Jonny Greenwood says he pretended to play keyboards when he joined Radiohead

nme.com:

Jonny Greenwood has revealed in an interview that when he first joined Radiohead he would turn his keyboards off during rehearsal.During the conversation with NPR’s Fresh Air Greenwood discussed his rise from legendary guitarist and keyboardist, to award-winning composer.

Earlier today (February 8) he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score for Jane Campion’s film The Power of the Dog.

Listen to the full episode below.“Thom [Yorke]’s band had a keyboard player — [whom] I think they didn’t get on with because he played his keyboard so loud,” he told NPR’s Terry Gross. “And so when I got the chance to play with them, the first thing I did was make sure my keyboard was turned off … I must have done months of rehearsals with them with this keyboard, and they didn’t know that I’d already turned it off.”Greenwood also shared that the Radiohead frontman didn’t notice he wasn’t playing at first.“They made quite a racket, quite a noise.

It was all guitars and distortion — and so I would pretend to play for weeks on end and Thom would say, ‘I can’t quite hear what you’re doing, but I think you’re adding a really interesting texture because I can tell when you’re not playing,'” he said. “And I’m thinking, ‘No, you can’t, because I’m really not playing.’ And I’d go home in the evening and work out how to actually play chords and cautiously over the next few months, I would start turning this keyboard up.