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Jonny Greenwood says Radiohead still talk but need to plan time together
Jonny Greenwood tells John Lewis of The Guardian that there is lots of music coming from Radiohead's members, just not as Radiohead. The Smile tour Europe again in June, Ed O'Brien is making another solo record, and Colin Greenwood is playing bass with Nick Cave. We're still talking all the time, we just need to make a plan and get some time together sorted out in advance. I've never been very good at that.
1 O'Brien spoke about the band in 2022, and Phil Selway in 2023.
Jonny has started on Paul Thomas Anderson's next film, their sixth together, and plans to revive his label, Octatonic Records, with a record by the cellist Oliver Coates later this year.
The interview comes a week before the premiere of 268 Years of Reverb, an eight-hour drone piece for church organ played in shifts by the organists James McVinnie and Eliza McCarthy. It runs from 2pm to 10pm on Saturday 18 May at the Octagon Chapel in Norwich. The number in the title is the age of the host building's organ sound, so the title will change with every church that takes the piece. Its first and last chords reach below and above the range of hearing, which Jonny likens to the rainbow being only the part of the spectrum we can see. The organ is the lungs and voice of any building where it is installed.
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The interest began in Le Marche, where he and his family live part of the year. After the 2016 earthquake in central Italy he joined the campaigns to rebuild, and a local mayor took him round churches in need of repair, where he played medieval organs. Their mechanisms, he says, were tackling the problems of synthesis, sampling and sound reproduction that studios face now. One, at Comunanza near the Sibillini mountains, has a little water tank that makes a birdsong burble.
I love the idea that these ancient churches have centuries of sounds that have almost soaked into the walls and the organ pipes
Jonny Greenwood1