Colin Greenwood on RTE Radio 1

Colin Greenwood talks to RTÉ Radio 1's Arena by phone about How to Disappear, his book of photographs of the band over 13 years, while on tour with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Photography goes back to an old friend who played with them at school and later worked at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The pictures start around 2003 because the band had built their own studio and stopped moving between other people's. He shot black and white film and prints it in a darkroom at home, partly because beginners are told to and partly because black and white is more forgiving as you get older. One picture shows his friend Jason Evans photographing Thom Yorke at the Landmark Hotel in London, where the band did their press for Hail to the Thief.

He rarely took pictures while they worked on songs, because he was working on songs, and the few he took are in the book. On stage he could, in the songs where he is not playing, and got some of his freest pictures of the others because they were too busy worrying about the next note. He followed his brother Jonny in and out of arena bathrooms, and nobody told him to get lost, because “they're too English”. He got Jonny into the band when Jonny was 12 or 13, “so he owes me”. For years the band rehearsed out of sight, and the village halls of Oxfordshire, he says, profited from their shyness.

Soul records on a Toshiba receiver, Otis Redding and Booker T and the MGs, made him love the bass as the glue between melody and rhythm. On “Nude” he suggested going into falsetto halfway, as Al Green does in his cover of the Bee Gees' “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart”. Asked about Radiohead now, he can confirm only that they got together in the summer and banged through a lot of the songs; it went really well, and they would all love to find a way to do something together again. On tour with Nick Cave, he calls Warren Ellis, a multi-instrumentalist and musical director, the Jonny Greenwood of the Bad Seeds.