so you know, they put on such a great show when they do that stuff.

You know, it was just brilliant.

So it's just, you know, very, you know, very sad.

You can't use the word sad because Trump uses the word sad.

Really, yeah, it was

sad.

Yeah.

It's not very nice.

That's the other one.

It's not nice.

I saw a thing as well of Musk

on a TV show getting quite emotional about Tim Waltz or someone

laughing at the falling stock price of Tesla.

And Musk was saying, you know, he's laughing because our company's not doing well.

Isn't that mean?

That's horrible, isn't it?

Why would you go on and be so pleased about someone else's misfortune?

That's mean.

Yeah.

And you're like, mate,

look in the mirror for a second.

Yeah.

I think it's how.

This chainsaw going out and celebrating all the cuts.

I think it's how quick people seem to be to take offence and be so upset and slighted.

Well, I've heard Nick Cave talking about that as well.

Like, he's always been, he's been someone who's actually managed to

navigate quite a good path through

the sort of

conversations around free speech or around the culture wars, I suppose.

Yeah that's right.

You know he's not a blowhard about it.

He likes to have an argument and a discussion because he's just very curious.

Right.

Because he just wants to find out

what you think and what you think about something.

You know,

he's very open and engaged to other points of view.

And I hope, you know, one of the things I hope I will have learnt from the time that I spent working with him is that I can try to approach that kind of worldview as well.

Do you have to be careful when you're together as a band, as radio head?

Do you have to be careful about having those kinds of discussions and whatever, whether it's culture wars or anything else?

Do you have to sort of go, okay, guys, not while we're rehearsing?

Yeah, well, I think that the difference between that, I suppose, is with that and Nick Cave, is that we've all been together since we were kids, so we all know

which buttons not to press.

Right.

Yeah, we all know that.

And it can be something like petty and trivial and or something like immense and irritating, whatever.

It's like Peter Jackson, the get back.

It's that same kind of thing.

I mean, have you seen that documentary?

It's so moving.

I don't know if it's worth

one scene where, um, towards the end, where um, they're clustered around the piano, and they're still talking about this idea of doing some kind of like live concert, and it sort of moved on to some other idea.

But I just found it fascinating the way the others all sort of clustered around John Lennon in this sort of protective way, because you could tell that the others felt that he was the one that was sort of more fragile in that situation.

You know, they were very protective of each other at points, which I thought was very beautiful.

Did you recognise that in your own relationship with your bandmates?

Yeah, I think we were all very respectful of each other and we all, you know, yeah, we all get on with each other and we're all kind and we all listen to each other.

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah me blah blah blah blue blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

conversation

Have you ever written a song?

No, I haven't written a song.

I do suffer some arrangements and write parts that I play on.

Yeah.

Although it's quite funny, I was in Brixton a few years ago and this guy stopped me on the, he was on a bicycle, sort of middle-aged bloke, whatever, and he was like, he said, oh, you're Colin Green from Radiohead.

He said, I said, yeah.

He said, oh, I'm a bass player too.

In fact, I teach bass.

And he said, I said, oh, that's great.

And he said, listen, I just want to say, like, I love your bass playing.

You know, some of my favourite bass lines, like you play and this stuff.

And I said, oh, right, okay.

And he said, yeah.

And I'll tell you what I love most.

It's this one called National Anthem.

That's an amazing studio.

Yeah, yeah, right.

And I said, oh, Tom wrote that.

You know, he did it when he was on four track, you know, when he was about 15 or something.

and recorded it too and he looked a bit abashed.

Then he said, I tell you what, there's this other one one that I really love.

It's called Where I End and You Begin.

I said, Tom did that one too.

That's it.

Tom wrote that one.

And then he just was looking more and more mortified and

he sort of wobbled off on his bicycle.

And it was like, I was like, you know, that's fine.

But they're great to play.

You know, I love it.

Yeah.

They're quite similar as well, those two ones.

They're almost the reverse of each other.

Yeah.

National anthem is doo-doo doo-doo doo-doo doo.

And then where I end and you begin is doo-doo doo doo doo do do doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo do yeah i guess they are yeah yeah well they've we've all got rhythmic clocks in us, in our bodies, how we respond to music.

That's also my slight hippy-dippy theory about metronomes.

Tom's always like 16th ahead of the beat on everything.

He's always

one little lurch before the one, which is kind of amazing.

I always remember talking to Johnny, your brother, once about Garage Band, which I use to make my music.

I love your music.

I was going to say, I'm loving all the new tunes as well.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And I talked to Johnny once about it and I said, do you ever use loops?

Like, because you guys use...

Yeah.

Well, actually, Pro Tools was the first bit of digital kit that you would use in the studio, I think.

Yeah.

So that didn't have loops on it.

No, but the first people to use loops, I suppose, would have been,

you know, and...

Well, not the first people, but like probably the most prominent would have been these people called the Dust Brothers who made the records for Beck.

Oh, yeah.

You know,

two turntables.

Weren't they making their own loops, though?

Yeah, and Beastie Boys is with Paul's boutique.

Right, but they wouldn't have been using the loops that came with a piece of software.

And Johnny, because I remember Johnny saying, like, no, we would never do that.

We would never use a loop that came with logic or something.

He said, no, we make our own stuff and we write our own code for the different effects and all that kind of stuff.

Right, well, he would do that.

He would write, he sits on a laptop and he uses this program called Max MSP,

which looks like a sort of digital version of like something from Bletchley Park, I guess.

It's all sort of bespoke, like you wouldn't lean on the ready-made aspects the labour-saving aspects of technology as a band or would you?

Well we've we used a lot more loops over the last few records because I think one of the things that Tom and maybe Nigel were really into was David Byrne talking heads when they were making rhythms and out of loops and stuff as well so I think we did a bunch of that with like records like King of Limbs.

And then I think on a Moonshaped Pool as well.

It was amazing.

Nigel turned the whole mixing desk into like a a drum machine by punching in Phil playing lots of different rhythms and stuff and then constructed this amazing rhythm track out of all of the loops.

So it's kind of like using like modern technology in a very old-fashioned way.

Yeah.

Which is very Nigel.

You know, amazing.

Like how you can make things out of like...

stuff, you know, using like old two-inch magnetic tape machines and turning it into like this some crazy drum machine It's like for okay computer we'd use microphone stands and we'd put tape all the way around the room through a tape machine so you'd have like 10 meters, I don't know, eight meters worth of tape sort of flying around the room being recorded into over and over again.

Like the Beatles did loads of that as well.

So a lot of this stuff, you know, it's not that new either.

It was done in Abbey Road in the 60s.

Yeah, but you're actually making the loops out of actual tape.

Yeah.

I'm just dragging them in from the library and Logic Pro.

But what's wrong with that?

I mean, well, because there's no, there's no labor in it.

You've got to have

made the effort.

Yeah, you don't.

Do you really?

The idea, the melody, the structure, you know, that's all fine.

I mean, you know, I know that Rihanna used a couple of garage band loops in some of her songs.

And, I mean, they're very good.

Well, a friend of mine works with, made a record with

Snoop Dogg.

Oh, yeah.

And he just like, he's got, I think is it, Fruity Loops or something on a laptop.

Yeah.

He just sits there and just knocks up these ferocious beats.

And that's what he's using.

So it's like, yeah, exactly.

It's what you do with it, isn't it?

I always remember a South Bank show documentary that I love about Bjork,

and she's there on walking down a beach somewhere with a Yamaha QY70, yeah, QI70.

Right.

And Sarah, my wife, got me one of those.

Actually, she got me the QI100

because she knew how much I admired Bjork and how I'd seen this dock.

And I was like, oh,

I want one of those.

We all bought one too.

Yeah, Yeah, did you?

Yeah, I never got past the manual.

It was like, I can't.

I know, she made it look so easy.

And she's coming up.

I've used it lots, actually.

Right.

But everything I've done is just with the presets.

Right.

And I never get beyond that.

You can go into it and you can customize everything.

Yeah.

And actually, it's got a really lovely bass sound.

Yeah.

A really thick, twangy, amazing, full, non-compressed sounding bass sound.

Yeah.

Which I've used lots.

But no, I could never, I don't have the wherewithal to to go in and start customizing and making really complicated things you want like a sort of slightly bored gum chewing like 18 year old like engineer wearing all his little belts with his boxer shorts pulled up yeah who does all that stuff for you and looks pityingly on you as you try and do it yourself yeah or johnny greenwood or johnny greenwood that's true how did you get so good at the bass like do you think that you and johnny are just one of you know that you're just those kinds of people who are innately musical and actually it's just a question of practicing and you will connect with your talent or do you think that it's more like you just practice enough and you get the proper lessons and you can get really good yeah i think b really yeah i'd say so yeah because but it's not it's that and it's also like having the drive i suppose because there's lots of really talented people who just don't exercise that talent but i think it's like it's being around with a bunch of people it's like well we were really inspired by what we heard stories about the pixies when they were like rehearsing a lot they worked their asses off in some rehearsal studio in Boston or wherever.

And so we thought that's what you had to do.

So we'd go in and like, you know, we work from like, I don't know, 10, 11 to like 5 every day for weeks on end in a lot of village halls around England.

You know, we worked really, really hard on it all.

Yeah, we played loads and loads.

And you were all on the same page.

There wasn't one of you saying, oh my god, do we have to do this again?

No, weirdly.

We never played any shows.

We weren't like those Americans who would go and play clubs and stuff.

You know, um that is one of the things i'm not sure is going so well now for kids who are in bands is the expense of or organization of getting in a room together for like say a few weeks or village halls because we used to like pay one pound fifty each and i'd get the money and i'd go and see mrs scott who was the keeper of the village hall key

and go and you know do the rehearsals and stuff and we'd rehearse for like four or five hours and it's a village hall

and now i think it's really tough for like kids to get together and find a practice space and you know, and do that and have that experience and make music together because it's a lot to organise.

So, I think a lot of people now they don't really rehearse, or they rehearse virtually, or they learn the parts and they're in their bedrooms and stuff, and then they, you know, I think it's a lot tougher.

And there's just so many more laptop jockeys, there's so many more kind of single artists

or you know, Billie Eilish types who can

to the extent that the style of the singing has changed, you know what I mean?

Like the kind of close mic breathy vocals of the laptop age.

Yeah, it's more hermetic.

Yeah, but I think, you know, if anyone wants to know what it was like, and I'm not making any other comparisons than this, I would say go and watch the, is it Peter Jackson Beatles?

Get back.

Get back.

If you want to know what it was like rehearsing with Radioheads, go and see Get Back when they're all getting together and they're just jamming and noodling and drinking tea and eating toast and talking about what was on the telly the night before, what was in the paper.

It was like that, basically, you know, for years.

Were the songs a fait accompli when they were brought in, or would you still be going, what about this for a middle-A?

Or would they still be getting written?

A lot of the songs were like written obviously by Tom and he would bring them in but then there would also be structure would change and then there would also be chords.

that would happen, you know, and occasionally and then songs and then things would be written around that.

I mean, it's so if you gave me, if you asked me a song, I would I would tell you.

Does he come in, sit down and play it on the guitar and then you all work it up together?

Was that how it would have been in the village hall?

Yes, that could happen on electric guitar.

He had an Ibenez, Ibenez Roadster.

So he doesn't come in and go, okay, Phil, this is what I want you to do.

No.

And Colin, this is what I want you to do on the bass.

No.

No, okay.

But

yeah, no, but it was all just like have a go and see what you think and,

you know, and then we just like work up the arrangements and some stuff would take a long time, and other stuff, you know, because we all had different tastes in music,

so everyone was very sort of

protective about their aesthetics, I suppose.

Quite right, yeah.

But, um, you know,

gotta be prosthetic, prosthetic, prosthetic about your detectives.

So, what about, like, as an example of a specific

bass part, okay, tell the story of Deep Into the Weeds, Deep Into the Weeds, okay, new.

Binger.

Fabulous.

I didn't slip you a piece of paper with nude on.

I mean, it's a beautiful piece of work because it...

I think part of the reason I liked it was that it didn't feel like a radio head line.

Yeah.

well, what happened was we were just jamming around, and

for me, it was Al Green.

I'd love Al Green.

And my brother had this amazing, like, Hammond, he had a Hammond organ, like a really big, like, old-fashioned Hammond organ that was in my mum's front room for years and stuff.

So, so there's all these terrible, like, Finbar Saunders jokes about my brother's enormous organ and the crew coming and having to carry my brother's, you know, that went on for years.

And so, that's amazing.

He plays this amazing soulful Hammond organ.

There's a conversion of outtakes on Okay, not Okay, on OK computer, you know that we put out,

but um, yeah, there's this song, um, How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, which is a BG song, and Al Green covers it.

And there's a version of it live in Tokyo where he goes into this falsetto and it becomes wordless and sort of escapes into the

Zephyr.

And it's so beautiful.

And I love that, and that's why I tried to get into nude that kind of arrangement.

It works so well.

And similarly, groovy, albeit faster, is staircase.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, to atom.

That's a good one.

Because I like all the washes of synth.

Yes.

And that's much more kind of

80s, early 80s electro pop for me.

It is, totally.

Well, so when we work on stuff, sometimes we have, I don't know how it works for you when you're working on

making something, but you have a sort of idea in your head and you're plucking at something that's way up in the firmament of past brilliant creativity and you're trying to drag some of that down.

So for me it was like, for us, me and my brother, it was like Miami Vice with what's his name?

Don Johnson.

Don Johnson, there you go.

And like, sort of, and Michael Mann movies, you know, all that.

And like looking at the TV series and the film, looking out across this sort of bleach, sort of boardwalk going into the sea and everything, and speedboats.

We're living the life when we're playing that in my head, anyway.

So, the other day

we were texting, and you said you'd listen to my episode with Kim Deal.

Oh yeah, I finished that this morning.

And you said,

I wish I could be in the moment like that.

Yes.

About her.

That's right.

What did you mean?

She just sounds very open and free and,

you know, the responses

just sound unmediated, you know, very direct.

And yeah, I really enjoyed that episode.

Do you feel when you're in interviews, do you feel like, oh, I've got to be careful?

What, not tread on any minds?

Yeah.

Well, our manager, Bryce, he always says with interviews and promos, keep it light, keep it moving is the golden rule.

I was listening to you the other day on a Rolling Stone podcast, I think you

towards the end of 2024.

And your interviewer there, I think he was Brian Hyatt, was

really trying hard to get some information out of you about whether you were going to be touring.

And it was like something from the Today programme with you

was I stonewalling furiously.

Furious stonewalling and obfuscation and eventually.

No sequiturs.

Because he had said, well, you've all been rehearsing.

And what was that all about?

Are you rehearsing for a tour?

And you were obviously just trying to not say what it was that you were doing.

Well, I'll tell you what happened.

It was last summer, and I was doing a live Zoom with a music festival in mexico

i was in london and they had the camera on and i could see it was like a music arts festival somewhere like in pachuca somewhere in one of the cities outside mexico city and they had an audience of like i don't know 16 17 18 year old kids and in this theater

about the my photo book how to disappear and they were like you know and it was just after we'd done this jam in crouch end in the summer of 24 and they were going well what are you going to play with some some kids like they had the microphone you know hey can you let us know if you ever if you're going to play again

and it just like I looked at all these kids who are like desperate to like hear us play or whatever and I just thought well we I just played with the guys like two weeks ago a week ago so I told I said yeah we just played last week and and it was just like yeah how could you how could you not say that then you know it's like such an amazing moment yeah

the reason you have to be secretive or or that you can't announce plans in advance it's because of all the ticket sales, right?

And because then, if there are rumors, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm speculating here.

That if there are rumors about you touring,

then disreputable companies claim to be selling tickets and start right.

I think the reality is that if you want to make any kind of plans to do any kind of like shows for us, you have to give the venues a minimum of like a year to year and a notice.

So, you know, if anyone thinks that anyone in radiohead says they're going to do a show, they're going to do some touring, you know, and there's rumors about it, it's not going to happen because you've got like that 18 months because everywhere is post-COVID already sold out, you know.

So, it's getting your slot to play is such a sort of long-term thing that there's never going to be any last-minute announcements.

Except, except, yeah, well, when we're doing this, we're speaking in early April

2025.

And there are rumors on Reddit at the moment that you're going to be touring later this year.

Yes.

So is that true?

Yes, it is true.

We are doing some shows at the end of the year in Europe.

We're doing like residencies, I guess.

We're doing four nights in five cities, which kind of sounds a bit like Sinatra-esque, perhaps.

So we're going to play like

Madrid, Bologna,

Berlin, and then London and then we're wrapping up in Copenhagen.

Yeah, and we're just going to take what we did, I suppose, in the summer of 24 when we did that little jam.

And we're not doing that many rehearsals either, so it all seems to be quite sort of relaxed.

This year, though, 2025, is going to be the 30th anniversary of the Benz.

Yes, that's right.

So many years.

So will you be...

You're not going to be playing the whole album through, or are you just going to sort of, is it going to be a mixed set?

Oh, I think it's going to be a mixed set.

I think we've like whittled it down to about 70 songs and uh me and my brother are not on the set list committee we're not allowed because we're too indecisive so that works so yeah so we'll play anything in any order at any time we sort of take a busking attitude to the radio head set list but yes it's going to be that

and um we're going to be playing everything stuff from the first record all the way through to now so yeah it's going to be the first time i think we've done shows where we haven't got new material to play as work in progress, but you never know, such stuff might come up or not, or whatever.

So, and I'd love to play um

there's that song Spectre, right?

Yeah, which you did play

in the last shows you did.

You're right, we did in America, you're so right.

For

Moonshake Pool, God, you're good.

Yeah, Tom played it on the Rhodes keyboard, I think, and I sort of noodled along on the bass as well.

But I think I want to play it like a full band thing, you know.

Right.

A la Paul McCartney Live and Let Die, you know, with some massive bit in the middle of like, you know, maybe not with the reggae bit,

which I love.

Yeah.

But, you know.

What does it matter to?

Yeah.

That's a good song, isn't it?

Yeah.

The reggae bit, I don't mind.

It never struck me as being problematic.

No.

But not even obla die, obla da strikes me as being too terrible.

Although you're supposed to hate that now, aren't you?

But it speaks of the sunshiny sort of exotic locations of the Bond films, doesn't it?

Yeah, maybe sipping a coconut cocktail like on the beach.

I mean, you know, it's no worse than a lot of the actual content of the film Live and Let Die as far as being

problematic.

Jane Seymour.

Was she in that?

Solitaire.

That's right.

And we recorded Oak Computer in her house.

Look at these

connections.

So smooth.

Yeah, that's right.

And she was in an advert called Lejarda and the Max Factor.

I remember it well.

That was in the Elizabethan Knott Garden and the terrace garden of that house.

So how did it work?

She would just rent the place out while she was off shooting.

Yeah, I think she's living in America, in LA, and I think she's doing Dr.

Quinn Medicine Woman.

Okay.

Yeah, and she'd rent it out to like cruises and had a block of time free.

I think we used it, and I think the cure recorded there as well.

And Robbie Williams did as well, I think.

Not at the same time.

No.

How does it work then?

When you record stuff, do you sit around afterwards and play back what you've been doing that day and have a glass of wine and nod at each other?

Well, we recorded a whole bunch of things that we liked the sound of so much, we would stay up to like four in the morning working on them.

And it was just us, it wasn't like anyone, the record company, they let us go away basically with Nigel, who at the time had been an assistant engineer at Rack Studios, with his mate Sam and Henry, who went on to make those records

07, that's right.

And just amazing.

And Sam and Henry also put the beats together with Nigel for National Anthem.

You know, cut up Phil's drums and stuff, old school, and an Akai sampler, and made that amazing, crunchy groove.

So, yeah, so we were just allowed to run off and play at this massive haunted, you know, house, you know, with just us and Nigel with all these toys.

And it was incredible.

When I look back at the self, the confidence that we had to go away and do something like that, having never done that before, and get away with it and make that record.

It's like subterranean homesick alien paranoid android.

Exit music for a film, you know, it's just incredible.

I think Phil was recording the drums right at the top floor, which was a sort of nursery with lots of stuffed cuddly toys and things, and

you know, children's cots and things.

And then it had that incredibly dead sound of the kit and everything.

So, and then I think Tom was singing downstairs somewhere, like in a big hall or in a corridor, with this sort of thing.

It was all amazing, incredible.

So I'm looking at a photograph of Tom all wrapped up in a blazer and wearing a scarf.

I think it would probably be the autumn as well when we were recording for In Rainbows at this house called Tottenham House on the edge of the Savonake Forest in Wiltshire.

One of the most run-down places we'd worked in.

It was kind of been abandoned,

you know, hadn't been lived in.

It had been

used as a for a drug rehab centre like a decade before, I guess.

And they had a gymnasium, but it was like an underground gymnasium.

It was in the basement, so it all had this sort of exercise equipment, sort of mouldering and stuff that hadn't, and there was like windows full of dead flies.

And we were told we couldn't sleep in it because it was structurally unsound.

So we rented like half a dozen caravans.

And of course, I don't know if you've slept in a caravan recently but sleeping in a caravan in October it gets very cold very quickly

So so we'd all get into our caravans and we'd just be like shivering away and then we'd wake up in the mornings and go and have like breakfast in this huge room that was all bare and there was nothing on the walls and it was bare floorboards because the family, the Cardigan family, Ola Cardigan, they ran out of money by the time they got to the stage of that stage of the house.

So it was all a bit grim really and freezing freezing cold.

How long were you there?

We were there for like too long.

I think we were there for like three weeks, you know?

Oh, okay.

Three, four weeks, four weeks.

I thought you were going to say like three months or something.

How long were you in the Jane Seymour place?

Oh, well, that was completely different.

We were there for like six to eight weeks.

We did two sessions there.

We were there for like about a month, went away and then came back.

Okay.

And you mentioned, I forgot to ask you when you said it, but you passingly referred to it as haunted.

Yes.

Do you think it was?

Jane Seymour's.

Yeah.

Well, Well, Tom was sleeping in the massive, like, master bedroom, which was all pink and had a huge four-poster bed, and then had a separate en suite bathroom.

And there were little sort of Jane Seymour dolls dotted about of her and different characters in her acting career.

You know, I guess they're like Barbie dolls, Barbie Jane Seymour.

Okay.

So, but I don't think he was sleeping very well, so I was sleeping in another room at the other end.

And supposedly, there was a ghost, which was supposedly the ghost of one of Henry VIII's wives who lived there, who was executed, but I can't remember which one.

And so we swapped bedrooms.

And I think he found my bedroom even more spooky.

I don't know if you ever slept in a really big room before, but you always have this feeling that someone's about to come in at the other end of the room because it's just like it's just so big.

So I was just in a state of perpetual awakenedness.

So it was all a bit spooky.

And, you know, it was the kind of place rich Americans would stay on, go on a cruise tour of England and want to go and visit, you know, ancient England, merry old England.

So that's kind of what we were doing.

Yeah.

When you go in to record a record, so like when you were going in to do In Rainbows, were you all feeling positive or do you sort of go in there and worry that your mojo is going to have abandoned you finally?

No, well what happens is we'd worked up a lot of the songs then, so it was just about getting songs sounding as good as you remember playing them.

I mean it's really...

I don't know, it's funny, isn't it, looking at these pictures in my book?

It's a bit like some kind of weird channel for Big Brother Brother house type thing, isn't it?

You know, if you wanted to add the pressure, you could put cameras in on the corners and stuff and like who gets voted out, you know, and all that kind of stuff.

It feels a bit like that, doesn't it?

Why would you put yourself in these challenging situations?

And then every weekend all these bikers would come at the end of the lane and you'd just see them.

They'd all be looking for magic mushrooms amongst the sheep shit at the end of the massive drive.

But, you know, I guess it sort of gives something to the records, an atmosphere, like a flavor, I suppose.

You know, with Kid A, we recorded in this massive house in a place called Moreton in the Marsh that was owned by some lord whose name I can't remember who visited briefly.

And again, his family hadn't lived in there for generations.

But the Mitford sisters used to go there, and we found some graffiti with their names written in one of these little towers on the corners of the formal gardens at the back, which was kind of amazing if you're interested in the Mitfords.

And then kids from the village in Moreton and the Marsh, they'd heard we were recording and they'd come and like hide in the bushes, like whilst we were working and stuff.

And Tom was kind of freaked out and he put a tent out by the control room outside in the big room because he didn't want to sleep in the house because it was too haunted.

And it was just extraordinary.

Another haunted one.

It was, you know, like the Remains of the Day,

film with about Shigeru.

It's a bit like one of those houses, only no one's lived there for like a hundred years, and then you've been given the keys back into it, and everything has been left when

all those people left.

Where would Radio Head be were it not for rambling houses of the British aristocracy?

That's right.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

God, anyway.

So some of the photos in your book are actually taken on stage during concerts.

How is it possible for you to have the wherewithal?

Are those just songs where you're not playing and you can get your camera out and wander around?

Well, one of your questions is a photograph of Tom looking out into the audience.

And I'm standing, as I always do, behind him.

And it says, how can you concentrate on stage with lights and shit yes and um I've often wondered that seeing you guys play because sometimes you're in more or less total darkness and you're still playing or there's strobes or it's just it's sort of extreme conditions and it's not as if you have those orbital torch glasses on maybe we should well yeah but you'd have to ask orbital that's their thing is it well yeah but maybe you know i'm sure you wouldn't yeah but um yeah how are you able to concentrate Well, back in the old days, you had these old-fashioned, like, filament lights, like really big old ones that you see, like big rock shows.

And the trouble with those ones, if you touch them, then you get burnt.

So now everything is like cool because it's LEDs.

So it's just like it's super fierce, the lighting and stuff.

There's so much light bouncing around and reflecting off the audience and onto the stage.

And there's so much fluorescent gaffer tape everywhere on the floor as well that you can just follow these paths.

And you take a carpet wherever you go you take this grey long rug that goes on the stage and it becomes this sort of that's your home from home you know that's your front room and you're having a few guests over for tea you know i remember seeing pearl jam with neil young at a festival and like i noticed they had like sort of rugs and carpets and joststicks and things and at the time i was a bit sniffy and thought it was a sort of american roccus affectation but i totally get that you want to sort of bring a bit of the front room to the stage you know, make it feel a bit cozy.

What you want is you want to feel really comfortable when you're up there.

I'm standing between two drummers.

I've got Phil and Clive.

And this is your domain, you know.

Will you have two drummers on the tour this year?

Yes, we are going to have two drummers on the tour.

Phil's working at the moment on it, and it's great for me because I get to like, you know, I get to check in with what each of them's doing.

Like, every on every song, I can wander over and and Phil loves it because he, I stop hassling him, I go and hassle, you know, Clive or Chris or whoever.

You know, I like it was amazing playing with Clive as well.

So, you know, he played with Porter's Head and Clive Dema.

Clive Demer.

What a drummer, Robert Plant, Ronnie Size.

I mean, what the, you know, all the drum and bass stuff that he does as well.

It's incredible.

So, in anticipation of seeing you guys play later this year,

can I ask you to, for my podcast listeners,

put yourself mentally on stage

and describe what it is like.

Right, what's it like?

Being in Radiohead, being on stage, little details, what do you see?

What do you see?

Take a step back.

Take a step back.

We're behind the stage.

There's a flight case, towels on the flight case.

It's like a sort of weird sort of altar thing, there's water bottles.

And there's the five of us just before we go on.

And that's when it's dark.

It's really dark.

I could never get a good picture because you can't pop up with a flash and go, you know.

And we have the team hug so we have individual hugs I think we have a group one and then we walk around to the monitor desk and we walk up rickety rackety stairs onto the stage following the fluorescent tape

and that's the thing about the crew and you spot them that everyone always moves slowly and deliberately because you want to like go ask over tit in front of 15,000 people

And then you walk on and you know we've been starting more recent shows with a slow song.

Is it Daydreaming?

a daydream is the first track off Moonshaped Paul there's a sort of arc there's a sort of narrative to the show there's a shape to the show I think of it like a roller coaster in a way that you want people to join you on and if you can get through the first three or five songs then this sort of rhythm and this momentum establishes itself and the space that you're in the music as you're playing it sort of becomes this bigger bubble that you're sharing with the audience and then you sort of of come out from it you surface at the end of the song and you feel that everyone else is as well in the audience and there's a point in the show usually about half three quarters of a way through where everyone's like hunkered down for the night and then it joins you on that journey i don't want to make it sound like a cheesy bunch of nonsense but it's so incredible is there a song that that happens typically with or some of the songs that that happens with?

Well, it depends.

I mean, if you ask me what I love playing, it's like songs like Arpeggi Weird Fishes and I like things like I like old songs like I like I'll play anything really but I'm thinking of they're there.

Yeah.

That seems to be one that gets quite trancey almost.

By the end of it everyone in the audience seems completely locked in.

We've got Phil and Johnny playing these big floor toms at the front of the stage.

The song that sort of builds and builds and then the payoff is my brother's.

I always think of my brother's guitar part at the end in the solo.

It's very angular.

It's like dung, ding, dung.

It's so right angles isn't it there's no soft edges it's all like sharp elbows and i love how that breaks across the end of the song and then phil breaks out and i'm trying to sort of do my sort of neil young bass sort of playing underneath it i love playing that song a lot you're right it's funny i was saying to my kids about like listening to back to the track and the car because my kids are listening to like radiohead or my my 15 year old he's like i ask him to offer a critique about what he thinks about the records and stuff like that so and i've been recently playing Hail to the Thief recently, so I like to see what he thinks, what he appreciates.

What's he enjoying about Hail to the Thief?

He loves 2 plus 2 and he loves the extremes of the record, which I think is great.

He loves 2 plus 2 and he loves Sail to the Moon.

But he loves Spectre.

And so he loves that sort of that slow pulsing piano thing that Tom plays on those tracks.

And he loves to play that too.

He had a piano lesson when he started having some piano lessons at school.

And this teacher, who's this amazing woman called Anna Blonsky, this amazing pianist.

She said to him, Well, why don't you play me something?

And so he started playing the chords of Spectre.

And then he turned around to the teacher and said, Yeah, my dad wrote that.

And it's like, No, I didn't, I didn't write it, you know.

But the fact that he loves that music and loves to play it makes me very happy.

I took a trip down the river of time.

I took a trip, took a trip down the river of time.

I packed some things for my trip down the river of time.

I packed some things for my trip down the river of time.

I took a camping chair and a fancy camera so I could sit and take pictures from my chair of the river of time.

Of the river of time, time, time, time, time.

I also made sure I had my laptop there so I could use my photo manipulation software and tweak the river of time.

Time, time, time, time.

Oh,

the river of time.

You be you,

the river of time.

Ooh, la la la,

it's long and covered in slime.

Ui you, the river of time.

I've put some post-it notes on a few pages of your book.

Ooh, a portrait of Radiohead.

This is a beautiful object that I am holding here.

Yes.

As you would expect from someone involved with the radio head organisation, every tiny detail has been considered and beautifully rendered.

Thank you.

You can respond to what I've written on the post-its however you wish.

You have to describe the photo that the post-it is attached to.

Okay, so it says pluck one.

Yeah, pick one that you like the look of that you can respond to.

Alright.

Let's start at the beginning.

Alright.

There's this photograph of me, which is bizarre, because it's like, I think it's the only one of me in the book, really.

And it's me playing this little short-scale bass in our rehearsal studio.

And I have written on the poster, is this how you see yourself?

You're looking moody.

Yes.

I'm looking sort of like some kind of indie rock pirate, aren't I?

You look good.

Beard.

Well, my brother took the photograph.

Right.

So I don't think I gave him a credit or anything.

And I'm playing a bass that I never used.

But we had a bass like...

We borrowed a bass like this.

This guy, amazing producer called John Leckie, who we did the Benz with.

He had a little bass.

it's like a Fender short scale one, and he had one that was played by, I think it was John Squire, used it on Fools Gold or Manny.

So, we used that on

Stone Roses.

That's right.

So, there's a radiohead song called Planet Telex, which is the first song on the Benz, and that's the bass I used on that.

It was the one that was on the bass for Fools Gold.

Oh, wow, which is really cool.

The same bass.

Wow.

Is that cool?

That's a good fact.

Yeah, so that's me holding a similar bass.

Planet Telex, talking about Staircase earlier, they are spiritual cousins in my mind.

They have that same space rock expansiveness.

Yeah, they totally, and they're sort of round a bass riff, aren't they?

Like a bass group.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's really, yeah, absolutely.

So there's that.

So we're moving on now.

Fave gear.

I love this photograph of my brother.

He's sitting behind some kind of like Cold War keyboard and there's like a sort of suitcase next to the tiny baker-like keyboard which looks like with a speaker in it and it's I think it says chamberlain on it so it's probably some kind of funky piece of American gear that Nigel picked up in LA or something and it's taken in our studio I can tell because there's a big piece of tape on the French door behind my brother to stop people like walking into it and yeah and he's just looking at me like you know slightly sort of staring with red eyes but I really got into this whole thing of like forensic photography the idea of like you can like make a picture of a crime scene and just take a picture and there's nothing really happening in the picture other than what's in the picture.

There's something sort of bald about the photograph.

so I thought for some of the photographs in my book I could approach them like a sort of police forensic photographer but obviously with less sort of mangled corpses and sort of drugs paraphernalia lying around yeah or road whatever they take pictures of you know this is like just pictures of like my friends playing music and what is your relationship with photography outside the band do you take a lot of photographs of your children and your family and friends and things like that?

Well I know, I mean I've heard in your your podcasts that you make these beautiful photo books.

You've done that over the years of your family.

In fact, I wanted to raise this subject with you on your podcast.

Yeah, go on.

Well, the most recent one that I've heard you made was with David Letterman, which is just fantastic.

And there was this very strong antipathy towards photography or to photographs that you seem to share.

My antipathy came from having looked through so many old photographs that my parents left behind.

After my mum died, I just, it was in the lockdown and I spent months scanning.

I bought a really nice scanner and I scanned all these transparencies and it was on the one hand an amazing strange experience of time traveling to places that I couldn't remember and it was like reconnecting with her.

in moments of her life that I had never known about before.

Yes.

Before I was born and seeing her when she was young and with her friends and with other partners and things like that.

So that was wonderful.

but then there were other times when it was back to our childhood and moments that I'd forgotten and being together out on the Sussex Downs, having a picnic one weekend.

And

I found those really painful when I was looking at it.

Just the feeling of time having passed and the worry that...

Well, I suppose the worry that, you know, when you're grieving for someone, it sometimes feels like you'll never be happy again.

Yeah.

And you can't imagine what it would be like to be happy.

And if you're a certain age, you know, in your 50s or whatever, you can start thinking like, oh, it's just downhill from now on.

Yeah.

And photographs hammer that feeling really hard.

Yeah.

And it's so painful, especially to see children when they're little.

Even at the time, I remember taking photographs of my children when they were five or whatever.

Yeah.

But even looking back a few seconds after I'd taken it would be painful because I would be aware, like, it's just a a few seconds now yeah but before I know it it's gonna be a few years yeah and then a couple of decades and I could feel it pulling away from me instantly whilst you were making the photo yeah you feel that I mean that is that's something I need to discuss with my therapist because that is like I'm not in the moment yeah but don't you ever get that yeah I do but then what I think about when I see the pictures of my kids is I find it hard to remember where we were well I know where we were but what it was like then

there's lots of different losses and stuff isn't it because you're like you say you're irredeemably cut off from the past and you can't go back to the past and the photograph doesn't take you back to that point because it's actually really hard because it's just a moment it's a frame in the film that's spun out and been played years before so it's very i think it's very difficult people talk about how look photograph reminds you of a day and a conversation and a story and a period it doesn't really it's like you know what i mean it's it can remind you of a place maybe but you think it's something out of time it's out of time, yeah.

I think so.

I saw this interview with Brian Eno, who I like very much, and he was talking about cameras.

This is from 1992 in an interview in Wired that he did with Mark Sinker.

And he says, I've always hated cameras because they force me to be somewhere else at the same time.

When someone points a camera at you, you are no longer just there.

You're also in the future looking back on this picture.

So you're suddenly forced to be self-regarding as well.

Well, that's why I like taking taking pictures of the band because I can get out of that bubble when we're together and I can photograph them.

Is it a power move as well, being the person behind the camera?

Well, no, I mean, I'm very shy about it, and I could have probably done a much better job.

And I think about how tolerant and patient they were of my intrusion onto

the other guys in the band when they were either like in the studio or like preparing to go on stage and stuff.

So I'm just enormously grateful for that.

You know, and I have such respect for like portrait photographers like this guy called Harry Borden.

Do you know him?

I do.

He's a great photographer who photographs loads of artists and musicians, and he's got a really cool YouTube blog that his son makes with him where he talks about.

Oh, yes, he was at your book launch.

He was.

I met him.

I had a great chat with him.

Yeah, he's brilliant, and he talks about photographing David Bailey, and it's really great.

And I just think there's a sort of cool discipline to that, and there's a sort of an ambition and aiming for something that's kind of nothing to do really with there's what he wants out of it, never mind what the subject, what you're talking about you know the subject what they feel about it and I think you just have to accept that that you're sort of being like lifted out of a moment in time and put behind glass and someone else's exhibition it's the objective nature of it I suppose that's photographs serving an artistic purpose.

That's true.

But then for most people photography is aid memoir and so that's why you get the situation of people given the choice between going on holiday and having their memory wiped or just staying home.

Yeah, most people will just take staying home.

Do you know what I mean?

Like they need the memories.

The photographs are part of the experience of hanging on to a moment, clinging on to life and trying to confound the slipping away of time.

But for me, what I like about a photograph, it's my friend Charlotte, who I just saw actually, who used to play in the band when we were kids at school.

She played saxophone with me.

Oh, really?

When you were on a Friday?

I don't know what you're talking about.

Yes, that's right.

That's terrible.

That's my one creative contribution, which was a terrible.

Were you named?

Did you name the band on a Friday?

No, it's awful.

Anyway, so.

Come on, you can't just gloss over that.

Well, I can't remember who might have initiated the sort of bald nature of that title.

So possibly.

What was the other?

You had another name as well.

There were a whole bunch of them.

I mean, it was sort of blurred, I suppose, because we didn't really know when we were going to do what we were going to do.

I don't know.

But going back to the photography.

Oh, he's denying that.

Yeah.

There were other.

Do you want the other names?

Yes.

Well, there were a lot of them are like demo tape names that Tom had on cassettes, like Shindig.

Oh, yeah, Shindig.

I remember Shindig.

Dearest, and

you know, it's a whole bunch.

It's funny, actually.

My son's like got a little band together, which is really cool, and he hasn't come up with a name yet.

And of course, I keep suggesting names.

And I come up with what I think are cool names.

I actually know some cool people in Washington who like play on old punk bands and they tell me cool names and one of the names I thought was really cool was Dreams

and sort of it met with a you know I can't believe there isn't a band called Dreams.

I think there probably is but you know within the context of something

you know that would have a profile.

Coming up with band names is one of life's great pleasures.

Is it though?

I think it is.

But there's just all those awful sort of 90s ironic band generator things that just make you want to curl up.

Yeah, well that's why you need human beings inventing them.

Because it's fun.

You gotta, it's a really fun thing.

When Tom and Johnny were rehearsing for Smile Shows and they hadn't named themselves yet,

Johnny said, like, have you got any ideas?

Because he knew that I liked coming up with band names.

Yeah.

And I had loads of ideas.

Yeah.

And I said

I texted them all through to him.

And, well, one of them that he liked was Meet Counter.

And some other ones I had was Lady Dada,

Hey Siri.

I'm getting the same reactions from you that I got from Johnny to those ones.

Oh yeah, John and

I had John and Two Thomases because the other guy in the band is called Tom.

Tom, yeah.

John and Two Thomases.

John and Two Thomas.

Anyway, obviously they didn't go for that.

But

one that Johnny seemed to genuinely like was Prostate Modern.

As in Secondary Modern?

No, as in Tate Modern.

Prostate Modern.

But now it's Prostate Modern because you're over a certain name.

You're a school and you went to a gallery.

I think, you know.

Oh, yeah.

Anyway, so they didn't go with any of those.

But I was happy with Prostate Modern.

So, sorry, I

derailed you.

You derail away?

Well, photography.

My friend Charlotte, who used to play saxophone with her sister Elizabeth and Rasmus, they were the sax trio we had.

She was curator in photography at the Victorian Albert Museum for like 11 years or something.

So I used to go and look at the collection with her.

And she basically was my sort of mentor and she taught me loads.

And when I see a photograph, it's like she used this phrase called the itchy scratchy feeling.

It's that idea there's something in the image that makes you want to look at it again.

There's something about the frame that's organized in a certain way that is greater than the component parts of that moment in reality.

And it's that sort of tension between something that's been created that's satisfying to look at that is also, you know, can be random in a way.

Although, of course, stuff is also constructed.

But so that makes any sense.

I said that would be the difference between what we were talking about with kid snaps.

Yeah, the pain of kid snaps.

Yeah, and an image that saves something by this old guy I was I love called Alfred Stieglitz who was like a turn of the century American photographer who could make a photograph that could be

you know your gaze could endure upon it.

So you know how someone sees the world it's like anything else they can have a particular vision and style that can translate into being appreciated by anybody but can be singular too.

So that's what I love and the photographs I made in my book in a way it's similar to the Radiohead songs.

And what I bring to the music is my love of other musicians and other styles of music.

It's my love of other photographers and other styles of photography in a tiny, crappy way that I'm trying to emulate.

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Continue.

Hey, welcome back, podcats.

That was Colin Greenwood talking to me there.

Among the links in the description of today's podcast is one to Colin's lovely photo book, How to Disappear,

which is available in standard format and as a kind of crazily deluxe special limited edition signed by the band with extra knickknacks.

Anyway, that's in the description.

Also there is a link to the Ashmoleon exhibition of Tom York and Stanley Donwood's artwork for Radiohead and for the smile, which is called This Is What You Get.

It's on right now as I speak and runs until the 11th of January next year, 2026.

Reading from the blurb now, featuring over 180 works from album cover paintings and digital compositions to unpublished sketches and lyrics, the show traces the evolution of their imagery alongside Radioheads' groundbreaking music.

Organized chronologically, it highlights their inventive use of materials, early experiments with technology, and their shared fascination with landscapes, both real and psychological.

The exhibition culminates with their most recent colourful works created during the pandemic, including large-scale tapestries inspired by maps and nature.

And yes, it's my voice on the audio guide, which I think you can download to your phone and listen to as you stroll through the wonderful visual world of Tom and Stanley.

But many thanks to Colin Greenwood for making the time to come and talk to me.

Much appreciated.

Oh dear, the weather is quite stinky this morning out here in Norfolk.

Fairly windy, very grey

and the rain is just, well it's not too hard, but it's enough to take the edge off the fun slightly.

It's a little bit like the weather at End of the Road Festival this year,

Although that was more hardcore.

There was a period of several hours on Saturday End of the Road Festival when it was just non-stop.

But actually it didn't take the edge off the fun on that occasion.

It was a really good atmosphere, I thought, as I was wandering around there.

And

I was there because I was playing a music show.

So last week on the David Byrne episode, I was saying I'd been rehearsing with a band with Joe Mount of Metronomy and a couple of current and ex-members of that band in order to play

about 10 or 11 of my songs from my new album Buckle Up

at a handful of live shows.

And in the end, we played one in a very small club in East London called Folklore

and then next day we went to Bristol, played a couple of shows in a beautiful small arty venue called the Cube which I really liked.

Rosie

over this way.

This way doglegs

and then the day after that we made our way to End of the Road Festival where we played an unannounced secret set late on Friday night to a packed tent of folks who had come along to see who the secret band was.

I think some of them had figured out that I was going to be there.

It was a very encouraging and warm reception that I got.

I think there's a lot of six music listeners and

generally sympathetic folks who go to that festival.

I met lots of nice people.

And it was a good experience.

I mean, I think, considering it was our fourth time playing in front of actual human beings, I thought it went okay.

And at one point, my sons even got up on stage.

They were there with me at the festival and on one of my tracks called My Feelings, which I don't think you will have heard at this point.

Oh, maybe you will have heard it if you listened to me and Joe Mount at Latitude Festival on Virgin Radio.

But they came and they accompanied me on that.

Frank played the guitar, and Nat played the flute on that track.

They were very nervous beforehand.

But it was a lovely moment.

For me at least, I don't know what it was like for the audience.

Maybe they were being violently ill.

But we had a great night.

And the next morning I bumped into Stuart Lee, who was performing at the festival.

He said that he had seen a bit of the set.

And then he said, So have you got that out of your system now?

I had to tell him that I don't completely

and

there are going to be more shows but I'll let you know when those happen

and

you know generally you can stay more or less abreast of what I'm doing

if you go onto my website adam-buxton.co.uk

And if you scroll down on the front page of that website, you have the option to sign up for a newsletter as well, which I don't send out very often, but I guess

there might be a few more than normal.

Like, normal would be one every two years on the evidence of the past decade.

But recently it's been a bit more frequent because of the book and now the album.

That option is there for you if you would like to be kept abreast of what I'm up to in the next few months.

Thank you very much to everyone who turned out for those shows.

I really hope you enjoyed them and it was very nice to meet some of you afterwards as well.

Thanks for your kind words and general warmth.

Addendum.

I'm just about to upload the podcast, but I suddenly realized when I was recording my outro the other day in Rainy Norfolk, I forgot about the comments I'd made at the top of my conversation with Colin when we were discussing the stage outfits that Nick Cave's wife put together and I very dismissively said that I was unlikely to be in a similar position with my wife and that if it was up to her we'd all be wearing tech bro fleeces or whatever.

In fact that turned out to be entirely untrue.

My beautiful wife bought me a shirt for my birthday this year which has actually ended up being kind of my band uniform.

I've worn the heck out of it.

It was a blue linen shirt from a great clothes shop in Norwich called Shopkeeper in Upper St.

Giles Street, not sponsored by them, just giving a local business a shout-out.

And I liked it so much that I bought several more in different colours, and I gave them to the band to wear as well, so they could all be dressed up like Adam Buxton

with docker caps as well.

Anyway, the point is, I apologise for minimising my wife's sartorial genius, and for all the pain I've caused, I've spoken to her about it, and she's considering her options.

End of addendum.

Back to outro.

Thank yous.

Thanks to Helen Green, she does the artwork for this podcast, as well as my book and a bit on my album.

But thanks, most of all to you for coming back, for listening right to the end.

You're the best.

And I really do think that we should have some kind of creepy hug.

What do you what do you say?

Oh, okay.

No, no, that's fine.

I just I apologize.

I misread the room.

Maybe we could just shake hands.

Come here.

Hey,

good to see you.

Is that a new fabric conditioner you're using?

You smell very fresh.

And until next time, we share the same outl space.

I do hope that you go carefully out there.

It's not getting any less nutty.

And for what it's worth, please bear in mind that I love you.

Bye!

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