Jonny Greenwood Guitar Solo

It occurs to me that from the title of these posts, people might think I don’t like Hendrix or Steve Vai. Far from it. I like Hendrix plenty, and I don’t dislike Steve Vai although I wouldn’t want to listen to the majority of his music. I have less than no time for Clappo though)

If you played guitar in the late nineties, you worshipped at the altar of Jonny Greenwood. Radiohead were one of those bands that transcended tribal boundaries. Metal kids liked them. Grunge kids liked them. Punkers liked them well enough too. It seemed like everyone who was into rock music, and certainly everyone who played it, liked them.

For guitar players, the interplay between the group’s three guitarists (Greenwood, Ed O’Brien and Thom Yorke) was one of the chief reasons. The other was Greenwood’s furious lead guitar, which was in the tradition of such post-punker players as Keith Levene, John McGeoch, Johnny Marr, J Mascis and Robin Guthrie, and eschewed fast scalar runs and blues licks for textures, noise, dissonance, modal melodies and sheer squonkiness. True, he made use of oblique bends and octave chords – which in lead guitar terms were popularised by Hendrix and Wes Montgomery respectively – so he wasn’t inventing a new grammar of lead guitar out of whole cloth. But he was adventurous, dissonant, unconventional, angular and popular. There are hundreds of thousands of people my age who learned the Complete Works of Greenwood as 16-year-olds. Levene and McGeoch were great players, but in comparison, they are unknowns.

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My favourite piece of Greenwood guitar comes at the end of The Tourist, the closing track on OK Computer, when his raging guitar solo shatters the uneasy calm of the song’s previous three and a half minutes. It’s a moment as raw and exciting as his infamous muted grunts just before the chorus of Creep. It’s often said by folks who dislike fast guitar playing that if you can’t sing along to it, then it’s not a good solo. You couldn’t sing along to the solo on The Tourist. It’s not without melody, but the importance it places on tunefulness is way below that which it places on noise, on jaggedness, on impurity of form (remember that The Tourist mixes up bars of 12/8 and 9/8, so the song’s very form resists the deployment of easy riffs and phrases). It’s like some sort of unstoppable eruption.

For a generation of guitar-playing kids, the solo on The Tourist was just the final piece of awe-inspiring guitar playing on an album full of them. And not that Radiohead haven’t made good music since, but the disappearance of Jonny Greenwood the guitar hero is a continuing source of regret to many of us.Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood remains one of alt-rock’s most enigmatic guitarists, and now he’s revealed what he considers to be the best parts he’s written with the groundbreaking Oxfordshire band.

In an interview with The Guardian promoting his soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, the iconic player answered, “I’m more proud of what we’ve written than how I play. Ful Stop has good phasing arpeggios which are really satisfying.

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“Also, talking of PTA, I like the version of Present Tense he filmed with me and Thom, performing in his back garden. That’s a nice guitar line, how it supports the song and dances around.”

As a point of interest, we posed the same question to Greenwood’s partner in tone, Ed O’Brien, last year, who cited In Rainbows’ All I Need and Amnesiac’s Pyramid Song as his own personal faves.

Elsewhere in the interview with Jonny, the question was posed, ‘Do you still get days when you want to strap on your guitar, turn the amp up to 11 and just rock?’, which saw Greenwood reply: “Of course. Nothing’s more exciting than playing an electric guitar in a small room with a good drummer.

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The answer marks a change in tone from the guitarist, who has previously stated he’s “always happiest trying new instruments - and honestly enjoy playing, say, the glockenspiel with Radiohead as much as I do the guitar”, labelling the guitar a tool akin to a washing machine or typewriter.

Mike is Editor-in-Chief of GuitarWorld.com, in addition to being an offset fiend and recovering pedal addict. He has a master's degree in journalism, and has spent the past decade writing and editing for guitar publications including , Total Guitar and Guitarist, as well as a decade-and-a-half performing in bands of variable genre (and quality). In his free time, you'll find him making progressive instrumental rock under the nom de plume Maebe.Few bands employ the as inventively as Radiohead. Starting life as a raucous troupe of grunge-enthralled uni lads fuelled by heartbreak and pent-up frustration, Radiohead has grown into one of the most important British bands of the past 30 years. Gradually widening their scope via earth-shaking records like the century-capping

Once the very foreground of their sound but now more of a textural accompaniment, the plays an important role in Radiohead. The band would still be worth talking about if its work was defined solely by the shrieking of Jonny Greenwood, the supple textures of Ed O’Brien, or the inspired chordal choices of Thom Yorke – but with all three in play, there’s an embarrassment of gems to enjoy here.

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Which makes highlighting just 10 tracks extremely tough. Here, we’re not opting for the ‘heaviest’ or most technically adept work, but have instead chosen the tracks that best demonstrate Radiohead’s breadth and brilliance.

’s second single was a notable retreat back to a more conventional -led sound, especially amid the album’s more sonically dense bedfellows. Inspired by Johnny Marr’s frequent tunnelling around chordal nooks and crannies in The Smiths,

Highlight ejects its parent album’s colourful approach to arrangement-building and instead roots itself in a gorgeous acoustic chord sequence. Yorke’s continual descents from a bright D chord into F♯m (actually played with a capo on the second fret) take the wind out of the listener. Nuanced augmentation peppers the track with ghostly swoops, emotional strings recorded at a 12th-century church and the subtle suggestion of choir, all of which serve to underline the effectiveness of the song’s architecture. Yorke would later describe the song as “the most beautiful thing we ever did”.

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Is built around a clock-like arpeggiated pattern, played by Ed O’Brien using his custom-built ‘Plank’ . The track undulates its way around A and E minor but balances them with tension and grace. As Yorke delivers a lyric dripping in mortal anguish, O’Brien’s measured playing keeps the arrangement hinged on his ominous movement. High and bright in the mix, O’Brien’s controlled picking pattern is the song’s focal point. It took a long time to get right in the studio but the final haunting studio version quickly became a favourite. It was Radiohead’s biggest-selling single until

This beauty finds Greenwood coating glistening acoustic arpeggiations atop a rippling bossa nova time signature. Incorporating a percussive playing technique that he first trialled on his solo track

, Greenwood gently taps his between notes, hitting the next in the flowing arpeggio sequence on his way back up. The result is that his playing is tightly locked in with the groove. Coated in reverb and echo, Greenwood’s implacable picking through the songs’ wary chord sequence underscores Radiohead’s continuing mastery of using the as a delicate, surgical instrument that cuts deep into the emotions of the listener.

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Smearing itself across Selway and Colin Greenwood’s tribal rhythmic centre, Yorke’s sludgy sound (conjured by his particular feedback-prone hollow-body Gibson ES-125T) accentuates the unnerving vibe of

’s lead single, before Greenwood leaps into the fray, unleashing a fuzz-soaked anxiety attack of a riff near the song’s climax. Taking their cues from experimental pioneers Can, the pressure keeps building through successive, chorus-free verses, all of which makes Greenwood’s intrusive buzzsaw riff all the more affecting. After taking years to get right, the final mix famously brought Thom Yorke to tears upon first listen. “What [Nigel Godrich] did with the sound and the way he mixed it… it’s really jubilant to me.” Yorke said on the album’s interview CD.

Recalling verse. As the song’s principal architect, Jonny Greenwood adds melodic ornamentation and vocal-melody aping hooks to the arrangement with his Telecaster Plus, eliciting an precarious, macabre mood, before the explosive detonation of the chorus leads us back into that riff-hurricane. A tour-de-force,

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 reaches its absolute pinnacle with a magnificent multi-sectioned solo, which is quite the most dazzling piece of work on Radiohead’s second album. Written as an attempt to pile as many chords as possible into one song,

’s heartbeat-pump bass line, crashing cymbals, and impassioned Thom Yorke vocal performance are just a few of the elements that make the song a standout on Radiohead’s masterpiece. But for our money, it’s the elegance of its (oddly-picked), polyrhythmic central riff, which glistens throughout the song’s runtime like raindrops, that is the crucial ingredient. The unconventional chimes of Greenwood’s 5/4 arpeggio run adds to song’s theme of momentum (‘transport, motorways and tramlines’) but aligns

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