Colin Greenwood's book of Radiohead photographs is out

How to Disappear, Colin Greenwood's book of photographs of Radiohead at work, is out today from John Murray Press at £26, seven months after he announced it. It runs from the Hail to the Thief sessions in 2003 to A Moon Shaped Pool in 2016, and most of the pictures have not been published before. The title nods to “How to Disappear Completely” on Kid A, and to how seldom Colin turns up in his own book.

A studio blackboard lists possible track names for Hail to the Thief, and Stanley Donwood paints that album's cover in a cowshed at the band's Oxfordshire studio in 2003. Jonny Greenwood plays a viola in a bath, for the sound. Thom Yorke sings “Spectre”, the song written for the 2015 Bond film and turned down, to an orchestra at Air Studios.

On stage Colin takes pictures in the stretches of a song when his bass is not needed. That’s when I pick up the camera and then take photographs of my friends who can’t object because they’re busy playing still¹, he tells CNN. Jonny is always up for a picture, which the rest of the band have not always been, and Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway made encouraging noises when he showed them the book. Charlotte Cotton, one of the saxophonists when the band were On a Friday in the mid-1980s and later a photography curator at the V&A, encouraged his interest in photography in the early 1990s. For the essay, Nick Cave told him to start from the middle of the story.

In The Big Issue's Letter to My Younger Self he goes back to school, where the headmaster, who lived about 100 metres from the music school, tried to bill the band £60 for rehearsing there on a Sunday afternoon. The director of music, Terry James, tore the bill up and put it on the headmaster's desk. Colin and Yorke were in the same school year and had the same classical guitar teacher, and Colin was asked to play bass because O'Brien already played guitar. I never let my brother Jonny forget that it was me that got him into the band.³

He was in tears after Radiohead's Glastonbury headline set in 1997, when the monitors and lights failed and Yorke walked off until O'Brien brought him back. Hearing the BBC recording years later, he thought it sounded amazing.

The five met to rehearse in early summer, as he said last month, with nothing in mind but seeing how it felt. We are talking to each other, and yes, we are hoping to make some plans.¹