The band · the five
Jonny Greenwood
Lead guitar · arrangements
The arranger of noise and strings.
- Plays
- Guitar, keyboards, ondes Martenot, viola
- Born
- 5 November 1971 · Oxford
- In the band since
- 1985, the last of the five to join
photo
Photo: Raph_PH · CC BY 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons_(cropped).jpg){kind=link}
Jonathan Richard Guy Greenwood is the youngest of the five and the last to join. Colin's younger brother, three school years below the others, he talked his way into On a Friday on harmonica and keyboards, and the guitar came after. For a while the others kept his keyboard turned down in the mix.
He came to the band with a classical training: recorder as a child, viola in the Thames Vale Youth Orchestra, music at A level. When the record deal came he left a music and psychology course at Oxford Polytechnic after barely a term. In Radiohead he writes the string and orchestral parts, and he brought in the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument he plays on stage.
He plays guitar hard enough to hurt himself, and wears a brace on his right arm for the repetitive strain. The noise that tears through “Paranoid Android” is his.
Beyond Radiohead
After Bodysong (2003) came a long run of scores for Paul Thomas Anderson, from There Will Be Blood (2007) through The Master (2012), Inherent Vice (2014), Phantom Thread (2017) and Licorice Pizza (2021) to One Battle After Another (2025). Between them he scored We Need to Talk About Kevin, You Were Never Really Here, The Power of the Dog and Spencer.
He has been nominated for three Academy Awards, for Phantom Thread, The Power of the Dog and One Battle After Another, and has not won. There Will Be Blood was ruled ineligible in January 2008, because it drew on music he had written before the film, much of it his own concert work. He made the Indian devotional record Junun (2015) with Shye Ben Tzur and the Rajasthan Express in a Rajasthan fort, and the follow-up, Ranjha (2026), in his own studio in Oxfordshire. He plays in The Smile with Thom and Tom Skinner.
His songs are in Songs, his nights on stage in the live archive. Without the band, he played Pilton, 2010, Macerata, 2017.