Jonny Greenwood gives Musikexpress a rare interview on The Smile

Jonny Greenwood has talked to Torsten Groß of the German magazine Musikexpress about The Smile, a band that has given very few interviews. Asked about the name, he says Thom Yorke cites Ted Hughes's poem “The Smile”, while he prefers William Blake's poem of the same title, so the band probably sit somewhere between the two.

Radiohead are a great band, Greenwood says, and The Smile feel lighter, a second start he is grateful for. Asked why new ideas go to The Smile and not Radiohead, he says Ed O'Brien is recording solo albums and Philip Selway and Colin Greenwood are busy with projects of their own. I think we all just need some time to become creatively fresh and fit again as a group.¹

The trio first met in summer 2018 and swapped ideas digitally through the lockdowns. This year's two albums, Wall of Eyes and Cutouts, came out of one set of sessions with the producer Sam Petts-Davies, at Abbey Road, where a painting room let them make both covers with Stanley Donwood. Splitting the music in two was never the plan. Eight or ten songs at a time suited it, and the songs that were finished went on Wall of Eyes.

“Bodies Laughing” was fast when they played it live, but in the studio the tempo felt wrong, so Yorke took the lead on a nylon-string guitar, the only one he owns. “Foreign Spies” began as a sequence Greenwood had worked on for some time before Yorke sang over it. He never had a metal phase, though Petts-Davies got him into the Japanese band Maximum the Hormone during the recording, and Yorke has long loved Boris, so metal may yet come.

We like danger at concerts. No risk, no fun.

Jonny Greenwood¹

Greenwood plays a keyboard on the floor with his feet, which is meant to sound like a 40-piece orchestra. Interestingly, that never works.¹