Colin Greenwood

Colin Charles Greenwood (born 26 June 1969) is an English musician and the bassist for the rock band Radiohead. Along with bass guitar, Greenwood plays upright bass and electronic instruments.

With his younger brother, the Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood, Greenwood attended Abingdon School in Abingdon, England, where he met the future band members. Radiohead have achieved critical acclaim and have sold more than 30 million albums. In 2019, Greenwood and the other members of Radiohead were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Early life

Colin Greenwood is the older brother of the Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood. Their father served in the British Army as a bomb disposal expert. The Greenwood family has historical ties to the British Communist Party and the socialist Fabian Society.

Greenwood lived in Germany as a child and became fluent in German. Greenwood credited his older sister, Susan, with influencing his and Jonny's taste in music as adolescents: "She's responsible for our precocious love of miserable music. The Fall, Magazine, Joy Division. We were ostracised at school because everyone else was into Iron Maiden."

When Greenwood was 12, he met the future Radiohead singer Thom Yorke at Abingdon School, an independent school for boys in Oxford. Their future bandmates Ed O'Brien, whom Greenwood met during a school production of the opera ''Trial by Jury'', and Philip Selway also attended the school.

Greenwood bought his first guitar when he was 15. He studied classical guitar under the Abingdon music teacher Terence Gilmore-James, who introduced him and the other future members of Radiohead to jazz, film scores, postwar avant-garde music, and 20th-century classical music. Greenwood said: "When we started, it was very important that we got support from him, because we weren't getting any from the headmaster. You know, the man once sent us a bill, charging us for the use of school property, because we practiced in one of the music rooms on a Sunday."

According to Greenwood, he began playing bass out of necessity, teaching himself by playing along to New Order, Joy Division and Otis Redding. Among his musical influences are Booker T and the MGs, Bill Withers and Curtis Mayfield. He said: "We were people who picked up their respective instruments because we wanted to play music together, rather than just because we wanted to play that particular instrument. So it was more of a collective angle, and if you could contribute by having someone else play your instrument, then that was really cool."

Greenwood read English at Peterhouse, Cambridge, between 1987 and 1990, and read modern American literature including Raymond Carver, John Cheever and other postwar American writers. While at Peterhouse, he worked as an events and entertainments officer.

Career

In late 1991, after a chance meeting between Colin Greenwood and the A&R representative Keith Wozencroft at Our Price, the record shop where Greenwood worked, On a Friday signed a six-album recording contract with EMI and changed their name to Radiohead. By 2011, Radiohead had sold more than 30 million albums worldwide.Jonathan, Emma
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