Colin Greenwood on Adam Buxton Podcast

Adam Buxton talks to Colin Greenwood for his podcast, face to face in London in early April 2025, and Colin confirms what Reddit suspected. Radiohead will play four nights in each of five cities at the end of the year, Madrid, Bologna, Berlin, London and Copenhagen, from a list whittled down to about 70 songs. He and his brother Jonny are not on the set-list committee, because they are too indecisive. He had nearly given it away the summer before, on a Zoom with teenagers at a festival in Mexico a week after the band's jam in Crouch End. Asked if they would ever play again, he couldn't bring himself to say no.

He has never written a song, only arrangements and his own parts. A bass teacher on a bicycle once stopped him in Brixton to praise his lines on “The National Anthem” and “Where I End and You Begin”, and Colin had to tell him Thom Yorke wrote both. The bass in “Nude” came from Al Green's live “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart” in Tokyo, where the falsetto goes wordless, and “Staircase” was Miami Vice in the brothers' heads. On “Planet Telex” he played a short-scale Fender borrowed from John Leckie, the one used on the Stone Roses' “Fool's Gold”.

The houses get a long stretch. At Jane Seymour's, for OK Computer, Thom Yorke slept in a pink master bedroom dotted with dolls of her characters, swapped with Colin and found his room even spookier, and Phil Selway's drums went down in a top-floor nursery full of cuddly toys. Tottenham House, for In Rainbows, was too unsound to sleep in, so they rented caravans, in October. Near Moreton-in-Marsh, making Kid A, Yorke pitched a tent rather than sleep in the house. Anyone who wants to know what rehearsing with Radiohead was like, Colin says, should watch Get Back, all tea and toast and talk about the telly the night before, for years.