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Colin Greenwood on BBC 6 Music
Toots and the Maytals' cover of “Let Down” reached the band backstage at the Tower Theatre, at the 2006 warm-up shows before In Rainbows.
12 July 2013 · BBC 6 Music · Colin Greenwood
Colin Greenwood fills 6 Music's Sunday Service with a mixtape of mixtapes, records his friends have passed on to him, and says Giorgio Moroder, “believe it or not”, has been a massive influence on him as Radiohead work on new songs. A remix of Rufus Wainwright's “Lost in the Tear Garden”, a tour bus favourite on the last tour, showed him how “Everything in Its Right Place” could stretch out live like an old 12-inch remix. Q-Tip gave him a disco tape on a visit to Oxford to see Nigel Godrich, and Colin kept him in herbal tea while Godrich went off to look at an old mixing desk.
When the band bus gets too much and the others have had enough of him, he escapes to the backline bus for reggae and a cold cider with Duncan Swift, Jonny's guitar tech of 20 years. Toots and the Maytals' cover of “Let Down” first reached the band backstage at the Tower Theatre in Upper Darby, outside Philadelphia, at the 2006 warm-up shows before In Rainbows, and blew them away. He saw the Cocteau Twins with Thom Yorke at the New Theatre in Oxford in about 1985, and waited through the encore break while a huge two-reel tape machine centre stage slowly spun their beats back to the start. He loved Bauhaus's “Bela Lugosi's Dead” as a half-hearted teenage goth, and the band still put it on after shows. He signs off with Moodswings' “Spiritual High”, from the 90s, when he went to the occasional evening party in a field around Oxfordshire “before the government balls this all up”.
where it comes up
- 0:04 A mixtape of mixtapes
- 1:17 Rufus Wainwright and “Everything in Its Right Place”
- 2:01 Q-Tip's disco tape
- 3:01 Cocteau Twins at the New Theatre
- 3:54 Giorgio Moroder and the new songs
- 4:19 Duncan Swift's reggae on the backline bus
- 5:06 Toots and the Maytals' “Let Down”
- 5:37 South Africa and the Children's Radio Foundation
- 7:52 Serge Gainsbourg and the OK Computer B-sides
- 11:48 Moodswings and parties in fields
sources · 1
- “(2013/07/12) BBC 6 Music, Sunday Service, Colin”, Radiohead's interviews' archive, 14 July 2013