Johnny Greenwood has been lifting the lid on his current cultural highlights.
In an interview with The Guardian, Greenwood has selected his favourite current listening, reading and viewing favourites – which include Sun Ra, Evelyn Waugh and Clive James.
Picking his current favourite album, Greenwood opted for Sun Ra And His Arkestra‘s In The Orbit Of Ra, describing the posthumous jazz compilation LP as “sound[ing] like music from the future”.
In terms of books, the guitarist opted for Clive James‘ Poetry Notebook 2006-2014 collection. “I owe so much to Clive James,” Greenwood says. “He’s led me to most of my favourite writers and poets – and frankly, he’s given me the further education I missed when I dropped out [of university] at 19.”
Greenwood also revealed that he listens to Richard Herring‘s Leicester Square theatre podcasts, Evelyn Waugh‘s The Sword Of Honour audiobooks, plays the The Talos Principle video game and watches movies via the Mubi app (“Netflix drives me crazy – so much choice, but you struggle to find anything worth watching,” Greenwood laments).
Here’s Greenwood’s picks:
Album: Sun Ra And His Arkestra – ‘In The Orbit Of Ra’
Book: Clive James – ‘Poetry Notebook 2006-2014’
Podcast: Richard Herring’s ‘Leicester Square Theatre Podcast’
Audiobook: Evelyn Waugh’s ‘The Sword Of Honour’ series, read by Robert Powell
Video game: ‘The Talos Principle’
App: Mubi
Greenwood will perform his score to Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood with the London Contemporary Orchestra as part of David Byrne’s Meltdown at the Southbank Centre on 19 August.
Meanwhile, Greenwood recently gave an update on the current Radiohead activity in a recent interview with Dutch music website 3voor12, Greenwood confirmed that the band are working in the studio “in periods” and that restarting the process “took a lot of time.”
Consequence Of Sound report that the interview has since been translated by the Radiohead community on Reddit.
“We didn’t do anything together for too long, so restarting took a lot of time,” Greenwood said. “We’re working in periods now. This afternoon, Thom and I will work on a song we started yesterday, see what it will lead to.”
He went on to reveal that the band were re-visiting a 1996 track, “Lift“.
“What people don’t know is that there’s a very old song on each album, like ‘Nude’ on In Rainbows. We never found the right arrangement for that, until then. ‘Lift’ is just like that. When the idea is right, it stays right. It doesn’t really matter in which form.”
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