Last year, Easy Star All Stars, a group of New York-based reggae musicians released an album called Radiodread. A track-by-track remake of Radiohead's 1998 album OK Computer performed in a dub reggae style, it raised a predictable sort of mirth. Radiohead, after all, are extremely white. And reggae is extremely black.
Those who gave it a listen, however, might have been struck by how eerily the pre-millennial dread of Karma Police and Let Down sounded transposed to the Jamaican ghetto. One suspects that for a good many buyers, this was their first tentative step into the smokey collector's basement of dub reggae, and Radiodread remained an oddity in their CD racks. A year on, though, and Radiodread may have just found a companion in Jonny Greenwood Is The Controller - a 17-track compilation featuring the likes of Lee "Scratch" Perry, Desmond Dekker, and Marcia Griffiths, pieced together by the Radiohead guitarist during a painstaking six months spent digging through the Trojan Records vaults.
A little odd, perhaps, but there's certainly no doubting the enthusiasm that has guided Greenwood's quest. "I chose reggae because it's mostly unknown to me," he wrote on Radiohead's blog, Dead Air Space, last September. "There's something exciting about coming to musicians when they're just names, when you've no idea what Derrick Harriott looks like, or what his reputation is - considered naff by real dub fans, maybe? Derivative? Or maybe groundbreaking?"
This is far from the first time Greenwood's taken a step outside his comfort zone. While the architect of the famous crunch just before the chorus of Radiohead's Creep - surely one of the most famous sounds in modern rock - Greenwood's enthusiasm for meat'n'potatoes guitar waned long ago. On Kid A, he downed Fender in favour of a Theremin-like instrument called the ondes martenot (inspired by one of his heroes, the composer Olivier Messiaen), while his 2003 solo album Bodysong, a soundtrack for Simon Pummell's documentary of the same name, displayed firmly avant garde sensibilities. For all Radiohead's reputation as sour-faced doomsayers, however, perhaps the best thing about Jonny Greenwood Is The Controller is how unexpectedly cheerful it is. Greenwood's taste isn't for brooding, apocalyptic dub workouts, but for rather playful cuts that focus on female faces and sweet-voiced soul singers. In short, it's not just a record that'll look "eclectic" and "conscious" on a shelf, but a record that you'll actually want to play.
One suspects, too, that the real winners of this are Trojan Records themselves who, approaching their 40th anniversary, are sitting on a massive archive of classic reggae, but still grasping for new ways to market it. Recent collections like the Trojan Reggae For Kids compilation and Trojan X-Rated Box Set (featuring tracks such as Phyliss Dillon's Don't Touch Me Tomato and George Anthony's Cock Stiff And Hard) certainly represent a concerted attempt to push reggae to people outside the inner sanctum of hardcore collectors. Who knows? Greenwood might just be the man to help give old school reggae a rebirth.
· Jonny Greenwood Is The Controller is out Feb 19
