Jonny Greenwood

The Guitarist Who Hated Solos

Jonny Greenwood couldn't read music in a conventional way when he started playing with Radiohead. It's a fact that tends to be left out to protect the aura of learned genius that has surrounded him for decades. In 1991 he was just Colin's younger brother, hammering away at a Fender Telecaster with an aggression unbecoming of a psychology student. But what sets him apart from the other britpop stars is his obsession with controlled noise.

He dropped out of university three weeks into his studies because his contract with the record label EMI was real. From that moment on, his career became a headlong flight away from rock clichés. In 2003, he released Bodysong. It was his first serious foray into film scores, and it already showed that Greenwood wasn't looking to accompany images but to create a physical friction with the viewer.

No one expected the guitarist of the world's biggest band to lock himself away writing fugues.

He is largely self-taught. He spends hours analyzing the scores of Messiaen and Ligeti while his generation's peers are content to copy the Beatles. This academic curiosity led him to rescue forgotten instruments like the Ondes Martenot. He doesn't do it out of snobbery. He does it because that device lets him produce an electric wail that no guitar can replicate.

A blood alliance with Paul Thomas Anderson

The turning point came in 2007 with There Will Be Blood. Director Paul Thomas Anderson heard an orchestral piece by Jonny titled Popcorn Superhet Receiver and decided it was the exact sound of oil and madness. The score was so radical that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences disqualified it from the Oscars for using preexisting material. But its impact on the industry was total.

Greenwood uses strings that sound like mechanical saws. He isn't after the pleasant melody that soothes the audience in their seats. In 2012 he reunited with Anderson for The Master, and in 2014 for Inherent Vice. His working method is spartan. He shuts himself away in his studio in Oxford with discontinued instruments and tape recorders that constantly malfunction.

And the gamble paid off.

For the recording of Phantom Thread in 2017, he decided to write for an orchestra of sixty musicians. He pursues the romanticism of Nelson Riddle but adds a contemporary venom that unsettles. He earns his first official Oscar nomination after years of institutional neglect. European critics begin to seriously compare him with the great names of the twentieth-century avant-garde.

The Craftsman of Uncomfortable Textures

In 2021, he signed two of his best works at the same time. For The Power of the Dog by Jane Campion, he plays a cello as if it were a banjo. It's a dry, dusty sound that defines the sexual repression of the character played by Benedict Cumberbatch. That same year he composed the music for Spencer, mixing free jazz with baroque to portray the mental collapse of its lead character.

His creative process ignores the industry standards of Los Angeles. He uses no ghostwriters or orchestrators to clean up the dirty work. He writes every note by hand on staff paper before transferring it to the computer. He prefers the imperfections of a real instrument to the sterile perfection of the digital sound libraries that other colleagues in the profession use.

Technology is just a means to reach human error.

In 2024, he works on the score for The Brutalist, directed by Brady Corbet. The project calls for a massive sonic structure to cover an epic of more than three hours about architecture and the postwar era. For this assignment he uses a rotating speaker system and magnetic tape recording techniques that saturate the signal naturally. The budget for the wind section of this production exceeds 80,000 euros.