EP.256 - COLIN GREENWOOD

Adam talks with British musician and photographer Colin Greenwood about playing bass for Radiohead and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, his memories of the crumbling buildings and spooky stately homes where Radiohead recorded OK Computer, Kid A and In Rainbows, some favourite Radiohead basslines, what it's like to play live with the band, and what people can expect from their forthcoming European shows. Colin also asks Adam what his problem with photographs is, especially after the publication of his Radiohead photo book, How To Disappear https://www.waterstones.com/book/how-to-disappear/colin-greenwood/9781399817844, now available in deluxe, limited edition form https://specialeditionbooks.co.uk/products/how-to-disappear?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=publisher, signed by all the band. Conversation recorded face-to-face in London on 25 April 2025 Thanks to Séamus Murphy-Mitchell for additional editing Podcast illustration by Helen Green https://helengreenillustration.com/ Pre-order Adam's album 'Buckle Up' https://shop.decca.com/products/buckle-up-vinyl-signed with limited signed artwork Order Adam's book 'I Love You Byeee' https://lnk.to/iloveyoubyeee_ EXCLUSIVE NORD VPN DEAL https://nordvpn.com/buxton Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee! UPCOMING LIVE EVENTS 2 EVENTS AT MANNINGTON BOOK BASH: I LOVE YOU, BYEE WAFFLE & NIGEL PLANER INTERVIEW https://www.manningtonbookbash.co.uk/, 27th September, 2025 ADAM IN CONVERSATION WITH SAMIRA AHMED @ WIMBLEDON BOOKFEST https://www.wimbledonbookfest.org/events/adam-buxton/, 10 October, 2025 ADAM AT THE LONDON BOOK FESTIVAL @ ROYAL FESTIVAL HALL https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/adam-buxton-i-love-you-byeee/, 26 October, 2025 MORE LINKS ON ADAM'S WEBSITE https://www.adam-buxton.co.uk/podcasts/82dyw29p3may2fa-dwb79-eycgn-fahgj-8yxba-c6hde-7lne6-5kthd-7a97e Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I added one more podcast to the giant podcast bin. Now you have plucked that podcast out and started listening. I took my microphone and found some human folk. Then I recorded all the noises while we spoke. My name is Adam Buxton, I'm a man. I want you to enjoy this, that's the plan.

• 0:31Adam Buxton?

  Hey, how are you doing, podcats? It's Adam Buxton here. It's not the most beautiful morning out here in Norfolk, in early September 2025. But it could be worse, couldn't it, Doglegs? One way it could be better is if I was back in the kitchen, on the sofa, and I was dry. Well, it is a little damp out here, I'll give you that, but it's only drizzle, Rosie. Shizzle more like. All right, Snoop Dogg. But how are you doing, podcats? Hope things are all right where you are. But look, let me tell you a bit about podcast number 256.

• 1:13Adam Buxton?

  This one features a rambling conversation with British musician and photographer Colin Greenwood. Here's some Colin facts for you. Colin facts: Colin was born in June 1969, just nineteen days after me, and over two years before his brother, Johnny. It was at Abingdon School in Oxford that the members of Radiohead met in the mid-1980s. Colin was in the same year as lead singer Tom York. Guitarist Ed O'Brien was a year above them, and drummer Phil Selway was two years above. Colin's brother, guitarist and keyboard player Johnny Greenwood, the last to join the band, was three years below Tom and Colin.

• 1:55Adam Buxton?

  That's info for all those people who really want to know what year people were in at school. Back then, the band's name was Honour Friday, because that was when they rehearsed. It was, said an otherwise positive 1991 Live review in The Melody Maker, "a terrible name." And when the band signed to EMI later that year, they changed it to Radiohead, after a song on the Talking Heads album, "True Stories", as you know if you listened to last week's episode with David Byrne. The band's first album, Pablo Honey, which contained the hit Creep, was recorded in nineteen ninety-two and produced by Paul Calderi and Sean Slade, who had previously

• 2:36Adam Buxton?

  worked with Radiohead favourites Pixies at the start of their career. But despite the huge success of Creep in nineteen ninety-three, it quickly became clear that Radiohead were not to be the next big thing in the grunge movement that the Pixies had helped spawn and Nirvana dominated. Instead, producer John Leckie and engineer Nigel Godrich helped the band mine more epic and spacey sounds on their second LP, The Benz, released in nineteen ninety-four. Godrich produced the next album, nineteen ninety-seven's OK Computer, and the six albums that have followed up to this point: Kid A, Amnesiac, Hail to the Thief, In Rainbows,

• 3:20Adam Buxton?

  King of Limbs, and twenty sixteen's A Moon-Shaped Pool. Radiohead's last live shows were in twenty eighteen. While Johnny has been playing with Thom Yorke in The Smile, and Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway have toured their solo music, Colin joined Nick Cave on tour with longtime Cave collaborator Warren Ellis in Australia in late twenty twenty-two. He fitted in so well that he has since become a recurring replacement bassist for Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds due to the illness of longtime bassist Martin P Casey. But in November and December of this year, twenty twenty-five, Colin rejoins his Radiohead brothers for a handful of live residencies in European cities.

• 4:05Adam Buxton?

  Yes, Radiohead are touring again. As if that wasn't enough good news for Radiohead fans, last month saw the opening of an exhibition of artwork by Thom Yorke and cover design collaborator Stanley Donwood at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum. I provided the voiceover for the audio guide, which I think you can download to your phone, and then you can have me doing my serious art voice as you walk through the gallery, interspersed with interviews with Thom and Stanley. And even more insight into the world of Radiohead comes in the form of Colin's book of photographs, How to Disappear, which features candid photos of Radiohead taken between two thousand

• 4:50Adam Buxton?

  and three and twenty eighteen. That was published earlier this year. Oh, it's quite rainy now.

• 4:58Adam Buxton?

  Shall we just shelter for a little bit, Doglegs? Rosie? Here, let's, let's pause here while I finish this intro.

• 5:06Adam Buxton?

  My conversation with Colin was recorded face to face in London back in April this year, and it was great to get nerdy with him about life in a band that I've loved since the mid 90s. I would say that Colin has a tendency to deflect investigations into what he does, out of modesty, but the sinewy groove of his basslines for Radiohead is a fundamental part of what makes many of the band's best songs so good, and we dug into a couple of those, as well as memories of crumbling buildings and spooky stately homes where Radiohead recorded OK Computer, Kid A, and In Rainbows. Colin also told me what it was like to be on stage playing live with the band,

• 5:49Adam Buxton?

  and what people can expect from this year's live shows. We also talked about photography, and Colin took me to task about what my problem is with photos anyway. We began by hearing about Colin's life as a bad seed. Back at the end for a bit more Waffle, but right now, with Colin Greenwood. Here we go.

• 6:50Adam Buxton?

  How many people on stage with the Bad Seeds?

• 6:52Speaker 02

  There's loads. I think there's about one, two, three, four... Eight or nine, I think.

• 6:56Adam Buxton?

  So many bad seeds.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  There's lots. Well, I'm not a bad seed. I'm standing in for a while whilst Marty gets better and stuff in Australia. But, um.

• 7:06Adam Buxton?

  Martin Casey.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  That's right. So, um, I'm just here for that period of time. But it's just been an extraordinary experience and I've had the best time. I mean, it's kind of two stories with me. It's, um, playing with them on tour with the Bad Seeds, but also I've been doing these solo piano and bass concerts with Nick around America. And then we're going to do a whole bunch around Europe as well.

• 7:30Adam Buxton?

  So that's literally just you and he on stage, is it?

• 7:33Speaker 02

  That's right. Yeah. He asked me if I'd be interested in doing it. A couple of years ago, he invited me for some lunch in London and he said, now then Colin, obviously you can wear whatever you like. But I was thinking that it would look great if we both wore suits. And I'm thinking, you know, I've been wearing my same double denim dad look with Radiohead for like twenty, twenty-five years. So I got all excited. I thought, you know, something that my mum would approve of finally. So if I wear a nice suit. So I said, yeah, that's, that would be great.

• 8:03Adam Buxton?

  His wife is a fashion designer, right?

• 8:05Speaker 02

  She is. That's right. She's.

• 8:06Adam Buxton?

  Suzie.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Well, she's made these beautiful, sparkly sequin clothes for the singers who's, who sort of float above the stage. And they just shimmer and they look like they're suspended in the, in, in the air whilst they're singing. And it's just so fabulous.

• 8:21Adam Buxton?

  I love my wife, but there's no question of her doing anything sartorially for me.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:28Adam Buxton?

  I don't think, I mean, like she, recently she's been buying what she calls tech bro jerk in things.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:35Adam Buxton?

  For the boys.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:37Adam Buxton?

  So she's dressed them up as tech bros and that's how I would look if she had her way. I mean, already I wear a lot of fleeces.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:45Adam Buxton?

  It's a lot of fleeces with buckles. So if I ever went on tour.

• 8:48Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:49Adam Buxton?

  And did some shows to promote my new album, which I have coming out this year, then.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Yes, outfits, something sparkly.

• 8:56Adam Buxton?

  Do North Face do anything sparkly?

• 8:59Speaker 02

  I just.

• 9:00Adam Buxton?

  I don't know. Sparkly hiking shorts.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Yes. Stuff like if you're in a city and it's dark and you don't want to get hit by a car.

• 9:07Adam Buxton?

  High vis, yeah.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  High vis.

• 9:09Adam Buxton?

  That's more my speed.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:11Adam Buxton?

  But what fun to be on stage to look great.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, right?

• 9:15Adam Buxton?

  To be playing with someone like Nick Cave. How did the association come around? Like, were you already pals?

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Well, no, not really. Because, I mean, I wasn't that gemmed up on the music because I always felt that the Bad Seeds were like far too cool for me.

• 9:29Adam Buxton?

  I mean, let's face it, a bit edgy, a bit naughty, a bit druggie. And the birthday party, have you watched that documentary about the birthday party? They're so naughty.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:38Adam Buxton?

  And they're pushing people around and they are just totally off the chain and they're living in squats and smoking all the cigs. Yeah, that, all that stuff was way out of my.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, comfort zone.

• 9:49Adam Buxton?

  Comfort zone.

• 9:50Speaker 02

  Exactly. But I loved, um, was it Let Love In? That album with Do You Love Me on it and, um, Red Right Hand and stuff like that, which came out, I think in the nineties and I sort of thrashed that record to death. So, uh, I, you know, I did know them and, and did love the music, but as you say, I was a bit nervous about, you know, introducing it to my mum. So, so, yeah, we have got the same manager, basically. Yeah, so what a showman, what a performer, what a, what an amazing person who can like bring everyone in and create a congregation out of a crowd, I would say.

• 10:24Adam Buxton?

  Right, there you go. Have you, have you learned anything? Have you, are you gonna go back to your bandmates in Radiohead and say, now, look, guys, the Bad Seeds do this thing that I think we could really benefit from?

• 10:39Speaker 02

  Well, actually, the one thing I would say that I would not want to do, that I've, I've had to deal with, with the Bad Seeds, that I don't want to do with Radiohead, is eat late.

• 10:49Adam Buxton?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  They all have this sort of Last Supper type setup after the show, because Nick doesn't, they don't really eat before the show because get too nervous and jumping up and down.

• 10:59Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  And we, so we all finish the show and we all start having food around eleven, twelve o'clock at night.

• 11:05Adam Buxton?

  That isn't good for the old gut.

• 11:07Speaker 02

  It's you're just rolling around at two in the morning.

• 11:10Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 02

  You can't sleep or anything. But um so that's that if I I'm not saying it's a negative, but it definitely is a it's something I won't be taking back to um Radiohead.

• 11:19Adam Buxton?

  So with the Bad Seeds, because you've been touring fairly recently with them, right?

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Yes, I'm I'm I'm on tour with them basically for on and off most a lot of this year.

• 11:28Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 11:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:29Adam Buxton?

  And how does that compare to the olden days of touring when you were first out in America with Radiohead?

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:36Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. Which would have been mid nineties?

• 11:38Speaker 02

  That's right, yeah. Well, I was just in Los Angeles, actually, and I walked down the Sunset Boulevard, walked past the old Hyatt Hotel, which used to be called the, was it the Riot on Sunset or the Riot House? And we stayed there. We were picked up by a white stretch limo.

• 11:56Adam Buxton?

  This is you with Radiohead.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  And they drove us to the Hyatt, which is where everyone would have stayed. And I guess Anthrax were having an album launch party on the roof when we arrived, to which they cordially, we didn't know them from Adam, but they cordially invited us if we wanted to um rock up on the roof. And but it was an alcohol-free album launch party. So there were these like plastic tubs of um sodas or soft drinks. And that's the first time I ever had smoked salmon and a bagel with capers and red onions for breakfast at the Hyatt, which was just was in all incredible. And because we'd had this hit with Creep, we had this sort of five-star introduction to um American club touring.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  But we were playing these, you know, tiny clubs, like, I don't know, five hundred, eight hundred people. We turn up to say Dallas and there'd be this huge queue stretching around the block to get into this club to come and see us because we'd had this hit with Creep, you know. So it was just the most incredible experience to have this sort of sort of luxury grassroots experience of this amazing country.

• 13:01Adam Buxton?

  But did you all find that incredibly exciting? And were you in a good mood about it? Or was it uh?

• 13:07Speaker 02

  No, I think. No, I think we all loved it, you know. I think Ed and Ed and the band was really into what you two had done. This romantic idea of America. And Ed had done his gap year before college. I think he'd done travelling in America on the Greyhound. Plus he had some family in America. So we were like, great, you know, cause there'd be some other artists, we were on EMR UK at the time. And what had seemed to happen is that some artists from the UK would like play like the coasts and not do anything else. And we were like, we wanna go everywhere and play to anyone. And the other thing is, of course, when you go to America, do you find this, that the way music sounds different in America, the things you know here, they're rearranged by the American molecules in the air.

• 13:51Adam Buxton?

  Mm hmm.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  So you listen to like, I don't know, Where the Streets Have No Name or something, or some hip hop or whatever. And it suddenly, it's like, this is the soundtrack for this country and it all makes sense.

• 14:01Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, in the hot environment, where like, with the sun beating down and the big wide streets.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  That's right, yeah.

• 14:08Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, sure, I know what you mean.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:10Adam Buxton?

  So what is it like now when you're touring around with Nick Cave?

• 14:14Speaker 02

  Well, most recently in America, I've done this tour with him, which is in a weird way, actually, it's sort of a throwback to, remember when David Bowie was doing those tours of America, was it when he was doing The Man Who Fell to Earth? Is that the Nicholas Rogue film? And there's lots of stuff of him in the back of a car.

• 14:33Adam Buxton?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  Driving through.

• 14:34Adam Buxton?

  In the Alan Yentob doc.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  That's it, the American landscape.

• 14:37Adam Buxton?

  Cracked actor.

• 14:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, crack tack, stuff like that, you know, and it's like, Nick's like, uh, that's how we get around from gig to gig. We get into like an SUV and sit in the back and we've got some like snacks, like some nuts and crisps and things that, and maybe not crisps, and fruit and stuff.

• 14:54Adam Buxton?

  Crisp is going a bit far.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  It is pushing the, pushing the, uh.

• 14:57Adam Buxton?

  They're bad boys, but.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  They are.

• 14:59Adam Buxton?

  There's limits.

• 14:59Speaker 02

  Well, I'll eat them if they're there. But anyway, we leave the hotel at nine, ten in the morning. And then we'll drive from, I don't know, Cincinnati to Minneapolis or something, and we'll do like seven, eight hour drives.

• 15:13Adam Buxton?

  Oh, what's that like? And you're just sat in the back with Nick Cave?

• 15:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right, and just shooting the breeze. He's working, he's on the laptop.

• 15:21Adam Buxton?

  Okay, right.

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Maybe he's pretending to work.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Typing away, someone like, listen to me gassing on.

• 15:28Adam Buxton?

  He puts his headphones on and says like, I'm just gonna listen to a podcast. Are you allowed to do that?

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. And then we listen to some tracks sometimes. We played in Atlanta, Georgia. And we were going out for dinner the night before, this like new southern cooking place, you know, food from the south, like Alabama and stuff.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  And I thought, I was thinking, I really wanted to talk to him about his screenwriting and his scripts.

• 15:52Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  And writing dialogue, because he's, you know, he's such an amazing writer. You know, how do you do that? How do you write words for actors to say? I just, it's such an amazing, because I've read scripts, I'm sure you've read them. And everything, when you read a script, it seems so bald, doesn't it? So I wanted to ask him about that. And he was telling me about this film he'd made called The Proposition.

• 16:12Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, I love it. John Hillcoat directed it.

• 16:14Speaker 02

  That's right, with Tom Hardy.

• 16:16Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, it's a good film.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's great. Anyway, so he was telling me about this scene where Tom Hardy's having his throat cut, I don't know if you remember, and it, but it goes on for quite a while because the guy is like soaring it. But that's been a part of the direction to make it even more lurid. And, you know, and he's telling me about that scene and about, you know. And this voice says over our heads, he said, I was the actor in that scene with the knife at Tom Hardy's throat. We looked up. And it was this guy who lives in Atlanta, who was working in the restaurant, he was the actor from the scene.

• 16:49Adam Buxton?

  That's weird.

• 16:50Speaker 02

  I know. So then he joined in the conversation about what, you know, it's completely like random coincidence.

• 16:56Adam Buxton?

  Whoa.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  You know.

• 16:57Adam Buxton?

  How does Nick process something like that? Is he into crazy, universal alignments and spiritual strangeness? Or does he go, oh, that was a weird coincidence?

• 17:10Speaker 02

  I think he sort of just takes everything in as it happens. So I've got this like photo book out about Radiohead called

• 17:18Adam Buxton?

  How to Disappear.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  How to Remember What It's Called. And I've been doing some promo on the Bad Seeds tour around England, you know. And I went to Waterstones Bookshop in Glasgow, in the UK, so this is in Scotland, in Glasgow. And the manager said to me, we had that Nick Cave from the Bad Seeds through with his book about a year ago. And I said, oh, how did that go, you know? And he said, um, well, it was his birthday. So we had around two hundred and fifty people turn up. And a lot of them brought cake in the queue. And he arranged for someone to come and cut up all the cake into slices. Everyone got a slice of cake and he hugged every single person.

• 17:59Adam Buxton?

  Whoa. That is not the bloke that I saw in the birthday party documentary.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  No.

• 18:05Adam Buxton?

  And what does it feel like? What does it feel like in America at the moment, Colin? Tell us.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  Um, well, it's a weird one because it's like people don't really want to talk about it.

• 18:13Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 18:13Speaker 02

  Um, it's like they just look slightly pained and just don't want to discuss it. And.

• 18:19Adam Buxton?

  That's what Colin Tobin said when I asked her.

• 18:21Speaker 02

  And I love that podcast you did with him.

• 18:24Adam Buxton?

  Oh, good. I'm glad.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  I was working. I'm sorry. I'm shouting at you about it now. I was working. I was on tour with, um, with, with the Bad Seeds. We were playing in Lisbon. And I was like going for a run and I, and I was listening to Colin Tobin talking to you and just that I bloody loved it. He's such an amazing writer.

• 18:40Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. No, he is. But I started by saying, because it was a few months before the election. And I was saying, uh, you know, are people talking about it a lot in New York? And he said, no, no one's talking about it because they don't wanna, they don't wanna deal with it.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  I was in America over the summer when the Democrat conventions were taking place in Philadelphia and in Midwest and stuff. And, you know, it was amazing. I just watched it and thought, well, she's gonna win, obviously.

• 19:06Adam Buxton?

  Kamala.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  That's right. We're not going back. We're not going back. All the chants and stuff. And it was just so, so powerful. And so, you know, they put on such a great show when they do that stuff, you know? Yeah. It was just brilliant. So it's just, you know, very, um, you know, very sad. It sounds, you can't use the word sad because Trump uses the word sad.

• 19:24Adam Buxton?

  He really does. Yeah. It's sad.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:27Adam Buxton?

  It's not very nice. That's the other one. It's not nice.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:30Adam Buxton?

  I saw a thing as well of, um, Musk. On a TV show.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:35Adam Buxton?

  Getting quite emotional about Tim Walts or someone.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:40Adam Buxton?

  Laughing at the falling stock price of Tesla.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:43Adam Buxton?

  And Musk was saying, you know, he's laughing because our company's not doing well. Isn't that mean? That's horrible, isn't it? Why would you go on and and be so pleased about someone else's misfortune? That's mean.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:57Adam Buxton?

  And you're like, mate, look in the mirror for a second.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's how.

• 20:03Adam Buxton?

  With his chainsaw, going out and celebrating all the cuts.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  I think it's how quick people seem to be to take offence and be so upset and slighted.

• 20:11Adam Buxton?

  Mm hmm. Well, I've heard Nick Cave talking about that as well. Like, he's always been, he's been someone who's actually managed to.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 20:20Adam Buxton?

  Navigate quite a good path through the the sort of conversations around free speech or around the culture wars, I suppose.

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 20:31Adam Buxton?

  You know, he's not a blowhard about it.

• 20:34Speaker 02

  He's he likes to have an argument and a discussion.

• 20:36Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Because he's just very curious.

• 20:38Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 20:38Speaker 02

  Because he just wants to find out, you know, what you think and what you think about something, you know, he's not, he's very open and engaged to other points of view. And I hope, you know, one of the things I hope I will have learnt from the time that I spent working with him is that I can try to approach that kind of worldview as well.

• 20:57Adam Buxton?

  Do you have to be careful when you're together as a band, as Radiohead? Do you have to be careful about having those kinds of discussions and whatever, whether it's culture wars or anything else? Do you have to sort of go, okay, guys, not while we're rehearsing?

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, I think that the the difference between that, I suppose, is with that Nick Cave is that we've all been together since we were kids.

• 21:19Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  So we all know.

• 21:20Adam Buxton?

  You know which buttons not to press. Right.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, we all know that. And it can be something that's like petty and trivial and or something like immense and irritating, whatever. It's like Peter Jackson, the Get Back.

• 21:32Adam Buxton?

  Hmm.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  It's that same kind of thing. I mean, have you you've seen that documentary?

• 21:35Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  It's so moving. I don't know if it's worth, there's one scene where um towards the end where um they're clustered around the piano and they're still talking about this idea of doing some kind of like live concert and it sort of moved on to some other idea. But I just found it fascinating the way the others all sort of clustered around John Lennon in this sort of protective way. Cause you could tell that the others felt that he was the one that was the sort of more fragile in that situation, you know, they're very protective of each other at points.

• 22:05Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  Which I thought was very beautiful.

• 22:07Adam Buxton?

  Did you recognise that in your own relationship with your bandmates?

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we're all very respectful of each other and we all, you know, yeah, we all get on with each other and we're all kind and we all listen to each other.

• 23:08Adam Buxton?

  Have you ever written a song?

• 23:10Speaker 02

  No, I haven't written a song. Um, I do suffer some arrangements and write parts that I play on.

• 23:16Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  Although it's quite funny, I was in Brixton a few years ago and this guy stopped me on a, uh, he was on a bicycle, sort of middle aged bloke, whatever, and he was like, oh, you're Colin Green from Radiohead, he said. I said, yeah, he said, oh, I'm a bass player too. In fact, I teach bass. And he said, I said, oh, that's great. Oh, and he said, listen, I just wanna say like, I love your bass playing, you know, and some of my favourite bass lines, you know, you play and this stuff. And I said, oh, right, okay. And he said, yeah, and it's, I'll tell you what I love most. It's this one called National Anthem. Uh, that's an amazing, yeah, yeah, right. And I said, oh, Tom wrote that, you know, he did it when he was on four track, you know, when it was about fifteen or something.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  And then recorded it too, and he looked a bit abashed. Then um, he said, I tell you what, there's this other one I really love. It's called um, Where I End and You Begin. I said, Tom did that one too. That's, that's it. Tom wrote that one. And then he just was looking more and more mortified and he sort of, he sort of wobbled off on his bicycle. And it was like, I was like, you know, that's fine, but they're great to play, you know, I love it.

• 24:15Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, they're quite similar as well, those two words. They're almost the reverse of each other.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:20Adam Buxton?

  National anthem is doo doo doo doo doo doo doo, and then where I end and you begin is doo doo doo doo doo doo doo.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess they are, yeah, yeah. Well, they've, we've all got rhythmic clocks in us, in our bodies, with how we respond to music. This was my side hippy dippy theory about, you know, metronomes, you know, Tom's always like sixteenth ahead of the beat on everything.

• 24:41Adam Buxton?

  Uh huh.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  It's always like, always one little lurch before the one, which is kind of amazing.

• 24:47Adam Buxton?

  I always remember talking to Johnny, your brother, once about GarageBand, which I use to make my music.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  I love your music. I was gonna say, I'm loving all the new tunes as well.

• 24:57Adam Buxton?

  Thank you.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:59Adam Buxton?

  And I, I talked to Johnny once about it and I said, do you ever use loops? Like, cause you guys use.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:05Adam Buxton?

  Well, actually Pro Tools was the first bit of digital kit that you would use in the studio, I think.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:11Adam Buxton?

  So that didn't have loops on it.

• 25:14Speaker 02

  No, but the first people to use loops, I suppose, would be, you know, and I, well, not the first people, but like probably the most prominent would have been these people called the Dust Brothers, who made the records for Beck.

• 25:25Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  You know, turntable, two turntables.

• 25:27Adam Buxton?

  But weren't they making their own loops though?

• 25:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Beastie Boys is a Paul's Boutique.

• 25:32Adam Buxton?

  Right, but they wouldn't have been using like the loops that came with a piece of software. And Johnny, cause I remember Johnny saying like, no, we would never do that. We would never use a loop that came with Logic or something. He said, no, we make our own stuff and we write our own code for the different effects and all that kind of.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  Right, well, he would do that. He would write, he sits on a laptop and he uses this program called Max MSP.

• 25:53Adam Buxton?

  Uh huh.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Which looks like a sort of digital version of like something from Bletchley Park, I guess.

• 25:58Adam Buxton?

  It's all sort of bespoke, like you wouldn't lean on the ready-made aspects, the labour-saving aspects of technology as a band, or would you?

• 26:07Speaker 02

  Well, we we used a lot more loops over the last few records, because I think one of the things that like Tolman maybe and Nigel were really into was um David Byrne Talking Heads. When they were making rhythms and out of loops and stuff as well. So I think we did a bunch of that with like records like King of Limbs. And then I think on a moon shaped pool as well, it was amazing. Um Nigel turned the whole mixing desk into like a drum machine by. Punching in Phil playing lots of different rhythms and stuff and then constructed this amazing rhythm track. Out of the all of the loops. So it's kind of like using like modern technology in a very old fashioned way.

• 26:43Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  Very Nigel, you know, amazing, like how he can make things out of like. Stuff, you know, using like old two inch magnetic tape machines and turning it into like this some crazy drum machine. It's like. For um OK Computer, we'd use microphone stands and we'd put tape all the way around the room. Through a tape machine, so you'd have like ten metres, I don't know, eight metres worth of tape sort of flying around the room, being. Recorded into over and over again, like the Beatles did loads of that as well. So a lot of this stuff, you know, it it's not that new either. It was done in Abbey Road in the sixties.

• 27:17Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, but you're actually making the loops out of actual tape.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:21Adam Buxton?

  I'm just dragging them in from the library and Logic Pro.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  But what's wrong with that?

• 27:26Adam Buxton?

  Well, because there's no, there's no labour in it. You've got to have.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Why?

• 27:31Adam Buxton?

  Made the effort.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, you don't. The idea, the melody, the structure, you know, that's all fine.

• 27:37Adam Buxton?

  I suppose, I mean, you know, I know that Rihanna used a couple of garage band loops in some of her songs. And I mean, they're very good.

• 27:47Speaker 02

  Well, a friend of mine works with, made a record with um Snoop Dogg.

• 27:51Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  And he just like, he's got, I think it's fruity loops or something on a laptop, and he just sits there and just knocks up these ferocious beats. That's what he's using, so it's like.

• 28:01Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, exactly. It's what you do with it, isn't it? I always remember a South Bank Show documentary that I love about Bjork. And she's there on walking down a beach somewhere with a Yamaha QY.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, QI seventy.

• 28:14Adam Buxton?

  Right. And Sarah, my wife, got me one of those. Actually, she got me the QI one hundred. Because she knew how much I admired Bjork and how I'd seen this doc and I was like, oh, I want one of those.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  We all bought one too.

• 28:29Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, did you?

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I never got past the manual. It was like, I can't.

• 28:33Adam Buxton?

  I know, she made it look so easy. And she's coming up, I've, I've used it lots, actually.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:38Adam Buxton?

  But everything I've done is just with the presets.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:41Adam Buxton?

  And I never get beyond that. You can, you can go into it and you can customize everything.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:45Adam Buxton?

  And actually, it's got a really lovely bass sound.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:49Adam Buxton?

  A really thick, twangy.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Amazing.

• 28:51Adam Buxton?

  Full, non-compressed sounding bass sound.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:54Adam Buxton?

  Which I've used lots.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:56Adam Buxton?

  But, um, no, I could never, I don't have the wherewithal to go in and start customizing and making really complicated.

• 29:03Speaker 02

  You want like a sort of slightly bored, gum chewing, like eighteen year old, like engineer wearing on his little belts with his boxer shorts pulled up.

• 29:10Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  Who does all that stuff for you and looks pityingly on you as you try and do it yourself.

• 29:15Adam Buxton?

  Or Johnny Greenwood.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  Or Johnny Greenwood, that's true.

• 29:18Adam Buxton?

  How did you get so good at the bass? Like, do you think that you and Johnny are just one of, you know, that you're just those kinds of people who are innately musical? And actually, it's just a question of practicing and you will connect with your talent? Or do you think that it's more like you just practice enough and you get the proper lessons and you can get really good?

• 29:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think B.

• 29:40Adam Buxton?

  Really?

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'd say so, yeah. Because, but it's not, it's that and it's also like having the drive, I suppose. Cause there's lots of really talented people who just don't exercise that talent. But I think it's like, it's being around with a bunch of people. It's like, well, we were really inspired by, we heard stories about the Pixies when they were like rehearsing a lot. They, they worked their arses off in some rehearsal studio in Boston or wherever. And so we thought that's what you had to do. So we'd go in and like, you know, we'd work from like, I don't know, ten, eleven till like five every day for weeks on end. And a lot of village halls around England, you know, we worked really, really hard on it all. Yeah, we played loads and loads.

• 30:18Adam Buxton?

  And you were all on the same page. There wasn't one of you saying, oh my God, do we have to do this again?

• 30:23Speaker 02

  No, weirdly. We never played any shows. We never, we weren't like those Americans who like would go and play clubs and stuff. You know, um, that is one of the things I'm not sure is going so well now for kids who are in bands. Is the expense of or organization.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  Of getting in a room together for like, say, a few weeks or village halls. Cause we used to like pay one pound fifty each and I I'd get the money and I'd go and see Mrs Scott, who was the keeper of the village hall key. And go and, you know, do the rehearsals and stuff and we'd rehearse for like four or five hours and it's a village hall. And now I think it's really tough for like kids to get together and find a practice space and, you know, and do that and have that experience and make music together. Cause it's a lot to organise. So I think a lot of people now, they don't really rehearse or they rehearse virtually. Or they learn the parts when they're in their bedrooms and stuff and then they, you know, I think it's a lot tougher.

• 31:15Adam Buxton?

  And there's just so many more laptop jockeys. There's so many more kind of single artists.

• 31:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 31:22Adam Buxton?

  Or, you know, Billie Eilish types who can, to the extent that the style of the singing has changed, you know what I mean? Like the the kind of close mic breathy vocals of the laptop age.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's more hermetic.

• 31:34Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  But I think, you know, if anyone wants to know what it was like, I'm I'm not making any other comparisons than this. I would say go and watch the, um, is it Peter Jackson Beatles?

• 31:46Adam Buxton?

  Get Back.

• 31:46Speaker 02

  Get Back. If you wanna know what it was like rehearsing with Radiohead, go and see Get Back when we're, when they're all getting together and they're just jamming and noodling, drinking tea and eating toast and talking about what was on the telly the night before, what was in the paper. It was like that basically, you know, for years.

• 32:02Adam Buxton?

  Were the songs a fait accompli when they were brought in or would you still be going, what about this for a middle A or would they still be getting written?

• 32:12Speaker 02

  A lot of the songs were like written obviously by Tom and he would bring them in, but then there would also be, structure would change and then there would also be chords that would happen, you know, and occasionally and then songs and then things would be written around that. I mean, it's so, if you gave me, if you must ask me a song, I would, I would tell you.

• 32:30Adam Buxton?

  Does he come in, sit down and play it on the guitar and then you all work it up together? Was that how it would have been in the village hall?

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Yes, that could happen on electric guitar. He had Ibanez, Ibanez Roadster.

• 32:42Adam Buxton?

  So he doesn't come in and go, okay, Phil, this is what I want you to do.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  No.

• 32:47Adam Buxton?

  And Colin, this is what I want you to do on the bass.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  No.

• 32:50Adam Buxton?

  No, okay.

• 32:51Speaker 02

  But, um, but yeah, no, but it was all just like have a go and see what you think and. You know, and then we just like work up the arrangements and some stuff would take a long time and other stuff, you know, because we all had different tastes in music.

• 33:03Adam Buxton?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:04Speaker 02

  So everyone was very sort of protective about their aesthetics, I suppose.

• 33:09Adam Buxton?

  Quite right.

• 33:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, but um, you know.

• 33:13Adam Buxton?

  You've got to be prosthetic, prosthetic.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  Prosthetic about your detectives.

• 33:19Adam Buxton?

  So what about like as an example of a specific.

• 33:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:23Adam Buxton?

  Bass part.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 33:24Adam Buxton?

  Tell the story of.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  Deep into the weeds.

• 33:26Adam Buxton?

  Deep into the weeds.

• 33:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 33:28Adam Buxton?

  Nude.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 33:47Speaker 02

  Fabulous. I didn't slip your piece of paper with nude on the.

• 33:50Adam Buxton?

  I mean, it's a beautiful piece of work because it, I think part of the reason I liked it was that it didn't feel like a Radiohead line.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, what happened was we were just jamming around and um, for me it was Al Green. I love Al Green. My brother had this amazing like Hammond, he had a Hammond organ, like a really big like old fashioned Hammond organ that was in my mum's front room for years and stuff. So, so it was always terrible like Finbar Saunders jokes about my brother's enormous organ and the crew coming and having to carry my brother's, you know, that went on for years. And so that's amazing. He plays this amazing soulful Hammond organ. There's a conventional outtakes on Okay Not Okay on OK Computer, you know, that we put out. But um, yeah, there's this song, um, How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, which is a Bee Gees song and Al Green covers it. And there's a version of it live in Tokyo where he goes

• 34:42Speaker 02

  into this falsetto, um, and becomes wordless and sort of escapes into the um, into the zephyr. It's so beautiful. And I loved that. And that's why I tried to get into nude, that kind of arrangement.

• 34:56Adam Buxton?

  It worked so well. And similarly groovy, albeit faster, is Staircase.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 35:27Speaker 02

  Oh, Adam.

• 35:28Adam Buxton?

  That's a good one.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 35:29Adam Buxton?

  Because I like all the, all the washes of synth.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 35:33Adam Buxton?

  And that's much more kind of, uh.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 35:37Adam Buxton?

  Eighties, early eighties electro pop for me.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  It is, totally. Well, so when we work on stuff, sometimes we have, I don't know how it works for you when you're working on.

• 35:45Adam Buxton?

  Hmm, yes, Colin.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Making something, but you have a sort of idea in your head and you're plucking at something that's way up in the firmament of past brilliant creativity and you're trying to drag some of that down.

• 35:57Adam Buxton?

  Sure, sure.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  So for me, it was like, for us, me and my brother, it was like Miami Vice with, um, what's his name?

• 36:05Adam Buxton?

  Don Johnson.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  Don Johnson, there you go. And like sort of, and Michael Mann movies, you know, all that. And like looking at the TV series and the film, looking out across this sort of bleached sort of boardwalk going into the sea and everything and speedboats. We're living the life when we're playing that.

• 36:21Adam Buxton?

  Uh huh.

• 36:22Speaker 02

  In my head, anyway.

• 36:54Adam Buxton?

  So the other day, we were texting and you said you'd listened to my episode with Kim Deal.

• 37:00Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, I finished that this morning.

• 37:02Adam Buxton?

  And you said, I wish I could be in the moment like that.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 37:07Adam Buxton?

  About her.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 37:09Adam Buxton?

  What did you mean?

• 37:11Speaker 02

  She just sounds very open and free and, uh, you know, the responses would just sound unmediated, you know, very direct. And, uh, yeah, I really, I really enjoyed that episode.

• 37:24Adam Buxton?

  Do you feel, when you're in interviews, do you feel like, oh, I've got to be careful?

• 37:31Speaker 02

  What, not trading on any mines?

• 37:32Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Well, our manager Bryce, he always says with interviews and promos, keep it light, keep it moving is the golden rule.

• 37:41Adam Buxton?

  I was listening to you the other day on a Rolling Stone podcast, I think you did.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 37:46Adam Buxton?

  Towards the end of twenty twenty four. And your interviewer there, I think he was Brian Hyatt. Was really trying hard to get some information out of you about whether you were going to be touring. And it was like something from the Today Programme with you.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Was I stonewalling furiously?

• 38:06Adam Buxton?

  Furious stonewalling and obfuscation and evasion.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  Non sequiturs.

• 38:11Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. Because he had said, well, you've all been rehearsing. And what was that all about? Are you rehearsing for a tour? And you were obviously just trying to not say what it was that you were doing.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  Well, I'll tell you what happened. It was last summer and I was doing a live Zoom with a music festival in Mexico. I was in London and they had the camera on and I could see it was like a music arts festival somewhere like in Pachuca, somewhere in one of the cities outside Mexico City. And they had an audience of like, I don't know, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen year old kids and in this theatre about the my photo book, How to Disappear. And they were like, you know, and it was just after we'd done this jam in Crouch End in the summer of twenty four. And they're going, well, what are you going to play with some some kids like we had the microphone, you know? Can you let us know if you're ever if you're going to play again? And it just like, I looked at all these kids who were like desperate to like hear us play or whatever.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  And I just thought, well, we I just played with the guys like two weeks ago, a week ago. So I told, I said, yeah, we just played last week. And and it was just like, yeah, how could you? How could you not say that then? You know, it was like such an amazing moment.

• 39:22Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. The reason you have to be secretive or or that you can't announce plans in advance is because of all the ticket sales, right? And because then if there are rumours, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm speculating here. There if there are rumours about you touring.

• 39:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:39Adam Buxton?

  Then disreputable companies claim to be selling tickets and start.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Right.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  I think the reality is that if you wanna make any kind of plans to do any kind of like shows for us, you have to give the venues a minimum of like a year to a year and a half's notice. So, you know, if anyone thinks that anyone in Radiohead says they're gonna do a show, they're gonna do some touring, you know, and and there's rumours about it, it's not gonna happen because you've got like that eighteen months because everywhere is post Covid already sold out, you know, so getting your slot to play is such a sort of long term thing that there's never gonna be any last minute announcements.

• 40:23Adam Buxton?

  Hmm. Except.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  Except, yeah, well, when we're doing this.

• 40:29Adam Buxton?

  We're speaking in early April.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 40:32Adam Buxton?

  Twenty twenty five, and there are rumours on Reddit at the moment that you're gonna be touring later this year.

• 40:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 40:40Adam Buxton?

  So is that true?

• 40:42Speaker 02

  Yes, it is true. We are doing some shows at the end of the year in Europe. We're doing like residencies, I guess. We're doing four nights in five cities, which kinda sounds a bit like Sinatra-esque perhaps. So we're gonna play like Madrid, Bologna, Berlin, and then London, and then we're wrapping up in Copenhagen. Yeah, we're just gonna take what we did, I suppose, in that in the summer of twenty four when we did that little jam. And we're not doing that many rehearsals either, so it all seems to be quite sort of relaxed.

• 41:14Adam Buxton?

  This year, though, twenty twenty five, is gonna be the thirty yearth anniversary of the Benz?

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Yes, that's right. So many years.

• 41:22Adam Buxton?

  So will you be, you're not gonna be playing the whole album through, or are you just gonna sort of, i- is it gonna be a mixed set?

• 41:28Speaker 02

  Oh, I think it's gonna be a mixed set. I think we've like whittled it down to about seventy songs. And me and my brother are not on the setlist committee. We're not allowed, because we're too indecisive. So that works. So, yeah, so we'll play anything in any order, anytime. We sort of take a busking attitude to the Radiohead setlist. But yes, it's gonna be that. And we're gonna be playing everything, stuff from the first record all the way through to now. So, yeah, it's gonna be the first time, I think, we've done shows where we haven't got new material to play as work in progress. But you never know, some stuff might come up or not or whatever. So, and I'd love to play, there's that song, Spectre.

• 42:08Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 42:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:09Adam Buxton?

  Which you did play. In the last shows you did.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  I was like, you're right, we did in America. You're so right. Tom played it.

• 42:17Adam Buxton?

  For Moonshake Pool.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  God, you're good. Yeah, Tom played it on the Rhodes keyboard, I think, and I sort of noodled along on the bass as well. But I think I wanna play it like a full band thing, you know.

• 42:27Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  A la Paul McCartney, Live and Let Die, you know, some massive bit in the middle of like, you know. Maybe not with the reggae bit, but which I love.

• 42:37Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  But, you know, but yeah.

• 42:38Adam Buxton?

  What does it matter to you? That's a good song, isn't it?

• 42:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:43Adam Buxton?

  The reggae bit, I don't mind. It never struck me as being problematic.

• 42:48Speaker 02

  No.

• 42:49Adam Buxton?

  But not even Obladi Obladar strikes me as being too terrible, although you're supposed to hate that now, aren't you?

• 42:54Speaker 02

  But it speaks of the sunshiny sort of exotic locations of the Bond films, doesn't it?

• 42:59Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Sipping a coconut cocktail like on the beach.

• 43:02Adam Buxton?

  I mean, you know, it's no worse than a lot of the actual content of the film Live and Let Die as far as being.

• 43:09Speaker 02

  That's true. Yeah.

• 43:10Adam Buxton?

  You know, problematic.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  Jane Seymour.

• 43:13Adam Buxton?

  Was she in that one? Solitaire.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  That's right. And we recorded OK Computer in her house.

• 43:18Adam Buxton?

  Look at these connections.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  So smooth. Yeah, that's right. And she was in an advert called Le Jardin de Max Factor.

• 43:24Adam Buxton?

  I remember it well.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  That was in the Elizabeth and Knott's Garden, the terrace garden of that house.

• 43:29Adam Buxton?

  So how did it work? She would just rent the place out while she was off shooting?

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think she was living in in America, in LA, and I think she's doing Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman.

• 43:40Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 43:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, and she'd rent it out to like cruises and had a block of time free. I think we used it and I think the Cure recorded there as well.

• 43:48Adam Buxton?

  Uh huh.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  And Robbie Williams did as well, I think. Not at the same time.

• 43:52Adam Buxton?

  No. How does it work then? When you record stuff, do you sit around afterwards and play back what you've been doing that day and have a glass of wine and nod at each other or?

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Well, we recorded a whole bunch of things that we liked the sound of so much, we would like stay up till like four in the morning working on them. And it was just us, it wasn't like anyone, the record company, they let us go away basically with Nigel, who at the time was had been an assistant engineer at um at Rack Studios with his mate Sam and Henry, who went on to um make those records um uh Zero Seven. Zero Seven, that's right, and just amazing. And Sam and Henry also put the beats together with Nigel for um National Anthem. You know, cut up Phil's drums and stuff, old school on an Akai sampler and made that amazing crunchy groove. So yeah, so we were just allowed to run off and play at this massive haunted, you know, house.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  You know, just us and Nigel with all these toys and it was incredible. When I look back at the self, the confidence that we had to go away and do something like that, having never done that before and and get away with it and and make that record, it's like like subterranean homes, Sicilian Paranoid Android, exit music for a film, you know, it's just incredible. I think Phil was recording the drums right at the top floor, which was a sort of nursery with lots of stuffed cuddly toys and things and and and you know, children's cots and things. And then it had that incredibly dead sound of the kit and everything. So and then and I think Tom was singing downstairs somewhere, like in a big hall or in a corridor with this sort of, it was all amazing, incredible.

• 45:42Speaker 02

  So I'm looking at a photograph of Tom, all wrapped up in a blazer and wearing a scarf. Um I think it would probably have been the autumn as well when we were recording for uh in rainbows. At this house called Tottenham House on the edge of the Savernake Forest in Wiltshire. One of the most rundown places we'd worked in, it was kind of had been abandoned, well banned, you know, hadn't been lived in. It had been abused as a for a drug rehab centre like a decade before, I guess. And they had a gymnasium, but it was like an underground gymnasium. It was in the basement, so it was all had this sort of exercise equipment. Sort of mouldering and stuff that hadn't, and there was like windows full of like dead flies. And we were told we couldn't sleep in it because it was structurally unsound.

• 46:25Speaker 02

  So we rented like half a dozen caravans. And of course, I don't know if you slept in a caravan recently, but sleeping in caravan in October, it gets very cold very quickly. So, so we'd all get into our caravans and we'd just be like shivering away. And then we wake up in the mornings and go and have like breakfast in this huge room. That was all bare and there was nothing on the walls and it was bare floorboards because. The family, the Cardigan family, Earl Cardigan, they ran out of money by the time they got to the stage of that stage of the house. So it was all a bit grim really and and freezing cold and we.

• 47:01Adam Buxton?

  How long were you there?

• 47:02Speaker 02

  We were there for like too long. I think we left like three weeks, you know.

• 47:05Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  Four weeks, four weeks.

• 47:06Adam Buxton?

  I thought you were gonna say like three months or something. How long were you in the Jane Seymour place in October?

• 47:11Speaker 02

  Well, that was completely different. We were there for like six to eight weeks. We did two sessions there. We were there for like about a month, went away and then came back.

• 47:19Adam Buxton?

  Okay. And you mentioned, um, I forgot to ask you when you said it, but you passingly referred to it as haunted.

• 47:26Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 47:27Adam Buxton?

  Do you think it was?

• 47:28Speaker 02

  Jane Seymour's?

• 47:29Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Well, Tom was sleeping in the massive like master bedroom, which was all pink. And had a huge four poster bed and then had a separate ensuite bathroom. And there were little sort of Jane Seymour dolls dotted about of her and different characters in her acting career.

• 47:45Adam Buxton?

  Mm hmm.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  You know, I guess they're like Barbie dolls, Barbie Jane Seymour.

• 47:48Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  So, but I don't think he was sleeping very well. So I was sleeping in another room at the other end. And supposedly there was a ghost, which was supposedly the ghost of one of Henry VIII's wives who lived there, who was executed, but I can't remember which one. And so we swapped bedrooms. And I think he found my bedroom even more spooky. I don't know if you've ever slept in a really big room before, but you always have this feeling that someone's about to come in at the other end of the room. Cause it's just like, it's just so big. So I was just in a state of perpetual awakenedness. So it was all a bit spooky. And, uh, you know, it's a kind of place Ameri- rich Americans would stay on a, go on a cruise tour of England and want to go and visit. You know, ancient England, merry old England. So that's kind of what we were doing.

• 48:31Adam Buxton?

  Yeah. When you go in to record a record, so like when you were going in to do in rainbows.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:38Adam Buxton?

  Were you all feeling positive or do you sort of go in there and worry that your mojo is gonna have abandoned you finally?

• 48:46Speaker 02

  No, well, what happens is we'd worked up a lot of the songs then. So it was just about getting songs sounding as good as you remember playing them. I mean, it's really, I don't know. It's funny, isn't it? Looking at these pictures in my book, it's a bit like some kind of weird Channel Four Big Brother house type thing, isn't it? You know, if you wanted to add the pressure, you could put cameras in on the corners and stuff and like, who gets voted out, you know, and all that kind of stuff. It feels a bit like that, doesn't it? Why would you put yourself in these challenging situations? But, um, and then every weekend, all these bikers would come at the end of the lane. And you'd just see them. They'd all be looking for magic mushrooms amongst the sheep shit at the end of the massive drive.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  But, you know, I guess it sort of gives something to the records, an atmosphere, like a flavour, I suppose, you know? With Kid A, we recorded in this massive house in a place called Morton in the Marsh. That was owned by some, a lord whose name I can't remember, who visited briefly. And again, his family hadn't lived in there for generations. But the Mitford sisters used to go there and we found some graffiti with their names written in one of these little towers on the corners of the former gardens at the back, which is kind of amazing if you're interested in the Mitfords. And then kids from the village in Morton Marsh, they'd heard we were recording and they'd come and like hide in the bushes. Like whilst we were working and stuff. And Tom was kind of freaked out and he put a tent out by the control room outside in the big room. Cause he didn't want to sleep in the house, cause it was too haunted.

• 50:11Speaker 02

  And it was just extraordinary.

• 50:13Adam Buxton?

  Another haunted one.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  It was, you know, like The Remains of the Day.

• 50:16Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Film with, um, yeah, about, you know, Shigeru. It's a bit like one of those houses, only no one's lived there for like a hundred years. And then you've been given the keys back into it and everything has been left when, when every, all those people left, you know?

• 50:29Adam Buxton?

  Where would Radiohead be were it not for rambling houses of the British aristocracy?

• 50:34Speaker 02

  That's right. Yeah.

• 50:35Adam Buxton?

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 50:37Speaker 02

  Yeah. God. Anyway.

• 50:39Adam Buxton?

  So some of the photos in your book.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 50:41Adam Buxton?

  Are actually taken on stage during concerts. How is it possible for you to have the wherewithal? Are those just songs where you're not playing and you can get your camera out and wander around?

• 50:53Speaker 02

  Well, one of your questions is a photograph of Tom looking out into the audience. So I'm standing, as I always do, behind him and it says, how can you concentrate on stage with lights and shit?

• 51:02Adam Buxton?

  Yes.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  And, um.

• 51:04Adam Buxton?

  I've often wondered that, seeing you guys play, because sometimes you're in more or less total darkness and you're still playing. Or the strobes or it's just a sort of extreme conditions. And it's not as if you have those Orbital torch glasses on.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Maybe we should.

• 51:20Adam Buxton?

  Well, yeah, but you'd have to ask Orbital. That's their thing.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  Is it? Well, yeah, but maybe, you know.

• 51:25Adam Buxton?

  I'm sure you wouldn't.

• 51:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:26Adam Buxton?

  But, um, yeah, how are you able to concentrate?

• 51:30Speaker 02

  Well, back in the old days, you had these old fashioned like filament lights, like really big old ones that you see like big rock shows. And the trouble with those ones, if you touch them, then you get burnt. So now everything is like cool because it's LEDs. So it's just like it's super fierce, the lighting and stuff. There's so much light bouncing around and reflecting off the audience and onto the stage. And there's so much fluorescent gaffa tape everywhere on the floor as well, that you can just follow these paths. And you take a carpet wherever you go, you take this grey long rug that goes on the stage. And it becomes this sort of, that's your home from home, you know, that's your front room. And even having a few guests over for tea.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  You know, I remember seeing Pearl Jam with Neil Young at a festival and like, I noticed they had like sort of rugs and carpets and josticks and things. And, and at the time I was a bit sniffy and thought it was a sort of American rockist affectation. But I totally get that. You want to sort of bring a bit of the front room to the stage, you know, make it feel a bit cosy. What you want is you want to feel really comfortable when you're up there. I'm standing between two drummers. I've got Phil and Clive. And you just, this is your domain, you know.

• 52:42Adam Buxton?

  Will you have two drummers on the tour this year?

• 52:44Speaker 02

  Yes, we are gonna have two drummers on the tour. Phil's working at the moment on it and it's great for me, cause I get to like, you know, I get to check in with what each of them's doing. Like every, on every song, I can wander over and, and Phil loves it, cause he, I stop hassling him, I go and hassle, um. You know, Clive or Chris or whoever, you know, I like, it was amazing playing with Clive as well, so, you know, cause he played with Porter's Head and, um.

• 53:06Adam Buxton?

  Clive Deema.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  Clive Deema. What a drummer, Robert Plant, Ronnie Siz, I mean, what the, you know, the drum and bass stuff that he does as well, it's incredible.

• 53:16Adam Buxton?

  So, in anticipation of seeing you guys play later this year. Can I ask you to, for my podcast listeners?

• 53:24Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 53:25Adam Buxton?

  Put yourself mentally on stage.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 53:28Adam Buxton?

  And describe what it is like.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Right, what's it like?

• 53:32Adam Buxton?

  Being in Radiohead, being on stage, little details, what do you see?

• 53:37Speaker 02

  Well, I take a step back.

• 53:39Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  Take a step back.

• 53:40Adam Buxton?

  Okay.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  We're behind the stage, there's a flight case, towels on the flight case, it's like a sort of weird sort of altar thing, there's water bottles. And there's the five of us just before we go on, and that's when it's dark, it's really dark, I could never get a good picture, cause you can't pop up with a flash. And go, you know, and we have the team hug, so we have individual hugs, I think we have a group one. And then we walk around to the monitor desk and we walk up rickety rickety stairs onto the stage, following the, um, fluorescent tape. And that's the thing about the crew, and you spot them, everyone always moves slowly and deliberately, cause you wanna like go arse over tit in front of, um, fifteen thousand people.

• 54:24Speaker 02

  And then you walk on, and, you know, we've been starting more recent shows with the slow songs, it Daydreaming, a Daydreamer's, the first track off Moonshaped Pool. There's a sort of arc, there's a sort of narrative to the show, there's a shape to the show. I think of it like a rollercoaster in a way, that you want people to join you on, and if you can get through the first three or five songs. Then this sort of rhythm and this momentum establishes itself, and the space that you're in, the music as you're playing it. Sort of becomes this bigger bubble that you're sharing with the audience. And then you sort of come out from it, you surface at the end of the song. And you feel that everyone else is as well in the audience.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  And there's a point in the show, usually about half, three quarters of a way through, where everyone's like hunkered down for the night and then joins you on that journey. I don't want to make it sound like a cheesy bunch of nonsense, but it's so incredible.

• 55:21Adam Buxton?

  Is there a song that that happens typically with or some of the songs that that happens with?

• 55:26Speaker 02

  Well, it depends. I mean, if you ask me what I love playing, it's like songs like um Arpeggio Weird Fishes. And um I like things like, I like old songs like um, I like, I'll play anything really, but um.

• 55:37Adam Buxton?

  I'm thinking of There There.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:38Adam Buxton?

  That seems to be one that gets quite trancey almost. By the end of it, everyone in the audience seems completely locked in.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  We've got Phil and Johnny playing these big floor toms at the front of the stage. The song that sort of builds and builds and then the payoff is my brother's. I always think of my brother's guitar part at the end in the solo, it's very angular. It's like ding ding ding, it's very right angles, isn't it?

• 56:00Adam Buxton?

  Mm hmm.

• 56:01Speaker 02

  There's no soft edges, it's all like sharp elbows. And I love how that breaks across the end of the song. And then Phil breaks out and I'm trying to sort of do my sort of Neil Young bass sort of playing underneath it. I love playing that song a lot, you're right. It's funny, I was saying to my kids about like listening to Back to the Track in the Car, because my kids are listening to like Radiohead or my, my, my fifteen year old, he's like. I asked him to offer a critique about what he thinks about the records and stuff like that, so. And I've been recently playing Hail to the Thief recently, so I like to see what he thinks, what he appreciates.

• 56:33Adam Buxton?

  What's he enjoying about Hail to the Thief?

• 56:35Speaker 02

  He loves two plus two and he loves the extremes of the record, which I think is great. He loves two plus two and he loves um Sail to the Moon. But he loves Spectre and so he loves that sort of that slow pulsing piano thing that Tom plays on those tracks.

• 56:49Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  You know, and he loves to play that too. He had a piano lesson, when he started having some piano lessons at school. And this teacher, this amazing woman called Anna Blonsky, this amazing pianist. She said to him, "Well, why don't you play me something?" And so he started playing the chords of "Spectre." And then he turned around to the teacher and said, "Yeah, my dad wrote that." And it's like, "No, I didn't. I didn't write it," you know. But the fact that he loves that music and loves to play it makes me very happy.

• 58:19Adam Buxton?

  I've put some Post-It notes

• 58:20Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 58:21Adam Buxton?

  on a few pages of your book.

• 58:23Speaker 02

  Ooh!

• 58:23Adam Buxton?

  "A Portrait of Radiohead." This is a beautiful object that I am holding here.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 58:30Adam Buxton?

  As you would expect from someone involved with the Radiohead organisation, every tiny detail has been considered and beautifully rendered.

• 58:40Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 58:40Adam Buxton?

  You can respond to what I've written on the Post-Its however you wish. You have to describe the photo that the Post-It is attached to.

• 58:48Speaker 02

  Okay, so it says "pluck one."

• 58:49Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, pick one that you like the look of, that you can respond to.

• 58:52Speaker 02

  All right. Let's start at the beginning.

• 58:54Adam Buxton?

  All right.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  There's this photograph of me, which is bizarre, because it's like, I think it's the only one of me in the book, really. And it's me playing this little short-scale bass in our rehearsal studio.

• 59:05Adam Buxton?

  And I have written on the post it, is this how you see yourself? You're looking moody.

• 59:10Speaker 02

  Yes, I'm looking sort of like some kind of indie rock pirate, aren't I?

• 59:14Adam Buxton?

  You look good.

• 59:15Speaker 02

  Beard. Well, my brother took the photograph.

• 59:17Adam Buxton?

  Right.

• 59:17Speaker 02

  So I don't think I gave him a credit or anything. And I'm playing a bass that I never used, but we had a bass like. We borrowed a bass like this. This guy, amazing producer called John Leckie, who we did the bends with. He had a little bass. It's like a Fender short scale one. And he had one that was played by, I think it was John Squire, used it on Full Gold or Manny. So we used that on.

• 59:37Adam Buxton?

  In The Stone Roses.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  That's right. So there's a Radiohead song called Planet Talics, which is the first song on the bends. And that's the bass I used on that. It's the one that was on the bass for um Full Gold.

• 59:48Adam Buxton?

  Oh, wow.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  Which is really cool.

• 59:49Adam Buxton?

  The same bass.

• 59:50Speaker 02

  Same bass, yeah.

• 59:50Adam Buxton?

  Wow.

• 59:51Speaker 02

  Is that cool?

• 59:51Adam Buxton?

  That's a good fact.

• 59:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's me holding a similar bass and.

• 59:54Adam Buxton?

  Planet Talics, talking about Staircase earlier, they are spiritual cousins in my mind. They have that same space rock expansiveness.

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, they totally, and they're sort of round a bass riff, aren't they? Like a bass groove.

• 1:00:06Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's really, absolutely. So there's that. So we're moving on now. Fave gear. I love this photograph of my brother. He's sitting behind some kind of like Cold War keyboard. And there's like a sort of suitcase next to the tiny Bakelite keyboard, which looks like uh with a speaker in it. And it's, I think it says Chamberlain on it. So it's probably some kind of funky piece of American gear that Nigel picked up in LA or something. And it's taken in our studio, I can tell because there's a big piece of tape on the um French door behind my brother to stop people like walking into it. And uh yeah, and he's just looking at me like, you know, slightly sort of staring with red eyes. But I really got to this whole thing of like forensic photography, the idea of like you can like make a picture of a crime scene

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  and just take a picture. And there's nothing really happening in the picture, other than what's in the picture. There's something sort of bald about the photograph. So I thought for some of the photographs in my book, I could approach them like a sort of police forensic photographer. But obviously with less sort of mangled corpses and sort of drugs paraphernalia lying around.

• 1:01:13Adam Buxton?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:14Speaker 02

  Or or road, whatever they take pictures of, you know, this is like just pictures of like my friends playing music.

• 1:01:20Adam Buxton?

  And what is your relationship with photography outside the band? Do you take a lot of photographs of your children and your family and friends and things like that?

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  Well, I know, I mean, I've heard in your podcasts that you you make these beautiful photo books. You've done that you over the years of your family. In fact, I wanted to raise this subject with you on your podcast.

• 1:01:38Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, go on.

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  Well, the most recent one I've heard you made was with David Letterman, which is just fantastic. And there was this very strong antipathy towards photography or to photographs that you seem to share.

• 1:01:50Adam Buxton?

  My antipathy came from having looked through so many old photographs that my parents left behind. After my mum died, I just, it was in the lockdown and I spent months scanning. I bought a really nice scanner and I scanned all these transparencies. And it was, on the one hand, an amazing, strange experience of time travelling to places that I couldn't remember. And it was like reconnecting with her in moments of her life that I had never known about before.

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:02:21Adam Buxton?

  Before I was born and seeing her when she was young and with her friends and with other partners and things like that. So that was wonderful, but then there were other times when it was back to our childhood and moments that I'd forgotten and being together out on the Sussex Downs, having a picnic one weekend. And and I found those really painful when I was looking at it, just the feeling of time having passed and the worry that. Well, I suppose the worry that, you know, when you're grieving for someone, it sometimes feels like you'll never be happy again.

• 1:02:55Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:56Adam Buxton?

  And you can't imagine what it would be like to be happy. And if you're a certain age, you know, in your 50s or whatever, you can start thinking like, oh, it's just downhill from now on.

• 1:03:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:08Adam Buxton?

  And photographs hammer that feeling really hard.

• 1:03:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:13Adam Buxton?

  And it's so painful, especially to see children when they're little, even at the time I remember taking photographs of.

• 1:03:21Adam Buxton?

  Of my children when they were five or whatever.

• 1:03:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:24Adam Buxton?

  But even looking back, a few seconds after I'd taken it would be painful because I would be aware, like, it's just a few seconds now.

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:31Adam Buxton?

  But before I know it, it's gonna be a few years.

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:34Adam Buxton?

  And then.

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:03:35Adam Buxton?

  A couple of decades and I could feel it pulling away from me instantly.

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  Whilst you take making the photograph, you feel that.

• 1:03:41Adam Buxton?

  I mean, that is, that's something I need to discuss with my therapist.

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 1:03:44Adam Buxton?

  That is like, I'm not in the moment.

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:47Adam Buxton?

  But don't you ever get that?

• 1:03:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I do. But then what I think about when I see the pictures of my kids is I find it hard to remember where we were. Well, I know where we were, but what it was like then. There's lots of different losses and stuff, isn't it? Because you're, like you say, you're irredemally cut off from the past. And you can't go back to the past. And the photograph doesn't take you back to that point because it's actually really hard because it's just a moment. It's a frame. In the film that's spun out and been played years before. So it's very, I think it's very difficult. People talk about how the photograph reminds you of a day and a conversation and a story and a period. It doesn't really, it's like, you know what I mean? It's, it can remind you of a place maybe, but the rest of it.

• 1:04:28Adam Buxton?

  Something out of time.

• 1:04:29Speaker 02

  It's out of time, yeah, but I think so.

• 1:04:31Adam Buxton?

  I saw this interview with Brian Eno, who I like very much, and he was talking about cameras. This is from nineteen ninety two in an interview in Wired that he did with Mark Sinca. And he says, I've always hated cameras because they forced me to be somewhere else at the same time. When someone points a camera at you, you are no longer just there. You're also in the future looking back on this picture. So you're suddenly forced to be self-regarding as well.

• 1:04:58Speaker 02

  Well, that's why I like taking pictures of the band because I can get out of that bubble when we're together and I could photograph them.

• 1:05:06Adam Buxton?

  Is it a power move as well, being the person behind the camera?

• 1:05:09Speaker 02

  Well, no, I mean, I'm very shy about it and I could have probably done a much better job. And I think about how tolerant and patient they were of my intrusion onto them. On the other guys in the band when they were either like in the studio or like preparing to go on stage and stuff. So I'm just enormously grateful for that, you know, that I have such respect for like portrait photographers like this guy called Harry Borden, do you know him?

• 1:05:30Adam Buxton?

  I don't.

• 1:05:30Speaker 02

  He's a great photographer who photographs loads of artists, musicians, and he's got a really cool YouTube blog that his son makes with him when he talks about.

• 1:05:40Adam Buxton?

  He was at your book launch.

• 1:05:41Speaker 02

  He was, that's right.

• 1:05:42Adam Buxton?

  I had a great chat with him.

• 1:05:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, he's brilliant. And he talks about photographing David Bailey and it's really great. And I just think there's a sort of cool discipline to that. And there's a sort of an ambition and aiming for something that's kind of nothing to do really with. There's what he wants out of it. Never mind what the subject, what you're talking about, you know, the subject, what they feel about it. And I think you just have to accept that, that you're sort of being like lifted out of a moment in time and put behind glass and someone else's exhibition. It's the objective nature of it, I suppose.

• 1:06:13Adam Buxton?

  That's photographs serving an artistic purpose.

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 1:06:18Adam Buxton?

  But then for most people, photography is a aide memoir. And so that's why you get the situation of people given the choice between going on holiday and having their memory wiped or just staying home.

• 1:06:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:06:32Adam Buxton?

  Most people will just take staying home. Do you know what I mean? Like, they need the memories, the photographs are part of the experience of hanging on to a moment, clinging on to life and trying to confound the slipping away of time.

• 1:06:48Speaker 02

  But for me, what I like about a photograph, it's my friend Charlotte, who I just saw actually, who used to play in the band when we were kids at school. She played saxophone with her sister.

• 1:06:56Adam Buxton?

  Oh, really? When you were on a Friday?

• 1:06:58Speaker 02

  I don't know what you're talking about. Yes, that's right. That's terrible. That's my one creative contribution, which was a terrible.

• 1:07:04Adam Buxton?

  Was that, were you named, did you name the band On a Friday?

• 1:07:07Speaker 02

  Well, it's awful. Anyway, so.

• 1:07:09Adam Buxton?

  You can't just gloss over that.

• 1:07:11Speaker 02

  I've, well, I can't remember who might have like initiated the sort of bald nature of that title. So possibly.

• 1:07:20Adam Buxton?

  What was the other, that you had another name as well?

• 1:07:22Speaker 02

  There are a whole bunch of them. I mean, it was sort of blurred, I suppose, because we didn't really know, you know, when we were going to do, what we were going to do. I don't know. But um. But going back to the photography.

• 1:07:32Adam Buxton?

  Oh, he's denying.

• 1:07:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, there were other, do you want the other names?

• 1:07:36Adam Buxton?

  Yes.

• 1:07:37Speaker 02

  There was, I think there was, well, there were lots of them are like demo tape names that Tom and Cassette's like Shindig.

• 1:07:41Adam Buxton?

  Oh, yeah, Shindig, I remember Shindig.

• 1:07:43Speaker 02

  Dearest and, um, you know, this whole bunch is quite, it's funny, actually, my son's like got a little band together, which is really cool and he's hasn't come up with a name yet. And of course I keep suggesting names. And I come up with, so I think a cool name, I actually know some cool people in Washington who like play like on old punk bands and they tell me cool names. And one of the names I thought was really cool was Dreams.

• 1:08:05Adam Buxton?

  Uh huh.

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  And I sort of met with a, you know.

• 1:08:08Adam Buxton?

  I can't believe there isn't a band called Dreams already.

• 1:08:10Speaker 02

  Probably is, but you know, within the context of something, you know, that would have a profile.

• 1:08:16Adam Buxton?

  Coming up with band names is one of life's great pleasures.

• 1:08:20Speaker 02

  Is it though?

• 1:08:20Adam Buxton?

  I think it is.

• 1:08:22Speaker 02

  Ah, but there's just all this awful sort of nineties ironic band generator things that just make you want to curl up.

• 1:08:27Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, well, that's why you need human beings inventing them, because it's fun. You've got to, it's a really fun thing. When Tom and Johnny were rehearsing for Smile shows and they hadn't named themselves yet. Johnny said, like, have you got any ideas? Because he knew that I liked coming up with band names.

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:44Adam Buxton?

  And I had loads of ideas, yeah, and I said, I texted them all through to him and well, one of them that he liked was Meat Counter. And some other ones I had was Lady Dada, Hey Siri. I'm getting the same reactions from you that I got from Johnny to those ones. Oh, yeah, John. I had John and two Thomases, because the other guy in the band is called Tom.

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:09:11Adam Buxton?

  John and two Thomases. Anyway, obviously they didn't go for that. But one that he, one that Johnny seemed to genuinely like was Prostate Modern.

• 1:09:18Speaker 02

  What, as in secondary modern?

• 1:09:20Adam Buxton?

  No, as in Tate Modern.

• 1:09:22Speaker 02

  Prostate Modern.

• 1:09:23Adam Buxton?

  But now it's prostate modern because you're over a certain age.

• 1:09:25Speaker 02

  School and you went to a gallery. I think, you know. Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:30Adam Buxton?

  Anyway, so they didn't go with any of those, but I was happy with prostate modern. Uh, so, sorry, I. Derailed you.

• 1:09:38Speaker 02

  No, derailed away. Well, photography.

• 1:09:40Adam Buxton?

  Photography.

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  My friend Charlotte, who used to play saxophone with her sister Elizabeth and Rasmus, they were the sax trio we had. She was curator in photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum for like 11 years or something. So I used to go and look at the collection with her and she basically was my sort of mentor and she taught me loads. And when I see a photograph, it's like she used this phrase called the itchy scratchy feeling. It's that idea there's something in the image that makes you want to look at it again. There's something about the frame that's organised in a certain way that is greater than the component parts of that moment in reality. And it's that sort of tension between something that's been created that's satisfying to look at, that is also, you know, can be random in a way, although of course, stuff is also constructed. But, um, so that, if that makes

• 1:10:24Speaker 02

  any sense, I says, that would be the difference between what we were talking about with kid snaps.

• 1:10:30Adam Buxton?

  Yeah, the pain of kid snaps.

• 1:10:31Speaker 02

  Yeah. And an image that saves something by this old guy, I love called Alfred Stiegelt, who was like a turn of the century American photographer, who could make a photograph that could be, you know, your gaze could endure upon it. So, you know, how someone sees the world, it's like anything else. They can have a particular vision and style that can translate into being appreciated by anybody, but can be singular too. So that's, that's what I love. And, and photographs that I made in my book, in a way, it's similar to the Radiohead songs. And what I bring to the music is my love of other musicians and other styles of music. It's my love of other photographers and other styles of photography in a tiny crappy way that I'm trying to emulate.

• 1:11:20Speaker 03

  Wait. This is an ad for Squarespace.

• 1:11:24Speaker 03

  Okay, we'll return to the AI apocalypse in just a wee wee moment, but first I wanted to talk about Squarespace. Do you know about Squarespace, Steve? Uh, yes, Monty. I think I might even be a little bit more tuned into modern tech, websites, et cetera, than you. I don't know, just guessing. No, Steve, I love this dynamic. I'm old and conservative and you're young and progressive and thus what makes the Newswind podcast such great listening. But yes, you're right. I must admit, I didn't know much about Squarespace. But because my new grumble book, Hell in a Handcart, is out this month, and I look forward to getting enraged by that. So I should hope. Em, um, em, um. Anyway, the publishers, Bluestar and Dogwhistle, made a beautiful website for the book using Squarespace. I know, I got the newsletter that you sent out using Squarespace. And the website does look great, videos of you airing your views, members' areas for your mad fans. You've even got a merch store, I see.

• 1:12:09Speaker 03

  That's right, a Union Jack top hat is a big seller. But they constructed it all so fast with Squarespace. They did most of it over one lunchtime, Steve. Well, you wouldn't want to spend much longer on it, would you? Shut up, Steve. But here's the thing, anyone listening to this can start a free trial right now at Squarespace.com/boxton and see how easy and versatile Squarespace is. And when they're ready to launch a new website or domain, they can save 10% off their first purchase by using the offer code BOXTON at checkout. Right, well, maybe I'll visit Squarespace.com/boxton and start a new website just to refute all the nonsense in your new book. Oh, don't do that, Steve. I will. Oh, shut up, Steve. Eh. Shut up. Now, back to more depressing matters on Newsweek.

• 1:12:48Adam Buxton?

  Continue.

• 1:12:59Adam Buxton?

  Hey, welcome back, podcats. That was Colin Greenwood, talking to me there. Among the links in the description of today's podcast is one to Colin's lovely photo book, How to Disappear, which is available in standard format and as a kind of crazily deluxe, special, limited edition, signed by the band with extra knickknacks. Anyway, that's in the description. Also there is a link to the Ashmolean exhibition of Tom York and Stanley Donwood's artwork for Radiohead and for The Smile, which is called This is What You Get.

• 1:13:39Adam Buxton?

  It's on right now as I speak and runs until the 11th of January next year, 2026. Reading from the blurb now, featuring over a hundred and eighty works from album cover paintings and digital compositions to unpublished sketches and lyrics. The show traces the evolution of their imagery alongside Radiohead's groundbreaking music. Organised chronologically, it highlights their inventive use of materials, early experiments with technology and their shared fascination with landscapes, both real and psychological. The exhibition culminates with their most recent colourful works created during the pandemic, including large-scale tapestries inspired by maps and nature.

• 1:14:24Adam Buxton?

  And yes, it's my voice on the audio guide, which I think you can download to your phone and listen to as you stroll through the wonderful visual world of Tom and Stanley. But many thanks to Colin Greenwood for making the time to come and talk to me. Much appreciated.

• 1:14:45Adam Buxton?

  Oh dear, the weather is quite stinky. This morning, out here in Norfolk.

• 1:14:52Adam Buxton?

  Fairly windy, very grey. And the rain is just, well, it's not too hard. But it's enough to take the edge off the fun slightly. It's a little bit like the weather at End of the Road Festival this year.

• 1:15:10Adam Buxton?

  Although that was more hardcore, there was a period of several hours on Saturday at End of the Road Festival when it was just non-stop. But actually, it didn't take the edge off the fun on that occasion. It was a really good atmosphere, I thought, as I was wandering around there.

• 1:15:32Adam Buxton?

  And I was there because I was playing a music show. So last week on the David Byrne episode, I was saying I'd been rehearsing with a band with Joe Mount of Metronomy and a couple of current and ex-members of that band. In order to play about ten or eleven of my songs from my new album Buckle Up at a handful of live shows. And in the end, we played one in a very small club in East London called Folklore. And then, next day, we went to Bristol, played a couple of shows in a beautiful, small, arty venue called The Cube, which I really liked.

• 1:16:18Adam Buxton?

  Rosie? Over this way. This way, Doglegs.

• 1:16:24Adam Buxton?

  And then the day after that, we made our way to End of the Road Festival, where we played an unannounced, secret set late on Friday night to a packed tent of folks who had come along to see who the secret band was. I think some of them had figured out that I was gonna be there. It was a very encouraging and warm reception that I got. I think there's a lot of six music listeners and generally sympathetic folks who go to that festival. I met lots of nice people. And it was a good experience. I mean, I think, considering it was our fourth time playing in front of

• 1:17:07Adam Buxton?

  actual human beings, I thought it went okay. And at one point, my sons even got up on stage. They were there with me at the festival and on one of my tracks called My Feelings, which I don't think you will have heard at this point. Oh, maybe you will have heard it if you listen to me and Joe Mount at Latitude Festival on Virgin Radio.

• 1:17:31Adam Buxton?

  But they came and they accompanied me on that. Frank played the guitar and Nat played the flute on that track. They were very nervous beforehand. But it was a lovely moment, for me at least. I don't know what it was like for the audience. Maybe they were being violently ill. But we had a great night.

• 1:17:55Adam Buxton?

  And the next morning I bumped into Stuart Lee, who was performing at the festival. He said that he had seen a bit of the set. And then he said, so have you got that out of your system now? I had to tell him that I don't completely.

• 1:18:14Adam Buxton?

  And um, there are going to be more shows. But I'll let you know when those happen. And uh, you know, generally you can stay more or less abreast of what I'm doing. If you go onto my website, adam-buckston.co.uk. And if you scroll down on the front page of that website, you have the option to sign up for a newsletter as well. Which I don't send out very often, but I guess there might be a few more than normal. Like, normal would be one every two years on the evidence of the past decade. But recently it's been a bit more frequent because of the book and now the album.

• 1:19:00Adam Buxton?

  That option is there for you if you would like to be kept abreast of what I'm up to in the next few months. Thank you very much to everyone who turned out for those shows. I really hope you enjoyed them and it was very nice to meet some of you afterwards as well. Thanks for your kind words and general warmth.

• 1:19:24Adam Buxton?

  Addendum. I'm just about to upload the podcast, but I suddenly realised when I was recording my outro the other day in rainy Norfolk, I forgot about the comments I'd made at the top of my conversation with Colin when we were discussing the stage outfits that Nick Cave's wife put together. And I very dismissively said that I was unlikely to be in a similar position with my wife, and that if it was up to her, we'd all be wearing tech bro fleeces or whatever. In fact, that turned out to be entirely untrue. My beautiful wife bought me a shirt for my birthday this year, which has actually ended up being kind of my band uniform. I've worn the heck out of it. It was a blue linen shirt

• 1:20:08Adam Buxton?

  from a great clothes shop in Norwich called Shopkeeper in Upper St Giles Street, not sponsored by them, just giving a local business a shout out. And I liked it so much that I bought several more in different colours, and I gave them to the band to wear as well so they could all be dressed up like Adam Buxton with docker caps as well. Anyway, the point is, I apologise for minimising my wife's sartorial genius and for all the pain I've caused. I've spoken to her about it, and she's considering her options. End of addendum. Back to outro, thank yous. So that's it for this week. Thank you very much indeed, once again, to Colin Greenwood.

• 1:20:50Adam Buxton?

  Thanks to Seamus Murphy Mitchell for his production support and additional conversation editing. Thanks to everyone at Acast for all their hard work liaising with my sponsors. Thanks to Helen Green, she does the artwork for this podcast, as well as my book and a bit on my album. But thanks most of all to you for coming back, for listening right to the end. You're the best. And I really do think that we should have some kind of creepy hug. What do you, what do you say? Oh, okay. No, no, that's fine. I just, I apologise. I misread the room. Maybe we could just shake hands. Come here. Good to see you.

• 1:21:35Adam Buxton?

  Is that a new fabric conditioner you're using? You smell very fresh. And until next time, we share the same outdoor space. I do hope that you go carefully out there. It's not getting any less nutty. And for what it's worth, please bear in mind that I love you. Bye!