Jonny Greenwood

Jonny Greenwood - Quick Facts

Profile Overview of Jonny Greenwood

Jonathan Richard Guy Greenwood (born 5 November 1971) is an English musician who is the lead guitarist of the rock band Radiohead. He has also composed numerous film scores. He has been named one of the greatest guitarists by multiple publications.

This profile of Jonny Greenwood covers Early Life and Family Background, On a Friday, 1991–1992: Pablo Honey, 1995–1999: The Bends and OK Computer and 2000–2003: Kid A, Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief.

Greenwood formed Radiohead at school with friends and his elder brother, Colin. Their debut single, "Creep" (1992), featured Greenwood's aggressive guitar work. He described his role in Radiohead as an arranger, helping transform Thom Yorke's demos into finished songs. Radiohead have sold more than 30 million albums, and Greenwood was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the band in 2019.

Greenwood is a multi-instrumentalist and a player of the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument. He uses electronic techniques such as programming, sampling and looping, and writes music software. The only classically trained member of Radiohead, Greenwood has composed for orchestras including the London Contemporary Orchestra and the BBC Concert Orchestra, and his arrangements feature on Radiohead records. He has collaborated with Indian and Middle Eastern musicians including the Israeli songwriters Shye Ben Tzur and Dudu Tassa. In 2021, Greenwood debuted a new band, the Smile, with Yorke and the drummer Tom Skinner.

Greenwood released his first solo work, the soundtrack for the film Bodysong, in 2003. In 2007, he scored There Will Be Blood, the first of several collaborations with the director Paul Thomas Anderson. In 2018, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his score for Anderson's Phantom Thread. He was nominated again for his score for The Power of the Dog (2021), directed by Jane Campion, and his score for Anderson's One Battle After Another (2025). Greenwood also scored the Lynne Ramsay films We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) and You Were Never Really Here (2017).

Early Life and Family Background of Jonny Greenwood

Jonny Greenwood was born on 5 November 1971 in Oxford, England. His brother, the Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood, is two years older. Their father served in the British Army as a bomb disposal expert. The Greenwood family has historical ties to the Communist Party of Great Britain and the socialist Fabian Society. Jonny said the family was "not musical at all" and that his parents did not appreciate rock music, but supported him and Colin by driving them to band rehearsals.

When he was a child, Greenwood's family would listen to a small number of cassettes in their car, including Mozart's horn concertos, the musicals Flower Drum Song and My Fair Lady, and cover versions of Simon & Garfunkel songs. When the cassettes were not playing, Greenwood would listen to the noise of the engine and try to recall every detail of the music. He credited his older siblings with exposing him to rock bands such as the Beat and New Order. The first gig Greenwood attended was the Fall on their 1988 Frenz Experiment tour, which he found "overwhelming".

The Greenwood brothers attended the private boys' school Abingdon. The Abingdon director of music, Michael Stinton, recalled Jonny as a "charming student" and "committed musician" who would spend as much time in the music department as possible. Greenwood's first instrument was a recorder given to him at age four or five. He played baroque music in recorder groups as a teenager, and continued to play into adulthood. He played the viola in the Thames Vale youth orchestra, which he described as a formative experience: "I'd been in school orchestras and never seen the point. But in Thames Vale I was suddenly with all these 18-year-olds who could actually play in tune. I remember thinking: 'Ah, that's what an orchestra is supposed to sound like!'" Greenwood also spent time programming, experimenting with BASIC and simple machine code to make computer games. According to Greenwood, "The closer I got to the bare bones of the computer, the more exciting I found it."

On a Friday of Jonny Greenwood

At Abingdon, the Greenwood brothers formed a band, On a Friday, with the singer Thom Yorke, the guitarist Ed O'Brien and the drummer Philip Selway. Jonny, the youngest, was three school years below Yorke and Colin and the last to join. He was previously in another band, Illiterate Hands, with Matt Hawksworth, Simon Newton, Ben Kendrick, Nigel Powell and Yorke's brother, Andy.

Greenwood initially played harmonica and keyboards for On a Friday. As they had fired their previous keyboardist for playing too loudly, Greenwood spent his first months playing with his keyboard turned off. No one in the band realised, and Yorke told him he added an "interesting texture". According to Greenwood, "I'd go home in the evening and work out how to actually play chords, and cautiously, over the next few months, I would start turning this keyboard up." According to Selway, at On a Friday's first gig, in Oxford’s Jericho Tavern, Greenwood sat on the stage with a harmonica, "waiting for his big moment to arrive". He eventually became the lead guitarist.

Although the other members of On a Friday had left Abingdon by 1987 to attend university, they continued to rehearse on weekends and holidays. Greenwood studied music at A Level, including chorale harmonisation.

1991–1992: Pablo Honey

In 1991, the members of On a Friday regrouped in Oxford, sharing a house on the corner of Magdalen Road and Ridgefield Road. Greenwood played harmonica on the 1992 Blind Mr. Jones single "Crazy Jazz". He enrolled at Oxford Brookes University to study psychology and music, but left after his first term after On a Friday signed a record contract deal with EMI. Greenwood said he had been "headed for the back of the viola section at some minor orchestra".

The band changed their name to Radiohead and released their first album, Pablo Honey, in 1993. Radiohead found early success with their debut single, "Creep", released in 1992. According to Rolling Stone, "It was Greenwood's gnashing noise blasts that marked Radiohead as more than just another mopey band... An early indicator of his crucial role in pushing his band forward." The Independent wrote that it was "the kind of transformative moment that has become his signature contribution to the Radiohead style".

1995–1999: The Bends and OK Computer

Radiohead's second album, The Bends (1995), brought them significant critical attention. Greenwood said it had been a "turning point" for Radiohead: "It started appearing in people's polls for the end of the year. That's when it started to feel like we made the right choice about being a band." On tour, Greenwood damaged his hearing and wore protective ear shields for some performances.

Radiohead's third album, OK Computer (1997), achieved acclaim, showcasing Greenwood's lead guitar work on songs such as "Paranoid Android". For "Climbing up the Walls", Greenwood wrote a part for 16 stringed instruments playing quarter tones apart, inspired by the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki.

Source: adapted from Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonny_Greenwood), text available under CC BY-SA 4.0.