Jonny Greenwood

recorder groups

Jonathan Richard Guy Greenwood was born in Oxford on 5 November 1971, two years after his brother Colin. Their father was in the army, stationed in Germany, and the family moved with him. “My father was a bomb disposal expert,” he told BBC Radio 4 in 2021. “Not a job I'd have managed, because I'm very badly colourblind.” His father died when he was six.

The recorder was his first instrument, and he never put it down. He played baroque music in recorder groups as a teenager and stayed in them until he was 18. Playing American arenas with Radiohead, he would get to the venue early and take his recorder into the showers, for the reverb.

I should have been stealing cars and getting in fights, but instead I was just happily sitting around with a group of other recorder players.

Jonny Greenwood · BBC Radio 4, 5 February 2021

He arrived at Abingdon School, a private boys' school south of Oxford, in September 1983, three school years behind Colin. At Abingdon he played in a band called Illiterate Hands, with Thom Yorke's younger brother Andy.

the keyboard turned off

On a Friday was Colin's band, formed at Abingdon in 1985 with Yorke, Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway and named after the day they rehearsed. “It was always Colin's friends' band,” Jonny told MOJO in 2026. “They were older and bigger and more frightening.” Jonny was the youngest: 14, he told the website Toazted, when they were 16. He came in on harmonica.

The band had not got on with one keyboard player because he played too loud, so when Jonny got his chance on keyboards, he made sure his was switched off. He told NPR's Fresh Air that he mimed for months while Yorke praised the texture he was adding, then went home in the evenings, worked out the chords and turned it up a little at a time.

He studied music all through his school years in the band. At 15 or 16 he heard Messiaen's Turangalîla-Symphonie, with the ondes Martenot, an early electronic keyboard, “swooping around with the strings”, and thought of it in the same category as the Pixies, New Order and the Fall. At 17 his viola got him into the Thames Vale Youth Orchestra “without the talent, just with the right instrument”, as he put it to The New Yorker, and he heard a roomful of strings playing in tune for the first time. He studied music until he was 18, ending on Bach chorales, and says he still relies on those lessons. His first gig as a fan was the Fall in Oxford, and he walked out after four songs, he told BBC 6 Music, and waited outside.

In 1991 he started a music course at Oxford Polytechnic and lasted a few weeks before the band signed to EMI. One of the few lectures he had, he told BBC Radio 3, was on Krzysztof Penderecki, and the idea that a string orchestra on its own could make white noise stayed with him. At the signing, EMI's Rupert Perry told him his favourite song on their tape was “Phillipa Chicken”, and Jonny had to tell him the band had dropped it.

the crunch

On a Friday became Radiohead, and Jonny became their lead guitarist. Inside the band “Creep” was known for ages as the Scott Walker song, and the guitar crunches he hit in it were an attempt to spoil it. “The nauseating adolescent in me found it a bit wimpy and wanted to make it the opposite,” he told MOJO. “Can't be having ballads!”

It was a hit in Israel before Britain or America, and the band played there in 1993. On that trip he met Sharona Katan, an Israeli visual artist, who became his wife.

On tour in the 1990s he wore a brace on his arm, which Radio New Zealand put down in 1998 to occupational overuse. Asked about it on BBC 6 Music in 2013, he said it had been for repetitive strain injury. By 2016 it was gone, and he told Adam Buxton the trouble had been “compounded by advanced hypochondria, I think.” In October 1995 the band's equipment was stolen in Denver, his Fender Telecaster Plus with it. That guitar was back with him by February 2015.

The Bends had a cellist and a violinist on it, and he wrote out simple parts for them. They were polite about it, he told The New Yorker, and it made him want to write more. On OK Computer the slow middle of “Paranoid Android” is, in his words, “a sort of rip off of Bach chorale style writing, which I learned at school”. He was the one pushing to finish. His standing joke is that with him in charge there would have been two extra Radiohead albums at 80 or 90 per cent of the quality. “I'm sure it was me complaining that finally got OK Computer released,” he told MOJO.

Jonny Greenwood talking to MuchMusic backstage at the Tibetan Freedom Concert, Downing Stadium, New York, 7 June 1997· MuchMusicthe whole interview →

the ondes martenot

He had heard the ondes Martenot only on records and could not even find a picture of one when he heard of one for sale through a shop in Paris. He told the film-maker Caroline Martel, for her film on the ondes Martenot, that it was delivered in a box to the studio where the band were recording in Paris, and that there was no one to show him which finger to use, which is why, filmed playing it in 2006, he was using the wrong one. It is on “How to Disappear Completely”, with the strings he arranged for Kid A.

“Idioteque” came out of his “half-hour-long jams of a gruesomely exploratory nature”, he told MOJO. Yorke had the patience to listen through them and find the chord sequence in the middle. By 2003, he told the Dutch broadcaster VPRO, he was writing his own software, as he had in BASIC as a boy on a Sinclair Spectrum, rather than use other people's programs.

I used to hate… a lot of electronic music or writing electronic music and using computers, and then I realized why. It's because you're not using the computer really, you're… using the software, you're using somebody else's idea of… how the computer should make music.

Jonny Greenwood · VPRO, 11 June 2003

His first record of his own was Bodysong in 2003, the score for Simon Pummell's film of life from birth to death, made from archive footage. It had a banjo on it, an instrument Nigel Godrich would never let him play on Radiohead's albums, and in its string quartets, he told The Independent, “I got really bitter and gave the viola all the interesting stuff.” At the Rotterdam film festival that year Paul Thomas Anderson ducked into a screening of it to get out of the rain.

Jonny Greenwood talking to Launch, 28 July 2003· Launchthe whole interview →

there will be blood

In May 2004 the BBC made him its composer in residence, writing for Radio 3 and the BBC Concert Orchestra. He was, as BBC News put it, a classically trained viola player who had not been trained in classical composition, and Roger Wright, the head of Radio 3, said that was the joy of it: “Jonny is not a classical composer.” For the BBC he wrote Popcorn Superhet Receiver, for strings, played by the BBC Concert Orchestra at LSO St Luke's in London on 23 April 2005, and it won the BBC Radio 3 Listeners' Award at the British Composer Awards the next year. It began with long car rides when he was a boy.

You'd listen to a song on a cassette over and over again until everyone was sick of it, and then they turned it off and you just hear the engine, and I used to pretend I could still hear the music.

Jonny Greenwood · BBC Radio 4, July 2015

Anderson got hold of a bootleg of it. “He wrote to me, and I'd not heard of him,” Jonny told The New Yorker, “and he said, 'Can I use this in the film, and will you write some more?'” The film was There Will Be Blood, and the score won Best Composer at the Critics' Choice Awards and a Silver Bear in Berlin. In January 2008 the Academy ruled it ineligible for an Oscar. About 35 minutes of the music in the film had been written for it, against roughly 46 minutes that already existed, among them about 15 minutes of Popcorn Superhet Receiver and pieces by Arvo Pärt and Brahms.

He went on scoring. For Tran Anh Hung's Norwegian Wood in 2010 he hunted down 1960s guitars and a reel-to-reel recorder, to make the music as the book's characters would have, and in 2011 he scored Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin.

penderecki

In March 2012 Nonesuch put out a record he shared with the composer that lecture was about: Penderecki's “Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima” and “Polymorphia” beside Popcorn Superhet Receiver and 48 Responses to Polymorphia, Jonny's answer to the second. When the two met, Jonny showed him software that turned recordings of strings into sounds very like Penderecki's. Penderecki had turned his back on electronics in the 1960s, and Jonny came to the same conclusion: an orchestra playing those colours was more vivid.

The Master followed that year, his second film with Anderson, built in part on one of Messiaen's scales. For Inherent Vice in 2014, he told The New Yorker, Anderson “wanted the music to make clear that it's a joke, but it's not just a joke.” The same year he wrote Water for the Australian Chamber Orchestra and played Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint on Reich's record Radio Rewrite.

Jonny Greenwood talking about Krzysztof Penderecki for Anna Schmidt's film, 2012· Anna Schmidtthe whole interview →

junun

In February 2015 he spent nearly three weeks in Mehrangarh Fort above Jodhpur, making Junun with the Israeli composer Shye Ben Tzur and the Rajasthan Express, a band of Rajasthani musicians, with Godrich producing and Anderson filming it. Jonny then talked the rest of Radiohead into taking the Rajasthan Express as their support on parts of the 2016–18 tour. Asked by El País how the band's fans took them, he said: “They reacted really well.”

On A Moon Shaped Pool he let the strings take over. “With 'Burn the Witch', I finally had the gall to say, let's leave this completely unfinished and let the strings finish it,” he told The Guardian. “In the past, I wouldn't have had the brass neck.”

For Anderson's Phantom Thread in 2017, Anderson asked for romantic music that was also quite English, and sent him a lot of Nelson Riddle. Jonny tried to steer him towards Glenn Gould and Bach.

He basically likes to take the piss out of me and was joking about how unromantic Radiohead is, and said, come on, you must have some romance in you, and give me more strings.

Jonny Greenwood · Adam Buxton, 9 February 2018

It was his first Oscar nomination. On 4 March 2018 the award went to Alexandre Desplat for The Shape of Water.

the smile

On 10 September 2019 the Proms gave him a late night at the Royal Albert Hall, which closed on Horror vacui, 36 minutes for 68 strings and the solo violin of Daniel Pioro. “There's maybe 20 bars I'd happily take out,” he told The Guardian. That autumn he launched a record label for soloists and small groups, Octatonic, named after his favourite eight-note scale (“Yeah, I know, nerdy”).

For Jane Campion's The Power of the Dog he tried a string quartet with banjo, which he called terrible, and ended up playing a cello like a banjo, with Sellotape marking where the frets would be. It was his second Oscar nomination; on 27 March 2022 the award went to Hans Zimmer for Dune. In 2021 he also scored Pablo Larraín's Spencer. Reviewers found Anderson's Licorice Pizza light and happy, which, he told The New Yorker, was obviously because it hardly used any of his miserable music.

Jonny Greenwood backstage at End of the Road, 2021· End of the Roadthe whole interview →

The Smile, named after a Ted Hughes poem, are Jonny, Yorke and the jazz drummer Tom Skinner. They were first seen on 22 May 2021, on Glastonbury's livestream from Worthy Farm. Their first album, A Light for Attracting Attention, came out in May 2022. In June 2023 he released Jarak Qaribak with the Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, love songs from across the Middle East sung in Arabic.

ranjha

The Smile put out two more albums in 2024, Wall of Eyes in January and Cutouts in October. In May 2024 Jonny played Tel Aviv with Tassa, and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel accused him of “artwashing of Israel's genocide”. “Silencing Israeli artists for being born Jewish in Israel doesn't seem like any way to reach an understanding,” he said in a statement. In July he was taken seriously ill with an infection and spent time in intensive care, and The Smile cancelled their European tour. In May 2025 his concerts with Tassa in Bristol and London were called off after the venues received threats.

Radiohead came back in November 2025 for 20 arena nights in Madrid, Bologna, London, Copenhagen and Berlin. “I was ill for two shows, and I was so depressed that I was ill, that I couldn't enjoy every second of it, like I had the rest of the shows,” Jonny told The Telegraph, without saying which two or what he had. The illness the band announced, Yorke's throat infection, moved two Copenhagen nights to mid-December.

His score for Anderson's One Battle After Another was written from the script and played against the day's footage as they filmed. It was his third Oscar nomination. On 15 March 2026 the film won Best Picture and the score lost to Ludwig Göransson's Sinners. In February the Hallé had played the premiere of his violin concerto, for Pioro, rewritten from Horror vacui until one eight-note phrase was all that was left of it.

Ranjha, his second record with Ben Tzur and the Rajasthan Express, came out in May 2026, and he made it in his studio in Oxfordshire. The title comes from a romantic story in Indian mythology. “It's a bit like Romeo and Juliet,” he told The Telegraph. “I think Ranjha is the Romeo character.”