Jonny Greenwood On Radiohead’s Creep: “I found it a bit wimpy.”

Speaking in the latest issue of MOJO, on sale now, Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood has recounted his attempt to sabotage the recording of the band’s breakthrough hit Creep, interrupting frontman Thom Yorke’s song with his now distinctive guitar crunches in the studio.

“It was known as The Scott Walker Song for ages,” Greenwood tells MOJO’s Dorian Lynskey. “I suppose the nauseating adolescent in me found it a bit wimpy and wanted to make it the opposite. Can’t be having ballads! A distortion pedal and a loud guitar is an enormously exciting thing,”

Despite initial interest in the UK press for 1992’s Drill EP, Creep’s parent album, Radiohead’s 1993 debut Pablo Honey, was initially met with indifference and disappointing sales. When it was first released in September 1992, Creep only reached number 78 in the UK singles chart. It wasn’t until the song was picked up internationally and in the US that it gathered momentum, reaching number 7 exactly a year after it was released.

“I remember [co-producer] Sean Slade saying, ‘Wow, it’s a shame no one will get to hear this, because it’s really good,’” remembers Greenwood. “Because it was the first album from a band who had no real prospects. But through a huge amount of luck, it was discovered. And even when it was, we were all desperate to say, Yeah, but that’s not what we mean! The Bends is a much better record because it felt like us getting back to what we’d been like five years earlier when we were still a school band.”

Three years younger than brother Colin, Greenwood was 13 when he was asked to join the group Colin and classmate Thom Yorke had formed with fellow pupils at Abingdon School near Oxford, Ed O’Brien and Phil Selway.

“It was always Colin’s friends’ band,” he says. “They were older and bigger and more frightening. Even though we’re in our fifties, we still have that relationship where I’m the irritating younger brother. You don’t catch up.”

The band initially calling themselves On A Friday, as that was the day they would rehearse in Abingdon’s music room, Greenwood recalls being impressed by Yorke’s songwriting abilities even when they were still at school.

“I remember thinking, Wow, Thom’s writing songs that sound as good as an Elvis Costello song, but there’s probably someone like that in every school in the country. You don’t realise it’s unusual. But looking back, he was, and remains, unusual.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Greenwood describes the process of working on the songs Yorke brings to the studio.

“I think if Thom is Leonard Cohen, you want to make sure you record the right version of Hallelujah. His version is fine, but the song is toweringly great. So that’s always the motivation,” he says. “Thom has just sat down and played Pyramid Song on piano. How do you do it justice? How do you arrange it? How do you not mess it up?”

When asked about a Radiohead song he originated, Greenwood recalls presenting Yorke with “half-hour-long jams of a gruesomely exploratory nature” during the protracted sessions for 2000’s Kid A, which would form the basis of Idioteque.

“He had the patience to listen through and say there’s a chord sequence in the middle of this that’s going to be great," says Greenwood. "He’s got enormous reserves of stamina and enthusiasm. He’ll be the one to run into the room when Ed’s doing something and say, ‘That sounds amazing!’”

Recording the follow-up to 1997’s OK Computer was famously tense, as the rest of the band initially struggled to work around Yorke’s embrace of electronic music. As a multi-instrumentalist trained in music theory, however, the younger Greenwood was perhaps best equipped to adapt to the group’s new way of working.

“My standard joke was if you put me in charge, there’d be two extra Radiohead albums, but the quality would be 80, 90 per cent. I was always up for moving forward quickly and releasing things constantly. So I was impatient,” recalls Greenwood of the sessions. “My role was to say, Come on, this is good enough. What’s the next thing? I’m sure it was me complaining that finally got OK Computer released.”

It’s been ten years since Radiohead released their last album, A Moon Shaped Pool, during which time Yorke and Greenwood have released two albums as The Smile, but last year Radiohead reconvened for their first shows since 2018 (you can read MOJO’s report from their first night at London’s O2 HERE).

“It’s incredible that we’re playing live again and that it feels so great and everyone is loving each other’s company. You hear of other bands getting together and having multiple managers and multiple sound people. We seem very blessed.”

“Everything else is just noise…”

Get the latest issue of MOJO to read the interview with Jonny Greenwood in full. On the agenda: Politics, Pixies, and the peril of rock cliché “Spinal Tap is always lurking on the edges…” he tells Dorian Lynksey. More information and to order a copy HERE!

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