A perfect balance of light and dark, subtle and stately, ‘Viola Quartet’ gallops over a gypsy scale in plucked strings while ‘West Alone’ softens the film’s tender ballad. Greenwood finds his most refined and elegant work to date in Jane Campion’s modern western with a score that opens up the interiors and shuts down the vistas. The opposite of Elton John’s ‘Candle In The Wind’. Wanting instead to “emphasise how chaotic and colourful” she was, Greenwood’s remarkable score sounds like a mind unravelling in real time – with frightened young jazz quickly swallowed up by the old baroque classics and spat back out of a church organ. “You either use actual Handel or pastiche Handel”, Greenwood told NME, remembering struggling with the weight of royalty when he started scoring Pablo Larraín’s Princess Diana biopic. If you’ve heard Hans Zimmer’s stately score for The Crown, you’ll know exactly what to expect from Spencer – and it isn’t this at all. The breakthrough that made a dozen other imitators start trying and failing to do the same thing. If it were a Radiohead album… ‘The Bends’. Tracks like ‘Prospectors Arrive’ and ‘Oil’ swoon over cold strings, but it was the stabbing staccato of ‘Future Markets’ that best captured the film’s under-the-surface horror – sounding like an arthouse remix of the Jaws theme. “You can do things with the classical orchestra that unsettle you… that are sort of slightly wrong… that have some kind of undercurrent that’s slightly sinister,” Greenwood told Entertainment Weekly at the time of recording his first score for Anderson, turning in a sparse, frightening period piece bristling with gentle menace.
The one that makes you want to pinch yourself to make sure you’re not dreaming. If it were a Radiohead album… ‘A Moon Shaped Pool’. Often eerie, occasionally frightening, sometimes sweet, it’s an album you fall asleep to and still somehow carry on listening to.
Matching the film’s woozy sense of disorientation, Greenwood’s score is hypnotic without ever feeling overpowering – drawing you in slowly and changing tack as soon as it settles. Greenwood’s second collaboration with director Paul Thomas Anderson takes him back to the early ’50s for a spacious, lilting dreamscape that swims through Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Olivier Messiaen and Claude Debussy. If it were a Radiohead album… ‘OK Computer’. At times remarkably restrained, almost tender, Greenwood’s score covers a lot of ground – writing complex, emotional and experimental horror music that hits like a hammer. ‘Dark Streets’ adds ’80s synth menace and ‘YWNRH’ packs so much scuzzy feedback it makes you want to check your speakers are plugged in properly.
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‘Sandy’s Necklace’ goes full funk before ‘Nausea’ kicks in like a techno Radiohead remix. Lynne Ramsay’s uncompromising revenge thriller is full of noise and violence (and hammers), so it makes sense for Greenwood’s score to push into some pretty dark and jittery places. Where classical music meets krautrock meets a nameless horror of the past, present and future. If it were a Radiohead album… ‘Amnesiac’. As classical as the score is, Greenwood keeps things experimental by recording it in his home studio using all period equipment (playing some parts himself on a Japanese ’60s nylon-strung guitar), and by mixing in avant-funk tracks from krautrock pioneers, Can. Much of Greenwood’s work outside of Radiohead is influenced by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki, and parts of his Penderecki-inspired BBC commission Doghouse found their way into his lush, sombre score for the film adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s novel. “There were a few pretty steel-strung harp things but the rest of it was mostly laptop-generated stuff recorded from an old LW radio… It’s good in the film but not exactly Raiders Of The Lost Ark on its own.” “It wasn’t long enough,” Greenwood told Uncut. Never officially released, you have to watch Lynne Ramsay’s tragic school-shooter drama (or sit through an awful YouTube edit) to hear snippets of Greenwood’s mournful anti-horror score. With new biopic Spencer now in cinemas, and The Power Of The Dog joining it tomorrow (November 19) – ahead of its Netflix release on December 1 – we rank Greenwood’s greatest film scores… 10.
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Already responsible for some of the most cinematic art rock of the last few decades, Greenwood’s scores have mixed free jazz, microtonal electronica and sweeping orchestral compositions to help change the sound and shape of the classic film soundtrack. Usually seen quietly hanging a mop of hair over his guitar somewhere behind Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood was the first member of Radiohead to launch his solo career – taking his guitar, bass, piano, viola, drum and ondes Martenot skills to the movies.