Colin Greenwood

an army childhood

Colin Charles Greenwood was born on 26 June 1969 at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. His father, Ray, served in the army's Ordnance Corps, and the family went where he was sent: to Germany, then Didcot, Suffolk, Abingdon and Oakley. Colin went to five primary schools. At home there was Burl Ives, Scott Joplin, Simon and Garfunkel and a Mozart horn concerto, and the three children each got an instrument. Colin's was a guitar, at seven. His younger brother, Jonny, got a recorder.

He met Thom Yorke at 12 at Abingdon School, where they were in the same year and learned classical guitar from the same teacher. When Yorke's school punk band, TNT, broke up, Yorke got a new band together with Ed O'Brien, and because O'Brien already played guitar, they asked Colin to play bass. “I think I dodged a bullet on that one,” Colin told The Big Issue in 2024. His mother bought him his first bass, a black Westone, and he learned by listening to New Order, Joy Division and Otis Redding.

That band was On a Friday, formed in 1985 and named for the day they could use the school's music room. When the headmaster billed them £60 for rehearsing there on a Sunday, the director of music, Terry James, tore the bill up and left it on the headmaster's desk. It was Colin who brought in Jonny, two years younger. Their first show was at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford in August 1986.

We did hide our lights under a bushel for a very long time, it's true, and… the village halls of Oxfordshire definitely profited from our… shyness and reticence to ever be in front of the public.

Colin Greenwood · RTÉ Radio 1, 22 October 2024

the record shop counter

He went up to Peterhouse, Cambridge, to read history, changed his mind over the summer after reading his favourite poetry books in a library in Oxford, and read English instead. He was the college's entertainments officer, played the college bars and the balls at St John's and Pembroke, and came home in the holidays to rehearse. By 1990 the five members of On a Friday were sharing a house on Ridgefield Road in Oxford.

After Cambridge he took a job behind the counter of the Our Price record shop in Oxford. Keith Wozencroft, an EMI sales rep about to move into A&R, came in on a round of goodbyes, and Colin handed him On a Friday's demo with the words “You should sign my band.” Wozencroft took them to his boss, Nick Gatfield. By December 1991, the Oxford paper Curfew reported, 25 A&R men had paid to get into a packed Jericho Tavern to see them. They signed with EMI and took a new name from a Talking Heads song, Colin's first favourite band.

the van

The first tours were in a rusty white van, the tour manager handed out £5 for fish and chips, and the Adelphi in Hull was, as Colin remembered it, a terraced house with a pool table and a deaf dog. The press held their school against them. “We were from a private school, played our first gig in a beautiful city, and had signed a record deal,” he told the Oxford Times in 2013. “We had worked hard, but in their eyes we were privileged.” By June 1993 “Creep” had taken them across America on a tour bus with 12 beds.

They played the NME Stage at Glastonbury on 26 June 1994, his 25th birthday, and Yorke told the crowd, who sang Happy Birthday to Colin. It was Colin who announced The Bends to the fans, in the band's W.A.S.T.E. newsletter in 1995. While John Leckie mixed that record, the band slipped off with the engineer Nigel Godrich to record “Black Star”. “Everything after that was Nigel,” Colin said in 2024.

ok computer

OK Computer started in January 1996 in Canned Applause, a converted apple shed in Oxfordshire, and it was Colin who wrote the history of the sessions for the press kit Capitol sent out in America. On “Airbag” he and Phil Selway were after the sound of DJ Shadow. His bass drops out and comes back without warning. Of his playing in general he told Bass Magazine in 2019, “You can tell that I've been told not to play too much for years!”

Thom… used to say I used to noodle furiously too much across things. So it's actually… been a good discipline to try and keep things simple, and also within my relative limits of ability as well.

Colin Greenwood · BBC 6 Music, June 2017

At Glastonbury in June 1997 the monitors and the lights failed on stage, and he came off in tears. “So traumatic,” he calls it. In New York, at an after-party following U2's set at a Tibetan Freedom Concert, he met Molly McGrann, an American writer who was studying creative writing. She took to Oxford over dinner at the Aziz on the Cowley Road, and they married at the Oxford Register Office in December 1998.

Colin Greenwood talking to MuchMusic, 31 July 1997· MuchMusicthe whole interview →

in a band with other people

Asked on BBC Radio 3 in January 2001 what he had done on Kid A, he said he had done nothing really. In March 2000, in the sessions that made Kid A and Amnesiac, Ed O'Brien wrote in his diary that Colin had finished an amazing bass part on a song with no name, and that bass players would not believe it.

On “Pyramid Song” he sometimes plays a Korean student-model double bass, and he told The Irish Times in 2001 that the song was a nightmare to play every night. In the same interview he said, “I don't think of myself as a bass player anyway. I'm just in a band with other people.”

He was also the one who talked. Yorke once called him the band's secret weapon, the member who would chat to anyone, any time. On 27 July 2000, the day after a judge ordered Napster shut, Colin argued for it on BBC Two, and NME called Radiohead the first British band to speak out. On 7 July 2001 Radiohead played South Park in Oxford, and his house on Southfield Road was a five-minute walk from the stage. His mother came.

the camera

From 2003, the year of Hail to the Thief, he took a camera into the studio and on stage, a small black Yashica T4 Super. He had been interested in photography since the early 1990s, he said later, but everything had been too intense. His three sons were born in 2003, 2005 and 2009.

For In Rainbows he and Godrich recorded 30 children from the Matrix Music School near Abingdon in March 2007, and their cheering is on “15 Step”. He named “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi” his favourite song on the album. In Rainbows went out as a download, at whatever price the buyer chose, on 10 October 2007, his wife's birthday, and he watched the file arrive in his email over breakfast.

Colin Greenwood on MTV Canada, 15 August 2008, on the In Rainbows tour· MTV Canadathe whole interview →

the radio

The King of Limbs opens with “Bloom”, which waited on one of his bass lines. “Then Colin had that bass line, and Thom started singing,” Jonny told Rolling Stone.

In October 2011, the year that record came out, Colin wrote on the band's blog that he had joined the Children's Radio Foundation, which runs radio by young people in Africa, saying it took in some of his passions, radio and the internet. On a visit to South Africa to see its work, he told the Mail & Guardian that had he not been a musician he would have loved to be a journalist.

Closer to home he took up the cause of the local venues where bands start. In January 2014 he was the ambassador of the first Independent Venue Week, and his own night, on 1 February, was at the Jericho Tavern, where On a Friday had played their first show. He put Glass Animals at the top of the bill.

Colin Greenwood recording a message for the Children's Radio Foundation in the arena in Washington DC, 3 June 2012· CRFthe whole interview →

europe

Away from Radiohead he played for other people. He played bass on the Belgian singer Tamino's “Indigo Night” in 2018 and on Tamino's albums Amir and Sahar, with three nights at the Ancienne Belgique in Brussels and an NPR Tiny Desk session along the way. On the way up to the Tiny Desk, one of Colin's sons texted that it was the coolest thing his father had ever done. He played bass on “Brasil” for O'Brien's first album, Earth.

When Britain left the European Union without a deal for touring musicians, he wrote in The Guardian in February 2021 that “Like Hamburg to the Beatles, Europe was crucial to our growth as a band”, and took the argument to Sky News and ITV News on behalf of the bands still coming up.

At the end of 2022 Colin played bass for Nick Cave and Warren Ellis on the Australian leg of their Carnage tour, recorded for a live album at the Sydney Opera House, and in the autumn of 2023 he was the only other musician on stage for 19 nights of Cave's solo tour of North America.

Colin Greenwood talking to Sky News about touring after Brexit, 8 February 2021· Sky Newsthe whole interview →

how to disappear

He is credited for additional bass on Wild God, the Bad Seeds' album of August 2024. Cave and Ellis wanted the record less sealed off, and Colin was close by. “I literally lived down the road,” he told MOJO. “And I make good tea.” He was not joining the band. “Am I a Bad Seed now? No! I love the Bad Seeds as they are.” When the Bad Seeds' bassist, Martyn Casey, was too ill to tour that autumn, Colin played the 33 arena nights in his place, from Oberhausen to Paris, and went on to play with them in North America in 2025 and in Australia, New Zealand and Europe in 2026.

His book, How to Disappear: A Portrait of Radiohead, came out from John Murray on 15 October 2024: photographs of the band from 2003 to 2016, Hail to the Thief to A Moon Shaped Pool, with a long essay of his own. Cave told him to begin it where the pictures begin, with the band neither starting out nor at the top. Some of the photographs were taken on stage in the songs where the bass is not needed, of bandmates too busy playing to object.

If you want to know what it was like rehearsing with Radiohead, 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.

Colin Greenwood · The Adam Buxton Podcast, 5 September 2025

The five had rehearsed in London in the summer of 2024, just to play the old songs, and in November and December 2025 Radiohead played 20 arena nights in Madrid, Bologna, London, Copenhagen and Berlin, their first shows in seven years. At the O2 he tried, and failed, to get the whole arena clapping in time to “15 Step”. The photographer Greg Williams, three days with the band near Bologna, noticed that Colin kept a Leica on his amp.