MTV Australia, 04.02.98
Radiohead
MTV grilled Radiohead's bassplayer, Colin Greenwood about all things musical.
MTV: Your last tour was a while after 'Creep' and a while before The Bends, it must be better for you to be here this time?
Colin: Yeah, I mean the record was only released in Europe and America on June 16th, so about 8 months ago. It's not such a bad cycle. We've been very busy since we released the album. I'm glad to come down here and play, to play in this part of the world and also Auckland and Wellington, for the first time.
MTV: I hear you love New Zealand?
Colin: Yes. My brother in-law is from Christchurch. After we finished OK Computer, we finished mixing it in March and I actually escaped from England for about 3 weeks and spent time on this lovely little island. It was wonderful. But you know, the quality of life here seems wonderful as well. As you get older one appreciates more and more what somewhere like Australia and New Zealand has to offer.
MTV: If you don't live here...
Colin: Yeah, it's easy for me to say that. But then I also say that from the standpoint of being an army brat - hence the vaguely military clothes - and really not feeling rooted to anywhere in particular in England, and not particularly loving or hating where I come from.
MTV: So you've been touring flat out since June?
Colin: We've been touring on and off since 1992.
MTV: So has it taken it's toll?
Colin: I think it's starting to lose a bit of its freshness, and I think we need to take some time away from it and get hungry for it again, and try and come up with something new and different. I think with this record in particular the music is quite intense, and the way that we approached launching this record is very intense. We played to basically nearly 90,000 people in the space of a week. We played to nearly 40,000 in Dublin at our own show, and then a week later we played Glastonbury to around the same number. It was a very stressful and high risk way of introducing new songs and performance to the public.
MTV: So Glastonbury was a huge gig for you career wise?
Colin: In some ways I'd say Dublin the week before was a huge gig for us, because that was 38,500 people who'd bought tickets just to see us basically. Although Massive Attack and Teenage Fanclub, both wonderful, were also on the bill. Glastonbury is one of those kids-own dreams things you know, to close Glastonbury on the Saturday night. Unfortunately it's not something we'll have particularly fond memories of in some ways, because we had lots of technical problems; the monitors broke, the lighting computer broke, and it was quite stressful.
MTV: Was Dublin and Glastonbury the first time you played new tracks from the album?
Colin: No, we'd launched the album about a month before in Lisbon, and played a couple of shows to warm up before Barcelona, which I thought was wonderful. It was the same kind of weather as the finest Australian weather. So all the journalists and press were predisposed already, and Barcelona is a wonderful cosmopolitan city. We did like seven weeks touring around Europe and built up a good following in Spain and France. I think it's very exciting to be in Europe at the moment, to be European. It was an experience that we adored.
MTV: Were you surprised by the enormous success of OK Computer?
Colin: Well for a record with no singles on it, it's apparently gone on to sell over 3 million copies. It's going back up the charts in America at the moment...
MTV: You've got two Grammy nominations?
Colin: Mr. Dylan will get one of them, and for the other we're way down the bottom of the heap. I don't think any of us are going to the Grammys.
MTV: How do you feel about comments like 'OK Computer is the best album of all time' or that it's 'the past, present and future of rock'?
Colin: It's kind of flattering, but they're made in the context of 1997, not within the last 50 years of recorded music. I think 'Revolver' will be already as one of the greatest records ever, still.
MTV: Do you think time will be kind to you?
Colin: Well you hope, but you don't know. Time was very kind to The Bends. It wasn't overlooked, but wasn't anticipated, because everyone thought we'd shot our bolt with 'Creep', and there was nothing more to be heard from Radiohead, so The Bends crept up on people, took them surprise - given the benefit of the doubt and a few listens it became a very popular record for a lot of people.
MTV: Was it hard to follow up from The Bends, because it proved to everyone that you could do it?
Colin: Well this is the thing, was it hard to follow up from the success of 'Creep' and the idea that Radiohead don't have another song, and then we did The Bends, and it was like 'How can they follow an album like that?' - but I'd much rather be in a situation like that than the situation we were in with 'Creep' and Pablo Honey, our first album. I think Thom felt the pressure quite keenly when we were recording OK Computer, and he felt sometimes paralysed creatively because he was aware of the expectation of the album after The Bends. But you just can't work like that. You have to find a way of ignoring it.
MTV: How does the songwriting process work with Radiohead?
Colin: It varies a lot. A lot of the songs, the melodies and vocal are obviously written by Thom, and then the arrangements and music, we just play a lot of it live in the room looking at each other, in an old apple farm near Oxford. And it's very important. My brother Jonathan writes a lot of the music as well. There's a song called 'The Tourist' at the end of OK Computer that we recorded the music and Thom doesn't actually play on it, he just came in and sang the vocal on top.
MTV: Thom's lyrics mean a lot to a lot of people...
Colin: He's constantly working on his lyrics. Sometimes what we do when we're working on a song is ask for lyric sheets, get a bit of gaffer tape and slap it to the wall and I look at the words and he'll play around with the sounds of the words. Sometimes the meaning comes later. Sometimes it's not good to be overly didactic and write something explicit because it can be two dimensional and flat, and we've definitely done that before. I think Michael Stipe's very good, his ability to suggest and imply rather than state you know? It's a fine line, you want to hold their interest...
MTV: Is that why the band is working on Velvet Goldmine with Michael Stipe?
Colin: Yeah that was Thom and Johnny. They were doing some covers of Roxy Music songs - that was over a year ago actually. It's incredible how slow moving film productions are.
MTV: What's the story with Massive Attack remixing OK Computer?
Colin: Massive Attack. Well they're really nice people and we really like where they come from, which is Bristol, not like London. It's West Country, left of centre, like being from Oxford. And the same goes for Portishead. Massive Attack got really excited, and they really want to remix the record, and they really wanted to do it over a short period of time. They wanted to go into a studio and just do it over a week or whatever. But we kind of said no, because we were really busy and we wanted to hang out with them. We're such huge Massive Attack fans, and they're really slow workers, so we really wanted them to finish their album first. They're on tour in March and their record should be coming out early springtime, so we really can't wait.
MTV: It will be really interesting to see what they do.
Colin: It will be. I find it really interesting that a whole lot of dance people and people who programme music are fans of our music, considering that we don't have a clue. We bought this technology for OK Computer and went in on a wing and a prayer. We bluffed our way through it.
MTV: But you still keep it quite organic...
Colin: Exactly. The first track on the album, Thom and Phil sat down and Phil did loads of drumming, recorded the drumming, stuck it on a Apple Mac and looped it all together... the musical arrangement of that track is basically the rhythm track. And then everybody just overdubbed, which is quite rare for us because usually we play it all live.
MTV: I hear you record all your live performances - where is all that going?
Colin: We were. We've slowed down on that for the moment though. After this tour of Australia we go back to England and on the 26th April we fly out to Houston and we do an American tour for four weeks, culminating with a number of shows with Bjork in New York. We've also invited Spiritualized to join us on these US shows. After that we take 4 or 5 months off, we won't really start work until September. So because of that we're keeping a lot of our songs as fresh as possible by not thrashing them to death live at the moment.
MTV: Can we expect a live album?
Colin: No, but what I would be nice, what I'd like to do after the next album is a B sides and remix compilation which I think would open a lot of people's eyes to some incredible music which has quite possibly escaped them. You know, were it not for people like Nellee Hooper and Baz Lurhmann people would not know a song like 'Talk Show Host', which is a very dramatic, powerful piece of music.
MTV: How did that come about, did Baz approach you?
Colin: I think it was Nellee Hooper. You have to be very careful with film soundtracks, they asked us to contribute to some later ones, but we didn't accept, because we didn't have the time or the energy to make it work. We'd be wasting our time. But it's probably been one of the best things we've been involved with, working with Baz. But you do have to be very careful about it, you learn as you go along. Because you can be offered silly money to slap a song onto a cheesy film now, after the success of the 'Romeo and Juliet' soundtrack. That soundtrack was so massive. A lot of film companies see it as a way of tying their music company offshoots, and making some money on the album sales and it really sucks.
MTV: The clip for 'No Surprises', do you like it?
Colin: I do. I find it very disturbing, and I find it very gripping. It's very powerful.
MTV: Your songs are all very similar, but also quite different.
Colin: They're all kind of similar in tempo, they're all mid-tempo but a lot of that is that when we worked out our songs we play them mid-tempo, or very slowly because we're not sure of what we're doing basically.
MTV: How did you work out the songs, was it quite difficult to work out how to get them across live?
Colin: A very important time for us was when we were on tour with Alanis Morissette in the autumn of 1996, in America. She invited us out, wanted us to do the whole tour, but we said we'd only do two and a half weeks... we weren't really into what she was doing musically, but as people they were wonderful.
MTV: Hasn't she just covered a song of yours?
Colin: Yeah she used to play 'Fake Plastic Trees'. Her old drummer Taylor, who now plays drums in the Foo Fighters - who are coming through Australia next week I think - he's a friend of ours. It was cool you know, because she had some good musicians in her band. They loved Supergrass as well. You used to hear Alanis Morissette's band doing covers of 'Lenny' from the first Supergrass album.
MTV: What music coming out of the UK do you really admire?
Colin: At the moment, the Propellerheads. I dunno, dance music is kind of funny. You have to see if it stays with you. Um, what are we into at the moment? Oh God, what a nightmare question! I like the Dirty Three album, I thought they were from America. Because last year I bought a Scud Mountain Boys album and a Dirty Three album, because someone recommended them to me, so I went to a mall and bought it. So that's cool. And I want to get Let Love In again, because that's such a great record, a very great record.
MTV grilled Radiohead's bassplayer, Colin Greenwood about all things musical.
MTV: Your last tour was a while after 'Creep' and a while before The Bends, it must be better for you to be here this time?
Colin: Yeah, I mean the record was only released in Europe and America on June 16th, so about 8 months ago. It's not such a bad cycle. We've been very busy since we released the album. I'm glad to come down here and play, to play in this part of the world and also Auckland and Wellington, for the first time.
MTV: I hear you love New Zealand?
Colin: Yes. My brother in-law is from Christchurch. After we finished OK Computer, we finished mixing it in March and I actually escaped from England for about 3 weeks and spent time on this lovely little island. It was wonderful. But you know, the quality of life here seems wonderful as well. As you get older one appreciates more and more what somewhere like Australia and New Zealand has to offer.
MTV: If you don't live here...
Colin: Yeah, it's easy for me to say that. But then I also say that from the standpoint of being an army brat - hence the vaguely military clothes - and really not feeling rooted to anywhere in particular in England, and not particularly loving or hating where I come from.
MTV: So you've been touring flat out since June?
Colin: We've been touring on and off since 1992.
MTV: So has it taken it's toll?
Colin: I think it's starting to lose a bit of its freshness, and I think we need to take some time away from it and get hungry for it again, and try and come up with something new and different. I think with this record in particular the music is quite intense, and the way that we approached launching this record is very intense. We played to basically nearly 90,000 people in the space of a week. We played to nearly 40,000 in Dublin at our own show, and then a week later we played Glastonbury to around the same number. It was a very stressful and high risk way of introducing new songs and performance to the public.
MTV: So Glastonbury was a huge gig for you career wise?
Colin: In some ways I'd say Dublin the week before was a huge gig for us, because that was 38,500 people who'd bought tickets just to see us basically. Although Massive Attack and Teenage Fanclub, both wonderful, were also on the bill. Glastonbury is one of those kids-own dreams things you know, to close Glastonbury on the Saturday night. Unfortunately it's not something we'll have particularly fond memories of in some ways, because we had lots of technical problems; the monitors broke, the lighting computer broke, and it was quite stressful.
MTV: Was Dublin and Glastonbury the first time you played new tracks from the album?
Colin: No, we'd launched the album about a month before in Lisbon, and played a couple of shows to warm up before Barcelona, which I thought was wonderful. It was the same kind of weather as the finest Australian weather. So all the journalists and press were predisposed already, and Barcelona is a wonderful cosmopolitan city. We did like seven weeks touring around Europe and built up a good following in Spain and France. I think it's very exciting to be in Europe at the moment, to be European. It was an experience that we adored.
MTV: Were you surprised by the enormous success of OK Computer?
Colin: Well for a record with no singles on it, it's apparently gone on to sell over 3 million copies. It's going back up the charts in America at the moment...
MTV: You've got two Grammy nominations?
Colin: Mr. Dylan will get one of them, and for the other we're way down the bottom of the heap. I don't think any of us are going to the Grammys.
MTV: How do you feel about comments like 'OK Computer is the best album of all time' or that it's 'the past, present and future of rock'?
Colin: It's kind of flattering, but they're made in the context of 1997, not within the last 50 years of recorded music. I think 'Revolver' will be already as one of the greatest records ever, still.
MTV: Do you think time will be kind to you?
Colin: Well you hope, but you don't know. Time was very kind to The Bends. It wasn't overlooked, but wasn't anticipated, because everyone thought we'd shot our bolt with 'Creep', and there was nothing more to be heard from Radiohead, so The Bends crept up on people, took them surprise - given the benefit of the doubt and a few listens it became a very popular record for a lot of people.
MTV: Was it hard to follow up from The Bends, because it proved to everyone that you could do it?
Colin: Well this is the thing, was it hard to follow up from the success of 'Creep' and the idea that Radiohead don't have another song, and then we did The Bends, and it was like 'How can they follow an album like that?' - but I'd much rather be in a situation like that than the situation we were in with 'Creep' and Pablo Honey, our first album. I think Thom felt the pressure quite keenly when we were recording OK Computer, and he felt sometimes paralysed creatively because he was aware of the expectation of the album after The Bends. But you just can't work like that. You have to find a way of ignoring it.
MTV: How does the songwriting process work with Radiohead?
Colin: It varies a lot. A lot of the songs, the melodies and vocal are obviously written by Thom, and then the arrangements and music, we just play a lot of it live in the room looking at each other, in an old apple farm near Oxford. And it's very important. My brother Jonathan writes a lot of the music as well. There's a song called 'The Tourist' at the end of OK Computer that we recorded the music and Thom doesn't actually play on it, he just came in and sang the vocal on top.
MTV: Thom's lyrics mean a lot to a lot of people...
Colin: He's constantly working on his lyrics. Sometimes what we do when we're working on a song is ask for lyric sheets, get a bit of gaffer tape and slap it to the wall and I look at the words and he'll play around with the sounds of the words. Sometimes the meaning comes later. Sometimes it's not good to be overly didactic and write something explicit because it can be two dimensional and flat, and we've definitely done that before. I think Michael Stipe's very good, his ability to suggest and imply rather than state you know? It's a fine line, you want to hold their interest...
MTV: Is that why the band is working on Velvet Goldmine with Michael Stipe?
Colin: Yeah that was Thom and Johnny. They were doing some covers of Roxy Music songs - that was over a year ago actually. It's incredible how slow moving film productions are.
MTV: What's the story with Massive Attack remixing OK Computer?
Colin: Massive Attack. Well they're really nice people and we really like where they come from, which is Bristol, not like London. It's West Country, left of centre, like being from Oxford. And the same goes for Portishead. Massive Attack got really excited, and they really want to remix the record, and they really wanted to do it over a short period of time. They wanted to go into a studio and just do it over a week or whatever. But we kind of said no, because we were really busy and we wanted to hang out with them. We're such huge Massive Attack fans, and they're really slow workers, so we really wanted them to finish their album first. They're on tour in March and their record should be coming out early springtime, so we really can't wait.
MTV: It will be really interesting to see what they do.
Colin: It will be. I find it really interesting that a whole lot of dance people and people who programme music are fans of our music, considering that we don't have a clue. We bought this technology for OK Computer and went in on a wing and a prayer. We bluffed our way through it.
MTV: But you still keep it quite organic...
Colin: Exactly. The first track on the album, Thom and Phil sat down and Phil did loads of drumming, recorded the drumming, stuck it on a Apple Mac and looped it all together... the musical arrangement of that track is basically the rhythm track. And then everybody just overdubbed, which is quite rare for us because usually we play it all live.
MTV: I hear you record all your live performances - where is all that going?
Colin: We were. We've slowed down on that for the moment though. After this tour of Australia we go back to England and on the 26th April we fly out to Houston and we do an American tour for four weeks, culminating with a number of shows with Bjork in New York. We've also invited Spiritualized to join us on these US shows. After that we take 4 or 5 months off, we won't really start work until September. So because of that we're keeping a lot of our songs as fresh as possible by not thrashing them to death live at the moment.
MTV: Can we expect a live album?
Colin: No, but what I would be nice, what I'd like to do after the next album is a B sides and remix compilation which I think would open a lot of people's eyes to some incredible music which has quite possibly escaped them. You know, were it not for people like Nellee Hooper and Baz Lurhmann people would not know a song like 'Talk Show Host', which is a very dramatic, powerful piece of music.
MTV: How did that come about, did Baz approach you?
Colin: I think it was Nellee Hooper. You have to be very careful with film soundtracks, they asked us to contribute to some later ones, but we didn't accept, because we didn't have the time or the energy to make it work. We'd be wasting our time. But it's probably been one of the best things we've been involved with, working with Baz. But you do have to be very careful about it, you learn as you go along. Because you can be offered silly money to slap a song onto a cheesy film now, after the success of the 'Romeo and Juliet' soundtrack. That soundtrack was so massive. A lot of film companies see it as a way of tying their music company offshoots, and making some money on the album sales and it really sucks.
MTV: The clip for 'No Surprises', do you like it?
Colin: I do. I find it very disturbing, and I find it very gripping. It's very powerful.
MTV: Your songs are all very similar, but also quite different.
Colin: They're all kind of similar in tempo, they're all mid-tempo but a lot of that is that when we worked out our songs we play them mid-tempo, or very slowly because we're not sure of what we're doing basically.
MTV: How did you work out the songs, was it quite difficult to work out how to get them across live?
Colin: A very important time for us was when we were on tour with Alanis Morissette in the autumn of 1996, in America. She invited us out, wanted us to do the whole tour, but we said we'd only do two and a half weeks... we weren't really into what she was doing musically, but as people they were wonderful.
MTV: Hasn't she just covered a song of yours?
Colin: Yeah she used to play 'Fake Plastic Trees'. Her old drummer Taylor, who now plays drums in the Foo Fighters - who are coming through Australia next week I think - he's a friend of ours. It was cool you know, because she had some good musicians in her band. They loved Supergrass as well. You used to hear Alanis Morissette's band doing covers of 'Lenny' from the first Supergrass album.
MTV: What music coming out of the UK do you really admire?
Colin: At the moment, the Propellerheads. I dunno, dance music is kind of funny. You have to see if it stays with you. Um, what are we into at the moment? Oh God, what a nightmare question! I like the Dirty Three album, I thought they were from America. Because last year I bought a Scud Mountain Boys album and a Dirty Three album, because someone recommended them to me, so I went to a mall and bought it. So that's cool. And I want to get Let Love In again, because that's such a great record, a very great record.
Labels: Australia, Colin Greenwood, family, Glastonbury, interviews, MTV, New Zealand, OK Computer, Radiohead, The Bends, travel, Velvet Goldmine
Radiohead’s bass player has been interviewed endlessly. One added weekly.
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