Sunday Pick: Design Matters | Colin Greenwood

0:28Hey, TED Talks Daily listeners. Colin sits down with host Debbie Millman to discuss his legendary career and why he turned to photography to capture the essence of music. You can find episodes of Design Matters wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about the TED Audio Collective at audiocollective.ted.com. There was one point we were playing, I was playing with Nick Cave in The Bad Seeds and Nick's playing the piano next to me on stage and he turned around and he said are you taking photographs because he heard i think he must have heard a clicking sound or something and i was like no from the ted audio collective this is design matters with debbie on design matters debbie talks with designers and other creative people about what they do how they got to be who they are and what they're thinking about and working on on this episode Debbie talks photography and music with Colin Greenwood, the bass player for Radiohead.

1:30Our first few records are more bomb-to-bomb, and perhaps our later records are more sort of bloop-to-bloop.

1:41Let's say that you're in a world-famous rock band, and you, the bassist, are a shutterbug. For years, you've been taking pictures with a small black camera in hotel rooms and bars, backstage, and even onstage. And then the time comes when you release a book of those photos and many unguarded, fugitive moments of your band are on display as never before. I'm speaking about How to Disappear, a photographic portrait of Radiohead by Colin Greenwood, the bassist in Radiohead, one of the most important, successful, and experimental rock and roll bands of the last 40 years. Colin Greedwood joins me today to talk about his career in music and his brand new beautiful book.

2:33Colin, welcome to Design Matters. Debbie, thank you so much for the invitation and for that wonderful introduction. Absolutely, my pleasure. Colin, you were born in Oxford, England, but because your father served in the Royal Ordinance, your family moved to Germany and then to Didcot, Suffolk, Abingdon and Oakley. I believe you attended five primary schools and even lived in Germany, long enough to learn the language. Can you still speak any German? I spoke some German and sadly, i did it at secondary school high school but i didn't have a very good teacher and um sadly not but i did do french a level so i can order a baguette in paris so the thing about what you talked about all those schools i guess when you say that i think you could either become like a raging introvert or you just get very good at making friends all the time and i think that's a quality that can be part of being a band too like michael stipe there's a bunch of people mark Eitzel, some people I know like that, they were like army brats, as you like to say, you know.

3:42So I think there's an interesting correlation that could be perhaps between people who are like moved around a lot like that and worked in entertainment. You grew up in a home with music always in the background. And I understand your parents' favourite records were by musicians, including Burl Ives, Scott Joplin, Simon and Garfunkel, and even Mozart's Horn Concerto. That's quite a range. Yeah, I guess my parents would have liked the kind of music that was just sort of described as sort of classical music and more of the pop stuff would have been Simon and Garfunkel. And my brother's first record was probably Burl Ives' Junior Choice, which is a collectible American sort of children's old folk song, Big Rock Candy Mountain.

4:27Do you know that? Yes, yes. You know, so those are kind of our first records, me and my brother growing up in Germany, because there was no television while we were in Germany that was in English. So we didn't have a television. So we just had to entertain ourselves with records and books and writing. Your parents brought you, your older sister, Susan, and your younger brother, Johnny, musical instruments and encouraged you to play them. And what instruments did they get you all? Well, my sister is a bit older, so she kind of, her musical contribution, I suppose, was that she brought music to the house.

5:05So we listened to records that she would buy, whether it's like Dylan or Beatles or reggae or whatever, or post-punk. And then in terms of musical instruments, my brother, I think his first instrument was a recorder, and I had a guitar, and then my brother played a viola, and I carried on with a classical guitar. that's kind of what we did really until radio had kicked off when we were in our teens. Now you mentioned your sister and the music that influenced you. What did that include? She brought lots of different kinds of records into the house which was really great like you know ska, soul, reggae, quite a Catholic taste but I would say you know record that was big for me which she probably didn't bring into the house was a Joy Division I loved.

5:51That was my favourite when I was about 13. But, you know, lots of different kinds of music, to be fair to her. And we sort of bop around the front room and my mother bought a Sony receiver, you know, one of those sound systems. But yeah, that was the main musical influences of me and my brother growing up. Tell us about your Toshiba radio cassette player. It was a single speaker, probably about, what's that about three inch size speaker and a little black um receiver thing with a cassette and that was kind of my gateway to my gateway drugs of music and it was um you know cassettes it was um cocteau twins listening to uh eps everything was on cassette and um yeah that was the thing that i power music through and then after that i had a little tiny little jvc stereo receiver tiny i'd call it a beatbox or a boombox but it was more of a sort of murmur box.

6:49It was so small. But it was just, you know, it was just fabulous. And since then, I've spent my life in front of speakers, whether it's like in recording studios or at home. You attended Abington School, wherein you had a lot of after-school activities, options, and you took classical guitar lessons with the same teacher as your classmate, Tom York. Was the teacher Terence Gilmore James? He was the director of music at my school and he was actually my neighbour where I lived. He was just a wonder. He is wonderful, inspirational, full of energy. One of these people who's very driven and positive.

7:31and, you know, I was kind of outside of the music system. I felt outside of, because I wasn't doing music to study. I was just, you know, exams. I was just doing classical guitar. But, you know, he was a fabulous leader for music at my school and I have very fond memories of him. He introduced both you and Tom to 20th century classical music, music, avant-garde music of the post-war era, classic jazz and film scores. And I read that your first experience in a band together was when Tom joined the punk band TNT that you were in. Was that your first band? I read that you were in three different bands before Radiohead.

8:18I wasn't really in that band TNT. And I don't know if they were, they were just like a couple of kids at the school. I think Tom did something with it, but it was all early days. And then And Tom was in a band after my school, when he was at college, called The Headless Chickens. He put out a single called, I Don't Want to Go Back to Woodstock, I think, which is fun. But when we were at school, it was just basically Radiohead from the ages of about 14, I guess. And we may have jammed with some other people, but that was kind of the thing. Why were you only able to play and rehearse on Fridays?

8:57I don't know why. It was probably because that was when the music school was free to practice or whatever. So the first band, the first name of the band was On a Friday. After TNT, Tom invited you and Ed O 'Brien to start a new band, which was named On a Friday. Is it true that your headmaster of your school once sent you a bill charging you for the... C.E. Paris. us why would he do something well you know as i get older as most people when they get older or perhaps some people they get more sort of hard in their opinions and stuff i sort of my my recollection of what happened is sort of softened as i've got older and i understand that my sundays his house is near quite near the music school and we were rehearsing on a sunday not a friday he i think we probably like disturbed his his weekend so he sent us a bill for practicing on a Sunday, but the director of music tore it up and left it on his desk, which I think is brilliant.

10:01And the facilities at the school were amazing. And I will always be very grateful for that. One of the things they did was this thing, I realise now it's called, you know, active listening. Do you know what that is? Yes, that's a little bit what I have to do with this show. Yeah, it's like an educational tool that was developed maybe after the war. It was a way of like teaching people about music, the idea of that, you know, you're not just, you just let it wash over you. So we had these music lessons, which we'd like be listening to, like Tomita's version of Masolski, Pictures and Exhibition or something like that.

10:36I realized what we were doing was we were having these lessons in active listening, which is, of course, what you do a lot when you're making a record. And it's hard. It's not something that you just sort of tell yourself you're going to do. I'm going to listen, you know, really hard. It takes a lot of training. Yeah, well, it takes some energy. And I think maybe like what Samuel Johnson said about books could apply to this too. If you listen to something and it's kind of boring, that's fine. You can just turn it off like you would say about a book. But I love listening to things that are satisfying in lots of different ways and don't just sort of modulate mindlessly.

11:17So because Ed already played guitar, you became the bass player. Yes. Did you know how to play the bass at that time or did you pick it up once you were sort of? Yeah, I bought my mother, I think probably got me a bass, a black bass called a Westone DX Spectrum. The most important thing about it was it was black. And I played along with my little Toshiba thing. I managed to plug it into the microphone input of the thing to like lots of Otis Redding and you know Booker T because their bass lines are fairly straightforward and that was a way for me to learn really and then you know other stuff after that so that's how I started.

12:01You said that the decision to play bass allowed you to dodge a bullet. Yes. Why is that? Well I think it's because there's three brilliant guitarists in my band I think it would be it would have been very difficult for me to get a note in Edways with all the other people. So it was a good thing. I was fortunate and I'm grateful to everyone for giving me the opportunity to play bass with them. The first gig you played was at a drunken school party with Ed and Tom in a drum machine. Oh, yeah, that's right. It was at West Hinksey Rugby Club. with the drum machine. It was Tom's Dr. Rhythm drum machine.

12:43And we were sort of stood in the middle with all these sort of, you know, drunk sort of, I don't know, 17, 18 year olds. And it was just the three of us. It was quite fun. When did Phil Selway, your drummer, join the band? Well, he was like three years, two or three years older than us. So we thought he was cool because he was already in a band, Jungle Telegraph. So we poached him. And I read that your younger brother, Johnny, begged you to join the band. Yes, that's right. And we briefly had another keyboard player as well. But then my brother came in to play keyboard, I think. That's what he did originally.

13:20He had a keyboard. Wasn't he also playing the harmonica? Yeah, harmonica recorder, penny whistle. Maybe there's one track where the Bay plays viola on an old track. It's a beautiful song actually called Chains. and then he picked up the guitar listening to the Pixies and Lou Reed, we love this album by Lou Reed called New York. Did you sense at that time that he would end up becoming the sort of musical genius he is today? Well, he was always very musical. He's always been into his music. He had a scholarship when we were at school, so it's been his thing since he was like a little boy, so it's something he's always loved.

14:03I read in your book that you've never let him forget that it was you that got him into the band. Yeah, that's right. I call him up like every so often, like, you know, remind him. No, it's just, it's really good. You know, it's been really, it's been really nice. We're not like other brothers, perhaps in music who've been in bands together and might have a sort of fraught relationship. It's always been very good. You played your first public gig at the Jericho Tavern on Walton Street in Oxford on August 14, 1986. You were 17 years old and you shared the stage with your bandmates and four other bands.

14:48And you write in the book that this experience gave you the ambition to make a life in music. What was it about that night that solidified this for you? I think it was just the excitement and the culmination after rehearsals of being on the stage the volume like noise the sheer sort of physical visceral sound of everything is so thrilling it was just great to be part of something in the band that there was then part of a scene in Oxford you know in some way some kind of a connection with all the music that we were listening to at the time, whether it was, you know, ska or post-punk or whatever, you know, so it was just a really wonderful way to spend time, you know.

15:36As our mother said, it was, she used to say, well, at least it keeps you off the streets. Didn't she want you to be a lawyer? No, I didn't know what she wanted me to be, but what I loved about my mother's take on our music is that she didn't sort of care for it per se, but she called it bumpity bump music. and then when we went to more sort of electronic stuff which she obviously had heard like sort of some modern classical I think she called it Blippity Blob something like that and I like to think that's actually a very accurate description of like Radiohead's musical sort of creative arc In what way?

16:11How would you? Well I'd say our first few records are more Bompity Bomb and then perhaps our later records are more sort of Blippity Blob you know more as in electronic bleeps and blobs bloops and things, bleepity you know In many ways, I think my mother's commentary foreshadows a lot of the finest music journalists who've written about Radiohead and 20 years ahead. So well done, her, I say. Would you say your bass playing has changed between Boppity Bop and Blippity Blipp? It's always been trying to find somewhere to fit in, I suppose. But no, I think that's one of the, my bass playing is one of the sort of the reassuring, sort of reliable dependent staples of the sound.

16:57Something you can rely on. Well, I mean, if you listen to songs like 15 Steps, Weird Fishes, those songs would not be, I mean, there's so many songs that wouldn't be the same without your bass line, but. Very kind of you. No, no. 15 Step is one of my all time favorite Radiohead songs. Oh, wow. And I listened to that song to feel the bass, to actually feel. Like there's this crescendo when the bass comes in that just kills me. Yeah, it's great. It's fun. Yeah, well, what happened was it was on a, I'd got a 909 drum machine a few years ago, and then we just had it set up in rehearsal. And then we just used it as a sort of rough pattern for that.

17:44And then basically sort of wrote around the pattern, I think it was. And then Lotus Flower as well. That song would not be the same without your bass line. Oh, thanks. I think that that's like, I can't remember. That's like a keyboard and then I played it or it's a keyboard and then I played it live. I can't really remember whether Tom did a keyboard bass line on that or whether I did. It sounds like your bass, but that's just my understanding of it. Well, it is live. It's fun playing live. It's... Yeah, there's this guy called Joseph Lucky Scott who played with Curtis Mayfield. And there's another guy whose name I always forget, so that's not very helpful, who played on Move On Up and stuff like that as well.

18:32And I bring them up because that would be the kind of thing that I would, in my dreams, aspire to, is that kind of playing, that combination of groove and melody. I read that you learned how to play by listening to Duck Dunn, Peter Hook Lee Scratch Perry yeah and then people who played with James Brown like Charles Sorrell and I remember all these other people and the Motown book about James Jameson I learnt about two thirds of those so that was amazing yeah so bass is a very sympathetic instrument it's the bridge between the rhythm and the melody the drums and the voice and the top line that's what's so amazing about the bass is the ability to sort of combine rhythm and emotion, I suppose, and to change the emotional weather underneath the chords, which you can do with the bass as well.

19:22Oh my God. Yeah. Especially in 15 steps. Oh, kills me. Thank you. Now you all had, you had an opportunity to sign a record contract, but decided to go to, you all decided to go on to college. Yes. Instead of sign with a record company? Well, we didn't have a contract before university, but we decided to go to university first before we tried to get a contract in that very, very sensible way of thinking, well, if it didn't work out, we'd have university degrees to fall back on. So that's why we went to university first, perhaps. And also just to have fun and try different experiences. So that's what happened.

20:10You studied English literature. That's right. Any particular authors that you found to be? I really like lots of modern American writing and I like a lot of 17th century writing and poetry. 17th century, like Milton, Marvell, poetry, stuff like that, Shakespeare. And then I really like modern stuff. I mean, I don't know, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Edith Wharton, just lots of stuff, you know, Willa Carther, but lots of history as well. So, you know, big history, history, history buff, as a lot of people are now with the podcast. Were you still playing together through college? Yeah, we would meet up every holiday and we'd rehearse in the village halls around Oxfordshire.

20:59and we'd keep in touch whilst we were at college sending cassettes or Tom would send cassettes of new songs that we would listen to and think about and then we'd get together and work on them. By 1991, you recorded your first demo tapes. The Manic Hedgehog demo was passed to Parlophone A &R rep Keith Wozencroft and he did that after seeing you play live at Jericho's And I believe that's when you got your record deal with EMI. And I think that was another connection that you made. I was working in a record store and Keith Wozencroft was going to get a job in A &R, at EMI, and he was working as a rep selling records out of a rusty white van.

21:46So I gave him our demo cassette. I used to give our demo tapes to any record company sales rep who was interested and they generally weren't fair enough. But it was also our management had a connection. So it wasn't just me and Keith. It was our management. We're friends with this guy called David Ambrose. He used to be in a band called Brian Augertrinity. He basically signed us to EMI together with a guy called Nick Gatfield. He used to play with Dex's Midnight Runners. Oh. So that was how we sort of got our first contract. You write in your book that you were probably one of the last bands to sign a traditional record deal.

22:29And I'm wondering, is that a good thing or a bad thing? I mean, I'm sure that other bands have signed record deals after us. And you used to think, what would it have been like if we had been signed to the record label 20 years earlier, 10 years earlier? because you could see at EMI the vestiges of what the business used to be before you know when you had artists like Queen or Beatles or whatever you know it was like a big international company we signed to Parlophone which was the one half of the company the other half was EMI the two marketing labels EMI and Parlophone so we yeah so we signed to Parlophone which was amazing so So we had all these, you know, Home of the Beatles.

23:14And then through the American company, it was Beach Boys, Beastie Boys. Anybody with boys in it basically was on Capitol. So we were going to become the Radiohead Boys in America on Capitol. And obviously just Radiohead and EMI and Unpapolophone in the UK. Yeah, it was, you know, it was very exciting to be part of this, you know, British institution. You know, the records that my sister bought when I was like nine, ten years old. I don't know if you know the Beatles Red and the Beatles Blue albums, which are like sort of compilations of their songs. And they have pictures of them looking down over the center, like stairwell of EMI office in Manchester Square.

23:55Well, that's where we signed. That's where we went. That sort of artistic cultural heritage is incredibly exciting. As I was growing up, I would look at those album covers. And I'm sad that album covers aren't as big as they used to be. But I would get lost in the photographs and I would get lost in the worlds that these bands created with their visuals. another band that I loved at the time and still love was Yes and Roger Dean was doing all their artwork for their albums and they were otherworldly. I felt that they were cosmic. Yeah, well, I just met Anton Corbin with Nick Cave on tour and I think he was doing some project with Ignosis which I want to check out but I think it must be some kind of documentary that's out.

24:52But yeah, I mean, it was brilliant. they had the photographs of like the band on the stairwells they had like all the artists depending on where you were in terms of i guess sales and success you know the least popular like least selling ones was some like like 80s hair bands down by the drinks vending machine in the basement like upstairs like each floor as you got to the sort of lofty heights of fairs or whatever you'd get like sort of you know shots of paul mccartney or whatever or beastie Boys or, I don't know, Tina Turner or something like that. Wow, there was a hierarchy to the stairs. That's what we all aspire to.

25:37Now, your first album, Pablo Honey, included the worldwide hit Creep, and I don't want to talk too much about, I don't want to talk about that song really at all. But I'm curious to know how it felt to go from a small, local, hardworking band with your schoolmates to essentially an overnight global sensation. Did it make you feel differently about who you were at the time? Well, it was all happening far away. It was like Star Wars, you know, somewhere long ago and far away, I suppose, because it was happening in San Francisco and in Tel Aviv. And where we had like our first radio plays for that song.

26:22What it meant, though, was that when we went on tour for the first time, say, in America, we never toured in a van, you know, with the trailer. we our first tour we we had our own tour bus with beds because we played all these clubs which you would normally do with a van bringing in your own equipment and so forth yeah but i guess because we had some money for the record company to advance the touring and also because we seemed to be selling the shows there was a budget for um a tour bus so we're playing these clubs around america and arriving in a really nice american eagle tour bus so uh we were spoiled really but It was just the best experience, just fabulous.

27:08You write in your new book that the sugar rush success of your first single probably saved you from being dropped by EMI and granted you the grace to record the album The Bends in 1994. And that album was initially overlooked when it first came out and some dismissed Radiohead as a one-hit wonder, which just sort of baffles me now. did you worry about the notion of becoming a one-hit wonder at that time no because i wouldn't say that we would think about what we do in terms of individual songs but when we were making our second record the bends we were like you know we were we spent a long time in um rack studios in london which is a fabulous studios uh inst john's wood around the corner from abbey road super famous plays.

27:56So many brilliant records and artists have recorded there. Al Green, Robert Plant. We had the time to make that record too. And it was one of my favorite albums. Mine too. You and the band went on to release seven additional studio albums that have changed rock and roll. You've sold over 30 million albums worldwide. You've won six Grammys. In 2019, the band was included into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Now, in addition to your work as a musician and a member of Radiohead, you are a photographer. And I read that the first book of photography that captured your imagination was the book Vagabond by gay lord Oscar Heron.

28:42What was it that intrigued you most about that book? I think it's that thing where like you see a book of photography that's like the first book that you see so like anything whether it's your first record or your first painting or whatever it stays with you but I think what I loved about that book was how he managed to make a documentary book about his family neighborhood and sort of turn it into something you know engaging and there's a text as well where he quotes i think from the bible about a cain and abel i think but i think it's the idea that you know as a photographer you're basically something sort of solitary about what you're doing but at the same time you know you're capturing other people collective crowds sort of portraits and things like that so it's quite sort of romantic i suppose as well that idea of how you see the world i just loved all i loved it i loved the different types of photography in the book there's landscape there's groups there's portraits there's documentary there's sort of abstract but um close-up photography um it's um it's yes it's just a great book and i was very lucky to see that and uh yeah it's very beautiful and i recommend it to anybody you know and it was a very influential book as well for um larry clark larry clark yes i do i have a photograph of his in my bathroom of naked people?

30:15Larry Clark's in Tulsa, I think. And Gaylord Oscar Heron is from Kansas too. So not that far away, I don't think. But I think he was a big influence on all those people. What motivated you to start taking photographs? Well, my friend Charlotte, who was in my band when we were in kids, she's a curator of photography and she did art history and then went to work at the Victorian Albert and she's a museum in London. and she's written some beautiful books on fine art, art photography for Thames and Hudson and other Napperture. And she very kindly, patiently indulged my limited ability but interest in photography.

30:58And I think that's through her. I met some very fantastic photographers, so I've got a lot to thank her for. You've said that the photographs in Vagabond and influenced how you captured your experience of the Radiohead crowds. And I'm wondering if you can talk about in what way it did that. Well, I think what's cool about when you take a picture of a group of people, you can get a sense of how music works too, in that you can look at people individually, but you can also see how they're interacting with the people around them, as well as how they're reacting to the music that they're listening to, or the experience that they're having.

31:39Because when people listen to things or look at things with other people, both those things are going on at the same time. You know, there's a communal collective and there's the individual solipsistic as well. You know, that's how musical those things work, you know. And they're amplified by being shared with all those people. So I just really like that. And I like photography. I like typological photographs, you know, things of photographs, collections of things as well. So, you know, what is a crowd if it's not like a collection of people that's been assembled, you know, and as human beings or as animals, we're always looking to make connections or combine what we see and make sense of things that are put together in nature.

32:23And that's what you do with crowds, either by seeing what they have in common or what they look that's different, what's different about them. So that's kind of why I like all that stuff. was the band your first subject or were you shooting other things before that uh no it was i think it was banned really so and in fact the beginning of the book i'm using a camera similar to the one that what's it gay lord oscar heron was using it's like a simple japanese slr camera one of my regrets is my i should have just i couldn't have used on stage it's too heavy but i wish i just kept that one really but i still have it it's amazing I read initially that you took a lot of photographs with remote cameras and GoPros.

33:06Yeah, I did. I've got those photographs and the colors are kind of cool. I placed them all around the stage before we played. But the point of view is kind of weird because obviously I couldn't have them in people's faces. So I've got them like on the floor or like strapped to some mic stands and things. What kind of camera do you currently use? Well, I've splashed out. I was in Australia and I went to Leica in Melbourne and they had the shop demonstration of a Leica digital M11. And I've been using that and it's actually kind of, I really like it. It's my first, well, it's my second digital camera, I suppose.

33:44I've been using it. I've been photographing Nick Cave's and the Bad Seeds with it. And I think I've got some nice pics. You've said that an analog camera records light like a vinyl does sound. yeah i suppose an analog camera records liked like photons landing onto uh chemical paper sensitive photo sensitive paper or film rather and then vinyl obviously records vibrations it's kind of similar but yeah i think um you know i love both i mean i've just been listening to two records this morning here you know i keep going back to vinyl because i find something about the process of playing a record goes back to the active listening when we were at school I suppose there's something sort of engaged about it that I really like and then whereas I love digital as well don't get me wrong but there's just something about records that makes me happy other than the price well there's in addition to the active listening there's sort of a physicality to it because you're constantly having to move the needle back if you're sort of obsessive listening like I used to do and then turning the album over.

35:01And the sequence was so important as well. What two albums were you listening to this morning? I was listening to Schubert, Amadeus Quartet playing Schubert. And then I was listening to some lute music played by Jacob Lindbergh playing the Rawolf lute, a guy called Jacob Lindbergh. I listen to records and music more than I look at the television. I don't really look at the television. You've collected quite a lot of your photographs and have published a new book. It's called How to Disappear. Yes. And it just came out, and it is a beautiful collection of your photographs of the band. Between 2003 and 2016, from the albums Hail to the Thief until the most recent studio album, A Moon-Shaped Pool.

35:54And the title of your book is taken from a partial title of a song from the album Kid A. The song How to Disappear Completely. And the song also contains the lyrics, I'm not here, this is happening, which I know was inspired by a conversation that Tom had with Michael Stipe. Now, does the title have anything to do with the sort of way in which you were photographed and the desire to not be intrusive? Yeah, absolutely. You're completely right. I think it's not. It's a joke. It's a cheap pun. It's a gag for the title, I suppose. It's about the fact that I'm not really in the book. There's one picture of me in the book that my brother took.

36:46And so I haven't completely disappeared. But yeah, it's just how to disappear. The joke is, of course, I can't be in the picture because I'm taking the pictures. I kind of had the title for the book and I had the cover for the book way ahead of anything else. Because, in fact, the cover of the book, which is all these flight cases that we had all done in purple when we started because we thought that no one would steal an ugly purple flight case. we had on the Radiohead website. We had that for about a long time. About three years. In our really sort of very graphical image to have on the website.

37:27Now, you weren't taking photographs from the outside in the way that a cameraman might be filming a concert. You were actually in the middle of all the activity and the performances. Yeah. Did you take photographs covertly or did your bandmates or crew or audience see you at the beginning? Yeah, I never took anything covertly. But I always felt really awkward about taking photographs. I still do probably. But I think a lot of photographers do. I was talking to one of my heroes in New York, a guy called Paul Graham, who's just an incredible photographer. And he said the same thing to me. There's sort of awkwardness and reticence that he has about, you know, interrupting people.

38:10When he makes a photograph of somebody, if he's on the street in New York, he like, we'll show them to see if it's OK. And, you know, because, of course, what you can do that with digital, you can show them. And then if they don't like it, you just go, OK, and you just delete it there and then, you know, rather than the film. I kind of wish I'd be more upfront with it, but I never see it as a sort of career plan, you know, because my career was planned to be music. in my prep for this show i came across an interview where you stated that one of your regrets is that you haven't been bolder with the lens got closer taken more photographs and you said you're shy with the camera do you still feel that way or has it changed it all over the years no i'm still shy but then i also know that you know there are things that if you're interested in something you think there's something there there's this great title by one of my favorite photographers Wolfgang Tillmans you know is called if one thing matters everything matters if you see something that you uh you want to photograph then the question really becomes not should you take a picture of it I guess you have to think about how you want to frame it or what is it about it that you see my other favorite quote my friend taught me is a Nick Knight you know who Nick Knight is he's like an amazing he's like a super famous photographer you know the cover of buick's album homogenic yes so he did that and he he has a great quote which is like one of those things it's a very simple thing to say but it's very very could be very difficult or very liberating is photograph what you see and photograph what you want to see and then and all those two statements like are they two different things or how you combine those two things is what could make a successful image you photographed your bandmates in the recording studio in dressing rooms in tour buses yawning meditating there are even photographs in bathrooms you shot ed playing a guitar in a white tile box of a bathroom and johnny playing a viola in the bathtub there's even a shot of johnny photographing tom and they're all candid yeah but there's a real intimacy to them.

40:25Yeah. That makes them more than just band photographs. They almost feel private. Was that intentional? Well, I love that book. I mean, you know, I'm not making any great claims as a photographer, but like it was the music, you know, you're obviously influenced or inspired by other, by great photographers. One of my favorite photographers is a guy called Robert Frank. He made a book called The Americans. He's a Swiss german photographer and he was like a sort of photographic survey road trip of america and um he managed to make this book of photographs that were sort of intimate glimpses really of a nation do you know what i mean if you ever see that captured sort of moments across a country so i'd like to think that you know but then you know i i'm not very technically very good so all the ones that I really wanted to take, you know, generally were too underexposed or blurry or both.

41:23I'm imagining that you've probably taken thousands of photographs. Yeah. And my understanding of like professional photographers who I work with, who I've met rather, is when you look at contact sheets, if you have, say, one image in a roll of film that you like, that's good. I'm very lucky, I suppose. I had some lucky moments where I pointed the camera and it worked out. The photographs feel like they're markers in time and evidence to what happened. And they're sort of cast in time, so to speak. They're memories, but they don't feel nostalgic. No. Well, I think a photograph is a recording of something using time, like shutter speed of the camera.

42:09but there's another dimension of time, which is the time you leave the image that you take and the next time you look at it, which could be like five years later. And when you look at it, the passage of time has had an effect upon the image. So it's not actually the same photograph that you took five years previously. And then, of course, if you make an edit and combine it with other images, that's another layer of meaning that you add to it that it may not have had when you took it originally. So there's all those different processes that are going on, which I think is very interesting. One of the things that I love about photography is how it gives you an accurate memory of something.

42:50When you think about your past and it's just an idea or a thought, you know, you have memories of memories, whereas a photograph stays the same. You might have different ways of interpreting it, but the image is the image frozen. Yeah. Well, and I think anything, if it works as a, depending what kind of photography, I suppose, if it works as an image, it sort of will resist becoming dated. Like someone like Alfred Stieglitz, who's probably my favorite photographers, or Bernie Sabbat. You know, they can make a photograph that is as fresh, freshly minted as the day it was taken. Yeah. I listened to an interview with you on, I think it was on YouTube, where you said that the idea for the book began when you were in a car with Nick Cave in Asheville, North Carolina.

43:46Yeah. So how did he help solidify the idea? Yeah. Well, he's just such a brilliant, engaging, curious, super smart person who I was in a car. We were doing these shows where I was supporting him whilst he was playing the piano. So we just have these conversations and I was struggling to find a way into the book and how to start writing it. And he just said to me, when did you start taking, when were the pictures starting from? And I said, well, they start from this period, 2003. And he said, well, what were you doing as a band then? and he said well we were sort of in the middle of our career from where we are now I suppose and he said why don't you write about what that was like what that's like I was like oh yeah so uh he's a bit I told him I thanked I think I gave him a credit in the book and uh he was surprised and I had a great chat with Warren Ellis you know Warren Ellis yes I do the Dirty Three and uh The Bad Seeds obviously and co-writes with Nick and And Warren was telling me about when he wrote his book on Nina Simone's gum and what that was like.

44:49That book is amazing. I mean, even the idea, like, let's make a book about Nina Simone's chewing gum. Yeah. So they're both really supportive. And I have nothing but gratitude and respect for both of them. And I'm very lucky that I've had the opportunity to work with them. A very dear friend of mine is very good friends with Nick Cave, and I asked her to ask Nick for a question to ask you today. So my next question is from Nick Cave. Colin Greenwood is one of the most unassuming and humble people I've ever met. I have long suspected that his ever-present camera is a way of diverting attention away from himself and back towards the person he is photographing.

45:44Is this true? Is his camera a way of holding people at bay? I don't know if that is true because I think that feels like an egotistical act in itself, really. You know what it's about? It's about light. It's like where light works and falls on someone or something. You know, I mean, I don't think I use the camera to keep people away because I think you'd have to be sort of quite egotistical to think of it like that, really. And it's like I'm more apologetic when I pick up a camera, less sort of self-protective. So I don't think so. But he's probably right. I don't have any confidence in doing that.

46:23But as I said, I've met some of my heroes. They seem to share that lack of confidence. So, no, I wouldn't want to do that because I just I love people and being with people. So I wouldn't keep people at bay with a camera. I don't think so. Does that give you an answer? Absolutely. You've been touring with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds and you mentioned that you're also taking photographs of the band as well. when you're taking photographs do you take a lot of photographs and then decide once you've seen them which are good or do you have a sense as you're taking them that this is the moment well both um well i wasn't taking pictures on stage because that's not my band unlike radio heads there was one point we were playing i was playing with the nick caves and the bad seeds and uh nick's like playing the piano next to me on stage and he turned around and he said are you taking photographs because he heard i think he must have heard a clicking sound or something and i was like no and uh the other things i can't take photographs with them really because i'm playing all the time i have more photographs of the bad seeds of warren well of everyone really except nick because i just don't want to intrude too much i've got more candid pictures of nick rather than like sort of stage pictures of Nick, if you like, more backstage and working pictures.

47:49I don't have any working pictures. But they're all such lovely, welcoming, kind, creatively open people who when they're dealing with stuff like musical stuff on stage, they all talk to each other. It's been just a real education and a privilege. In addition to photography, the book is also a beautiful object. how did you decide on the design and the layout oh well that's a fantastic question because it's something i care about i'm so proud of as well um the book was all printed in paper and the printing was all done in verona and it was designed by this amazing guy called duncan white he's from london but he lives in france and he's a really incredible book designer who's made some beautiful photography books over the past few years and he's also worked with a really famous photography book design maker called um Gerhard Steidl who's made some of the most beautiful books in the world and so he worked with him in Hanover and he I found Duncan through an old friend of mine called Michael Mack who has a beautiful um publishing photographic book in print called macbooks who publishes people like paul graham and basically tons of amazing people and um uh one of my favorite photographers is this woman called collier shaw makes these beautiful portraits and um i briefly was in touch with her in the 90s and uh yeah i just i'm a big fan of hers and that's what's great about instagram you can find all this work still so um the book was very much we basically did what Duncan said in terms of the design and layout and I'm just thrilled with it and it was published by a fabulous house called John Murray who also published Slow Horses do you know Mick Herron and Slow Horses?

49:47Yes I do and my old friend Nick Pearson published it at John Murray he's one of my oldest friends and he published people like Jonathan Franson, Larry Mantel people like that he's this incredible publisher and editor so I'm just so flattered and grateful that he would consider working with me um and um yeah it's the whole experience has been an unalloyed joy from start to finish how were you able to choose the photographs in this sort of narrative arc of the book well the edit was like well we had about 350 photographs and then And we boiled it down to about$100, I suppose. But it was like Duncan, the editor, we had them in a pile of rough prints and like, yes, yes, no, no, yes, yes.

50:35And then from that rough selection, Duncan basically helped with making an edit where the flow of images kind of goes from the studio and the music writing, working on the songs, to the recording, to the promotion, to the stage. So there's like a nice sort of outwards, sort of funneling outwards of the images, which I think is really beautiful. And then it's interleaved with three sections of text of around 10 ,000 words where I sort of act as sort of commentary, I suppose, to how we started as a band and describes like some of the situations that some of the photographs show you. I think it's more than commentary, though.

51:20It's almost diary-like. It's very in the moment. What was the process like as you went through? Well, I had like a sort of setup where I would try and write around 300, 500 words a day. And then I'd send the writing off to Nicholas, who's famous for his Christmas cake baking. And he bakes two a year. And he basically, the analogy, he was like folding what I'd written into the rest of the ingredients. So instead of he was making a sort of Christmas cake with my photography book. I love that analogy. I'm wondering if you would consider reading a short excerpt of your essay from How to Disappear, a portrait of Radiohead.

52:03I've chosen the excerpt because I think it's one of my favourite in the book. I'd love to. And it starts like this. There's a photograph of Tom with his hands held together in front of him. It's the end of the night somewhere in America. I can't be sure where, because the image is so murky, and the vast blacked-out caverns are so similar. Let's say it's New Orleans Smoothie King Arena, 3rd of April, 2017, around 11pm. We've finished our second encore, and Tom is here, thanking the 20 ,000 people out front. The white strip to Tom's left is his black-and-white Rhodes piano, wheeled on and off on a riser like a musical prop.

52:48I've stayed on stage while the others have drifted off, and I'm standing stage left, closer to Ed's microphone, to take in the image of Tom in the crowd. The preceding two and a half hours were full of light and colour, acid blues, greens and yellows, near ultraviolet purple that lends everything on stage an extra 3D glow. There are remote-controlled spotlights, cameras, multiple mirror balls, film projections from front of house onto a stage-wide silvery surfboard screen, that is studded with thousands of light-emitting diodes. 30 years ago, you could burn your leg on a floor lamp, and now the white-hot heat of technology runs cool, is pixelated and fiercely bright.

53:36One day, this back screen will have more resolution and fidelity than the performers in front. But at the end of the show, the stage lights go down, the house lights stay low, and we're finally left alone without our force field in front of all those people. They have their phones raised up like cigarette lighters for the last power ballad. Their LEDs are lit this time to help illuminate the sudden darkness as the audience records the scene. Many are live streaming from their phones, thousands of one-person outside broadcast units for the web kids across the world and all its time zones. These haloed points of light throw up a weird phosphorescence like creatures from the deep.

54:19hailing each other from inside the black belly of the Smoothie King, rippling up from the arena floor all the way to the nosebleed rake of the gods. In another 60 seconds, the house safety lights will flood this scene and wash it away until it ebbs back two nights later at the Dunkin' Donuts Centre. Colin Greenwood, thank you, thank you, thank you for making so much art that matters and thank you for joining me today on Design Matters. Thank you, Debbie. It's been fun to talk to you. Thank you so much. Colin Greenwood's new book is titled How to Disappear, a Photographic Portrait of Radiohead.

55:01And to read more about Colin's work, you can go to radiohead.com or wastedheadquarters.com. And I'd like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I'm Debbie Millman, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

55:47Thank you.