Channel V, 2-98
Radiohead were in Australia in February 1998, and played to adoring crowds all over the country. In this interview, Jabba and bassist Colin Greenwood get cosy in a lounge chair and discuss everything from video clips and remixes to the pressures of success...
Jabba: Hello there. Jabbatron here, in this luxurious hotel foyer with Mr Colin Greenwood from the band, Radiohead. He plays bass, his brother's in the band too... How are you?
Colin: Fine - I just had a nice lunch down opposite the Stock Exchange in the centre of Sydney - it was lovely.
Jabba: How long have you been in Australia for?
Colin: Only about four days; we flew in from Wellington and we landed in Melbourne. We did two shows in Melbourne - the Exhibition Centre I think it is - where the Beatles played in the 60s. It was great - hasn't changed since ...
Jabba: Did you come across stage-diving, moshing at the gig?
Colin: No, in fact, cos we don't like that very much, and we make sure the audience knows that as well. It's not much fun doing a gig and seeing the kids getting hurt at the front. Kind of puts you off your stride.
Jabba: You have been out here before ...
Colin: Yes, in the spring of 1994 - we were in the middle of recording our last album, The Bends.
Jabba: Last time you came out "Creep" would have been really huge
Colin: Last time we came out "Creep" had already been huge up to eight months before and nobody came to see us apart from Sydney which has always been the happening centre of Australia obviously. We played in front of 50 people in Adelaide and 60 people in Brisbane, a few more people in Melbourne actually... but it was a bit of a disastrous tour really.
Jabba: Do you think you were battling the one hit wonder stigma?
Colin: Yes exactly. We arrived too late to get any vibe off the hit single and too soon before the new album had come out... so it's fair enough, we weren't surprised.
Jabba: Your latest album OK Computer has received rave reviews pretty much everywhere in the world, was there anywhere where it didn't?
Colin: Well, no I don't know... the fact that it has been well reviewed has absolutely nothing to do with us so it's very flattering. Certain factions in the NME cite it as an attempt to revive the excesses of the progressive rock of the 70s without bothering to listen to anything that we were listening to at the time, when we were doing OK Computer... from Miles Davis to Shadow to Massive Attack to Bjork to Sparklehorse to... all the contemporary music stuff that we all love and worship and attempt to reflect in what we do, so you know. It's just boring anyway, I don't want to talk about them.
Jabba: Thom appears in the videos, and you guys do the interviews - does the media try and separate the front man and put him on the pedestal and leave the band?
Colin: No all those things that happen are all decisions made by the five of us, so to be honest with you I'm very grateful that we haven't been in the videos for the past three because they are awful things and all of us would rather not have to do them, they are a no-bonus job which cost a fortune and put you into thrall with the record company and they are just one more tool for them to be able to control and manipulate you. So we are in a fortunate position where we have sold enough records to recoup against our video costs but what sort of sense is it to spend an album budget... you can make a well-recorded album for the price of filming one video. So it's crazy... as soon as whatever happens in the next 10 years happens, then hopefully all video channels will all be fucked then, that would be good.
Jabba: We'll all be making chips!
Colin: Obviously there is diversification, there's other things to do with the medium, you don't just have to use the same format. Hopefully it will change.
So yeah, there was an animation with "Paranoid Android" and then Thom was in "Karma Police" and "No Surprises" and I am very grateful for that cos there is nothing more boring than hanging around on a set waiting to do a video between the hours of 6 in the evening... or even 9 in the evening till 7 in the morning for two days, costing a couple of hundred thousand dollars ...
Jabba: I read there was a plan where you were going to do a film clip for every song?
Colin: Yeah, that was the plan originally, but the budget just got crazy, so what we've decided to do instead is pursue this documentary thing, with this friend of ours, colleague of ours, Grant, who's been basically following us on tour and photographing. And we've been doing sound recordings of the records since the launch of the album in May in Barcelona last year, all the way through to now. He's actually here with us in Australia.
Jabba:Is he filming any of the shows?
Colin: Yeah, he's filmed lots of live footage. I think he's going to stop doing that now, he's just trying to get his head round what we do. I think he's done more interviews and stuff than anything else.
Jabba: You mentioned the cost of making a clip, the "Paranoid Android" clip which was done by Magnus Carlsson, wouldn't that save money?
Colin: Animation is very expensive - well his type of animation is very expensive, well that's what he told us - because it's all line drawing and stuff. It's not like computer animation, it's not like programming various cells. They are very expensive things. The cheapest video we've ever done was for "Creep" and that was twelve and a half thousand pounds and it was our first video and it was filmed in our village hall, well community center, round the corner from where we all lived in Oxford and sadly the prices have since escalated... and in some ways it's our most successful video I suppose.
Jabba: As the band gets bigger do you have more people coming to you saying, wow we can do a million dollar clip for you now?
Colin: No the thing is, as our career continues, we get more and more hacked off with doing them so we actually have to set limits on the cost of them... but if you meet a good talented director who has great ideas... we are very lucky, we have worked with some brilliant people like Jonathan Glaser and Magnus Carlsson and Grant's done the video for "No Surprises", the guy that's doing the documentary. What we learnt is that you have to trust the artistic judgement of the people you are paying the money to get involved. There's nothing worse than a group of people who all think they know how something should look.
Jabba: What's it like having your brother in the band?
Colin: It's wonderful, it's good, it makes my promise to keep an eye on him for my mother a lot easier, having him right next to me all the time. But he's very easy to look after anyway, cos he's very well behaved.
Jabba: Has there ever been conflict?
Colin: I was really naughty to him as a kid - he was colour blind, and I'd mix up his colouring crayons and he had to go and see the educational psychologist after he'd done too many grassy lawns the colour of blood. I once told him to sniff into a pepper pot - which is a really nasty thing to do. It has plagued me - sleepless nights racked by guilt.
Jabba: We were talking before about the critical success of the record. Does that put more a creative pressure on the band instead of commercial?
Colin: Yes definitely. What happened with the first album was that it was critically successful about a year after it was released which was nice for us but it meant that we were aware that we had to follow up with an album whereas previously we just had to follow up a song - "Creep". We just removed ourselves from the public and people and went to this old haunted country house owned by Jane Seymour in Bath and recorded there... we didn't see anyone and... (burps) excuse me, sorry I've just had a Lime Spider. When I was a kid they were one of my favourite bands and I just finally found out what it is, it's a fruit float, soda drink with an icecream dollop on the top... fantastic.
Jabba: Were you into any other Australian bands?
Colin: Oh yeah, the Triffids, and obviously Mr Cave... there was this seminal compilation called Beyond The Southern Cross that came out... antipodean to us, to be honest, is all grouped together in England - Australia and NZ... there was this period - '85, '86 - John Peel this radio DJ used to play a lot of Antipodean music, it was really good.
Jabba: Do you have any idea of what kind of sound you want to take Radiohead to, maybe the drum & bass path?
Colin: Well Tricky has asked us to do some work with him in New York; I don't think we'll be able to do anything with that, but it is very flattering for him to invite us. And Massive Attack want to remix a record.. Eddie and I concocted this ridiculous idea when we were wasted one night in Auckland last fortnight. We had gone to see where Crowded House had recorded their Together Alone and we thought it would be really cool to go somewhere like that with Massive Attack and spend a couple of weeks just cutting some stuff, that would be really good.
Jabba: Bjork just recorded some of her second but last album on a beach in the Bahamas... if you can do it on the beach... why not?
Colin: We're all such pale, white, skinny English boys, we would end up with melanomas, it would be disastrous. But there is lots of things we are planning to do - when Massive Attack finally finish and release the album in March we might ask them to do some remixes and stuff... But with the remixes, Thom has done a collaboration with DJ Shadow and Mo'Wax - that's really cool. That is going to come out some time in the future. Remixes are like videos and you have to approach them with a certain amount of disdain, because quite often people are there to rip you off. But we are lucky again because we are in a position where a lot of dance people like our music so we are in a position where we can ask people to do remixes and we only pay for it if we use it which is brilliant because people want to do it.
Jabba: What about film soundtracks?
Colin: Well I suppose the most successful thing we have done is the collaboration with Nellie Hooper who is the musical director for Romeo & Juliet with Baz Luhrman. The story behind that is that we were on tour in America - about two years ago now - and we got thhis call through that this Australian director was doing this Romeo & Juliet and Nellie Hooper wanted to get us involved in it. Because we are big fans of the production work that he has done with Massive Attack and Bjork and stuff, so they sent us the last half hour of the movie... and it was fantastic, it was the scene where Di Caprio goes to the church and find Clare Danes at the funeral byre and we thought it was wonderful. Thom wrote this song for exit music for the end of the film that no-one has really heard because we didn't want to put it on the soundtrack because we wanted it for our album so it is always heralded by the closing of seats in the cinemas because it is right at the end of the movie. And Nellie did a good job... a version of 'Talk Show Host' and added a few things which will go on the B-side. That was really cool but our whole approach to working with music for films is to do it as sympathetically as possible because when we started off with our career we just sort of signed off on a couple of things stupidly . There was this awful film called So Fucking What with Steven Dorf that has "Creep" on it - we were young, foolish, naïve... we were drunk at the time... it wasn't very good, but we are well up for looking at soundtracks and stuff.
Jabba: Have you ever been approached by a large commercial institute?
Colin: Yes we have been approached by a big brewing company to use one of our songs for an obscene amount of money worldwide and it's a tipple we all enjoy as well... but we didn't do it, but at the same time I respect other people's bands for doing it because ultimately it's their property to do what they want with their music. We are the last people to get on a pedestal and say that some people are compromising their art, so it's just bullshit.
Jabba: The portrayal of Radiohead is a serious group of guys - do you think there is a humour in your music that people miss?
Colin: Humour... yes. All the baudy quips and punchlines that people just fail to pick up on... no. I suppose so - it depends what song you talk about, there is some dark humour definitely. The thing about a song like 'Paranoid Android', is that it's just put together and taking the piss, it was just a joke, a laugh, getting wasted together over a couple of evenings and putting some different pieces together. It's a good question though in terms of like, you do something and you are never aware how far it is going to be scrutinised when it's released in the public and it takes a life of its own and becomes this creature that you have no control over. That's if you are successful, of course... if you're not, then it sits in a box in the back of a record store covered in dust, so we are lucky.
Jabba: Radiohead.... Colin, thanks you for talking to us.
Jabba: Hello there. Jabbatron here, in this luxurious hotel foyer with Mr Colin Greenwood from the band, Radiohead. He plays bass, his brother's in the band too... How are you?
Colin: Fine - I just had a nice lunch down opposite the Stock Exchange in the centre of Sydney - it was lovely.
Jabba: How long have you been in Australia for?
Colin: Only about four days; we flew in from Wellington and we landed in Melbourne. We did two shows in Melbourne - the Exhibition Centre I think it is - where the Beatles played in the 60s. It was great - hasn't changed since ...
Jabba: Did you come across stage-diving, moshing at the gig?
Colin: No, in fact, cos we don't like that very much, and we make sure the audience knows that as well. It's not much fun doing a gig and seeing the kids getting hurt at the front. Kind of puts you off your stride.
Jabba: You have been out here before ...
Colin: Yes, in the spring of 1994 - we were in the middle of recording our last album, The Bends.
Jabba: Last time you came out "Creep" would have been really huge
Colin: Last time we came out "Creep" had already been huge up to eight months before and nobody came to see us apart from Sydney which has always been the happening centre of Australia obviously. We played in front of 50 people in Adelaide and 60 people in Brisbane, a few more people in Melbourne actually... but it was a bit of a disastrous tour really.
Jabba: Do you think you were battling the one hit wonder stigma?
Colin: Yes exactly. We arrived too late to get any vibe off the hit single and too soon before the new album had come out... so it's fair enough, we weren't surprised.
Jabba: Your latest album OK Computer has received rave reviews pretty much everywhere in the world, was there anywhere where it didn't?
Colin: Well, no I don't know... the fact that it has been well reviewed has absolutely nothing to do with us so it's very flattering. Certain factions in the NME cite it as an attempt to revive the excesses of the progressive rock of the 70s without bothering to listen to anything that we were listening to at the time, when we were doing OK Computer... from Miles Davis to Shadow to Massive Attack to Bjork to Sparklehorse to... all the contemporary music stuff that we all love and worship and attempt to reflect in what we do, so you know. It's just boring anyway, I don't want to talk about them.
Jabba: Thom appears in the videos, and you guys do the interviews - does the media try and separate the front man and put him on the pedestal and leave the band?
Colin: No all those things that happen are all decisions made by the five of us, so to be honest with you I'm very grateful that we haven't been in the videos for the past three because they are awful things and all of us would rather not have to do them, they are a no-bonus job which cost a fortune and put you into thrall with the record company and they are just one more tool for them to be able to control and manipulate you. So we are in a fortunate position where we have sold enough records to recoup against our video costs but what sort of sense is it to spend an album budget... you can make a well-recorded album for the price of filming one video. So it's crazy... as soon as whatever happens in the next 10 years happens, then hopefully all video channels will all be fucked then, that would be good.
Jabba: We'll all be making chips!
Colin: Obviously there is diversification, there's other things to do with the medium, you don't just have to use the same format. Hopefully it will change.
So yeah, there was an animation with "Paranoid Android" and then Thom was in "Karma Police" and "No Surprises" and I am very grateful for that cos there is nothing more boring than hanging around on a set waiting to do a video between the hours of 6 in the evening... or even 9 in the evening till 7 in the morning for two days, costing a couple of hundred thousand dollars ...
Jabba: I read there was a plan where you were going to do a film clip for every song?
Colin: Yeah, that was the plan originally, but the budget just got crazy, so what we've decided to do instead is pursue this documentary thing, with this friend of ours, colleague of ours, Grant, who's been basically following us on tour and photographing. And we've been doing sound recordings of the records since the launch of the album in May in Barcelona last year, all the way through to now. He's actually here with us in Australia.
Jabba:Is he filming any of the shows?
Colin: Yeah, he's filmed lots of live footage. I think he's going to stop doing that now, he's just trying to get his head round what we do. I think he's done more interviews and stuff than anything else.
Jabba: You mentioned the cost of making a clip, the "Paranoid Android" clip which was done by Magnus Carlsson, wouldn't that save money?
Colin: Animation is very expensive - well his type of animation is very expensive, well that's what he told us - because it's all line drawing and stuff. It's not like computer animation, it's not like programming various cells. They are very expensive things. The cheapest video we've ever done was for "Creep" and that was twelve and a half thousand pounds and it was our first video and it was filmed in our village hall, well community center, round the corner from where we all lived in Oxford and sadly the prices have since escalated... and in some ways it's our most successful video I suppose.
Jabba: As the band gets bigger do you have more people coming to you saying, wow we can do a million dollar clip for you now?
Colin: No the thing is, as our career continues, we get more and more hacked off with doing them so we actually have to set limits on the cost of them... but if you meet a good talented director who has great ideas... we are very lucky, we have worked with some brilliant people like Jonathan Glaser and Magnus Carlsson and Grant's done the video for "No Surprises", the guy that's doing the documentary. What we learnt is that you have to trust the artistic judgement of the people you are paying the money to get involved. There's nothing worse than a group of people who all think they know how something should look.
Jabba: What's it like having your brother in the band?
Colin: It's wonderful, it's good, it makes my promise to keep an eye on him for my mother a lot easier, having him right next to me all the time. But he's very easy to look after anyway, cos he's very well behaved.
Jabba: Has there ever been conflict?
Colin: I was really naughty to him as a kid - he was colour blind, and I'd mix up his colouring crayons and he had to go and see the educational psychologist after he'd done too many grassy lawns the colour of blood. I once told him to sniff into a pepper pot - which is a really nasty thing to do. It has plagued me - sleepless nights racked by guilt.
Jabba: We were talking before about the critical success of the record. Does that put more a creative pressure on the band instead of commercial?
Colin: Yes definitely. What happened with the first album was that it was critically successful about a year after it was released which was nice for us but it meant that we were aware that we had to follow up with an album whereas previously we just had to follow up a song - "Creep". We just removed ourselves from the public and people and went to this old haunted country house owned by Jane Seymour in Bath and recorded there... we didn't see anyone and... (burps) excuse me, sorry I've just had a Lime Spider. When I was a kid they were one of my favourite bands and I just finally found out what it is, it's a fruit float, soda drink with an icecream dollop on the top... fantastic.
Jabba: Were you into any other Australian bands?
Colin: Oh yeah, the Triffids, and obviously Mr Cave... there was this seminal compilation called Beyond The Southern Cross that came out... antipodean to us, to be honest, is all grouped together in England - Australia and NZ... there was this period - '85, '86 - John Peel this radio DJ used to play a lot of Antipodean music, it was really good.
Jabba: Do you have any idea of what kind of sound you want to take Radiohead to, maybe the drum & bass path?
Colin: Well Tricky has asked us to do some work with him in New York; I don't think we'll be able to do anything with that, but it is very flattering for him to invite us. And Massive Attack want to remix a record.. Eddie and I concocted this ridiculous idea when we were wasted one night in Auckland last fortnight. We had gone to see where Crowded House had recorded their Together Alone and we thought it would be really cool to go somewhere like that with Massive Attack and spend a couple of weeks just cutting some stuff, that would be really good.
Jabba: Bjork just recorded some of her second but last album on a beach in the Bahamas... if you can do it on the beach... why not?
Colin: We're all such pale, white, skinny English boys, we would end up with melanomas, it would be disastrous. But there is lots of things we are planning to do - when Massive Attack finally finish and release the album in March we might ask them to do some remixes and stuff... But with the remixes, Thom has done a collaboration with DJ Shadow and Mo'Wax - that's really cool. That is going to come out some time in the future. Remixes are like videos and you have to approach them with a certain amount of disdain, because quite often people are there to rip you off. But we are lucky again because we are in a position where a lot of dance people like our music so we are in a position where we can ask people to do remixes and we only pay for it if we use it which is brilliant because people want to do it.
Jabba: What about film soundtracks?
Colin: Well I suppose the most successful thing we have done is the collaboration with Nellie Hooper who is the musical director for Romeo & Juliet with Baz Luhrman. The story behind that is that we were on tour in America - about two years ago now - and we got thhis call through that this Australian director was doing this Romeo & Juliet and Nellie Hooper wanted to get us involved in it. Because we are big fans of the production work that he has done with Massive Attack and Bjork and stuff, so they sent us the last half hour of the movie... and it was fantastic, it was the scene where Di Caprio goes to the church and find Clare Danes at the funeral byre and we thought it was wonderful. Thom wrote this song for exit music for the end of the film that no-one has really heard because we didn't want to put it on the soundtrack because we wanted it for our album so it is always heralded by the closing of seats in the cinemas because it is right at the end of the movie. And Nellie did a good job... a version of 'Talk Show Host' and added a few things which will go on the B-side. That was really cool but our whole approach to working with music for films is to do it as sympathetically as possible because when we started off with our career we just sort of signed off on a couple of things stupidly . There was this awful film called So Fucking What with Steven Dorf that has "Creep" on it - we were young, foolish, naïve... we were drunk at the time... it wasn't very good, but we are well up for looking at soundtracks and stuff.
Jabba: Have you ever been approached by a large commercial institute?
Colin: Yes we have been approached by a big brewing company to use one of our songs for an obscene amount of money worldwide and it's a tipple we all enjoy as well... but we didn't do it, but at the same time I respect other people's bands for doing it because ultimately it's their property to do what they want with their music. We are the last people to get on a pedestal and say that some people are compromising their art, so it's just bullshit.
Jabba: The portrayal of Radiohead is a serious group of guys - do you think there is a humour in your music that people miss?
Colin: Humour... yes. All the baudy quips and punchlines that people just fail to pick up on... no. I suppose so - it depends what song you talk about, there is some dark humour definitely. The thing about a song like 'Paranoid Android', is that it's just put together and taking the piss, it was just a joke, a laugh, getting wasted together over a couple of evenings and putting some different pieces together. It's a good question though in terms of like, you do something and you are never aware how far it is going to be scrutinised when it's released in the public and it takes a life of its own and becomes this creature that you have no control over. That's if you are successful, of course... if you're not, then it sits in a box in the back of a record store covered in dust, so we are lucky.
Jabba: Radiohead.... Colin, thanks you for talking to us.
Labels: Channel V, Colin Greenwood, interviews, OK Computer, Radiohead, sibling rivalry, Sparklehorse, travel, videos
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