Jonathan Richard Guy Greenwood (born 5 November 1971) is an English musician and composer, best known as a member of the English alternative rock band Radiohead. Greenwood is a multi-instrumentalist, but serves mainly as lead guitarist and keyboard player. In addition to guitar and keyboard, he plays viola, xylophone, glockenspiel, ondes martenot, banjo, harmonica and drums.
He also does work on the electronic side of Radiohead, working on computer-generated sounds and sampling. He wrote the soundtracks of the films Bodysong, There Will Be Blood, and Norwegian Wood as well as serving as "composer-in-residence" for the BBC Concert Orchestra. He is the younger brother of fellow Radiohead member, Colin Greenwood.
Noted for his aggressive playing style, Greenwood is consistently named as one of the greatest guitarists of the modern era.Citing his work with Radiohead, Channel 4 described Greenwood as a "significant creative force within the music industry."
Greenwood had begun studying at Oxford Brookes University when Radiohead predecessor On A Friday signed a recording contract with EMI in 1991. He left university shortly after. While Greenwood is the only member of Radiohead to have been classically trained on any instrument (he took viola lessons as a child), he is also the only band member without a university degree.
Greenwood's influence on Radiohead's recording and writing can be heard in many songs, as he usually takes the traditional lead-guitarist role. For a while, Greenwood wore an arm brace due to a repetitive strain injury attributed to his "aggressive" way of playing the instrument, often billed as "abusive guitar". He has said that "It's like taping up your fingers before a boxing match."
Greenwood is often credited as the second major influence on songwriting in Radiohead, next to Thom Yorke. He wrote the music for the closing tracks of OK Computer ("The Tourist"), Kid A ("Motion Picture Soundtrack"), Amnesiac ("Life in a Glasshouse") and Hail to the Thief ("A Wolf at the Door"). He also wrote the intro, chorus and outro sections of the song "Subterranean Homesick Alien" from the OK Computer album, as well as the "rain down" section of "Paranoid Android". According to Yorke, the track "Just" from The Bends was "a competition by me and Jonny to get as many chords as possible into a song". An example of Greenwood's versatility is his use of the Ondes Martenot, which is featured on songs such as "The National Anthem" and "How to Disappear Completely" from the album Kid A, and "Pyramid Song" from the album Amnesiac. The song "Where I End and You Begin" from Hail to the Thief, which also features the instrument, was dedicated to the memory of Jeanne Loriod, a pioneer of the Ondes. It is also featured in the middle eight of "Bodysnatchers" on In Rainbows.
Greenwood and Yorke also collaborated on the song "Arpeggi" which is a piece in a classical style centered around arpeggios for voice, Ondes, and orchestra. It was performed with the London Sinfonietta and Arab Orchestra of Nazareth at the Ether Festival in March 2005 the song would later be adapted for the full band to play in 2006, rearranged for guitar. A studio version (closer to the full band version than the orchestral version) appeared on the album In Rainbows as "Weird Fishes/Arpeggi".
In 1995 Jonny Greenwood married Israeli-born Sharona Katan, a visual artist whose work (credited as Shin Katan) appears on the covers of the Bodysong soundtrack as well as the There Will Be Blood soundtrack. Their first son, Tamir, was born in 2002 and has the 2003 Radiohead album Hail to the Thief dedicated to him. They also have a daughter named Omri, born in 2005, and a third son, named Zohar, who was born in February 2008. They live in Oxford, but also own a house in Israel, a mile outside of the city Naharia.
pictures of Jonny Greenwood.
