Colin Greenwood on BBC Radio 3

Colin Greenwood picks music for BBC Radio 3, with his book How to Disappear out since October. It collects his own photographs of the band at work in Oxford and on stages round the world from about 2003 to A Moon Shaped Pool, with an essay meant to sit beside you while you look. When the family lived in Germany his parents played Schubert songs and Simon and Garfunkel on Sunday mornings, and bought Jonny a recorder and him a guitar. Classical guitar lapsed when he had to cut his nails for the bass, and came back over Covid, after concerts in a small Oxfordshire church at the end of 2020, where he heard Paul Lewis play and Mark Padmore sing Schumann's Dichterliebe. So he starts with Padmore singing Handel, then Duke Ellington's “Caravan” with Charles Mingus and Max Roach, and Eric Whitacre's “Child of Wonder” sung by Voces8, which takes him back to Jonny's choir arrangements on A Moon Shaped Pool.

Learning the double bass, he calls himself a very bad student. He also picks Voces8 singing “Pyramid Song”. Phil Cohran's “The Minstrel” reminds him that Radiohead, inspired by the Pixies, rehearsed endlessly before they ever played to anyone. The last stretch is about Nina Simone.