In May 2025, two Jonny Greenwood shows in the UK with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa —booked for Bristol Beacon and Hackney Church—were cancelled. The stated reason, in Greenwood and Tassa’s joint response, was that the venues had received “credible threats” and couldn’t be expected to underwrite security.
The cancellations came after a campaign urging the venues to drop the gigs as part of the broader cultural boycott of Israel. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, a founding component of the BDS movement, framed the duo’s musical collaboration as “artwashing” and welcomed the decision to cancel. Greenwood and Tassa countered that stopping people from performing is “self-evidently” censorship.
I’m a musician who grew up listening to Radiohead, where Greenwood played the guitar and first found fame. I’m also a Palestinian immersed in the ramifications of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But I have to admit that I wasn’t aware of Greenwood’s work with Tassa until after the shows had been cancelled.
Cultural boycotts are intended to close doors and to punish artists. But in practice they also function like searchlights, dragging a niche project into the centre of a wider argument. In my case, the cancellation worked almost like a recommendation: if this is controversial enough to be stopped, I should probably hear it for myself.
In my case, the cancellation worked almost like a recommendation: if this is controversial enough to be stopped, I should probably hear it for myself.
And when you do listen, Tassa and Greenwood’s album Jarak Qaribak—which means “your neighbour is your friend” in Arabic—is abrasive, physical music—rock band instrumentation pressed up against Arabic melodies, old songs rebuilt with fuzz, percussion, and jagged guitar lines. It doesn’t have the profile of an Israeli public-relations project. It sounds more like a rehearsal room: musicians tugging hard at the same material from different angles, letting it strain and hold.
There is no sense here of “smoothing things over”. If anything, the record has the opposite energy: a refusal of polish or comfort. Greenwood’s guitar rarely behaves like a rock lead instrument; it functions in figures that nag, glitter and even irritate.
The standout track for me is “Taq ou-Dub”—an Arabic musical onomatopeia, built around a repeated vocal refrain. The band hits with a slightly overdriven thud, percussion pushing forward like a shoulder in a crowd, while Greenwood lays down a repeated arpeggio that is bright, precise, faintly mechanical.
Then there’s “Lhla Yzid Ikthar”—Arabic for “may it not increase any further”. The arrangement here is restrained and filled with texture, shimmer, grain, building an atmosphere around the voice. The rhythm is still physical, still carries a rock band’s weight, but it doesn’t crowd the song. The melody is allowed to breathe.
The first single is “Ashufak Shay”—a colloquial phrase that roughly means “you mean something to me”, or more literally “I see you as something”. The title feels intentionally cryptic. It also shifts the album’s palette. The track moves with a looser grace. Piano motifs rain down, while flute-like reeds lift above the band in quick, airborne phrases.
If you come to the record expecting an “East meets West” novelty, these tracks are an immediate corrective. The music is too dense, too lived-in. It doesn’t translate itself. It doesn’t apologize.
Greenwood’s collaborator Tassa grew up inside a particular Israeli reality that rarely makes it into international arguments about culture and boycott: the world of Mizrahi Jews (Jews from the Middle East and North Africa), whose family histories are entangled with Arabic language and song. In Tassa’s case, his grandfather and great-uncle were the Al-Kuwaity brothers, Daoud and Salih, major figures in Iraqi music in the early twentieth century. They wrote songs that were sung and circulated as part of the region’s mainstream repertoire—music that, for a long time, didn’t require anyone to choose between “Arab” and “Jew” as mutually exclusive categories.
Tassa’s grandfather and great-uncle wrote songs that were sung and circulated as part of the region’s mainstream repertoire—music that, for a long time, didn’t require anyone to choose between “Arab” and “Jew” as mutually exclusive categories.
Then politics intervened. In the decades around 1948, Jewish communities across the Arab world began to collapse, via a mix of Arab nationalist pressure, dispossession, violence, fear, and the pull of Zionism and the new Israeli state. Tassa’s family left Iraq in 1951. By the 1960s and 70s, communities in Iraq, but also Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria—places where Jewish life had been part of the social fabric for centuries, if not millennia—had been reduced to remnants. Thus many Mizrahi families arrived in Israel carrying Arabic songs and Arabic ways of speaking.
So when people frame Jarak Qaribak as “normalization”, as if the album is staging an unnatural contact between sealed-off worlds, they miss something basic. The mixture of Arab and Jewish culture isn’t new. What’s new is the insistence that it must be treated as forbidden, shameful or suspicious. “No normalization”, in that sense, sounds like an attempt to enforce a political border retroactively on histories, on families, on melodies that were already shared from long before 1948.
What’s also missing when people treat this as a purely political story, is how well the project fits into Greenwood’s wider musical career. Even at Radiohead’s most guitar-driven, Greenwood’s instinct was to turn the guitar into a pattern machine, a texture generator. Over the last two decades, that instinct has pulled him out of the rock frame and into a wider ecosystem: film scores, contemporary classical ensembles, minimalism.
What’s also missing when people treat this as a purely political story, is how well the project fits into Greenwood’s wider musical career.
This diversity is interspersed through his career. Take Radiohead’s “The National Anthem”: a droning bass riff, drums locked into a single stubborn gait, and then a brass section piling in with free jazz swirls. Even earlier, in “Climbing Up the Walls” from OK Computer , we get swarming strings, claustrophobia, and a wash of ambience.
Greenwood’s movie score for There Will Be Blood builds atmosphere with sustained strings, stabbing figures, long stretches of unresolved pressure. “You Were Never Really Here” is built around discordant motifs that loop around traumatically.
Then there is Junun and the Rajasthan Express—a collaboration built around another songwriter’s vision: Shye Ben Tzur, an Israeli composer who writes Sufi-influenced South Asian Hebrew devotionals.
That record was made in Rajasthan with long-time Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich and a cast of Indian musicians playing at each other. Harmoniums and voices form a thick centre. Handclaps and percussion lock the whole thing into a rollicking rhythm. Brass and reeds flare up like heat. The songs gather the momentum of a chant—by returning to the same phrase until it stops being a phrase and becomes a state.
On Junun, Greenwood lets the other musicians drive the music. When you notice him, it’s usually because of texture—little guitar figures that glitter and snag, a low rumble that thickens the groove, a line that nudges the harmony into a slightly stranger colour. It’s Greenwood working as a composer and an arranger, helping the repetition stay alive, keeping the music from turning into either total chaos or wallpaper.
The truth is that Jarak Qaribak doesn’t function as propaganda for Israel. It is not some kind of fake coexistence project built on Palestinian oppression. It isn’t smoothing anything over. It isn’t going to solve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, either.
But it also doesn’t follow that this music is meaningless.
Jarak Qaribak matters precisely because it exists in a space that simplistic political narratives try to eliminate: a space where history is messy, where identities are complex and overlapping, and where people share cultural grammar regardless of any fight over land or power.
Listen to:
- Taq ou‑Dub — Jonny Greenwood & Dudu Tassa
The engine room. This is the record’s thesis statement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObW6bGDoi3Q
- Lhla Yzid Ikthar — Jonny Greenwood & Dudu Tassa
Restrained, grainy, patient. A lesson in how to build weight without crowding the voice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Od6m4mvqd-I
- Ashufak Shay — Jonny Greenwood & Dudu Tassa
Piano, reeds, unfinished longing. The album’s most open moment.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDn_K9hEAEM
- Hu — Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood & The Rajasthan Express
From Junun. Greenwood learning how to disappear inside a system.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XX4EpkR-Sp4
- Allah Elohim — Shye Ben Tzur, Jonny Greenwood & The Rajasthan Express
Hebrew devotional lyrics carried by South Asian musical logic. Categorical confusion as a musical fact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgTK7S97EQU
- The National Anthem — Radiohead
Greenwood’s rock-era blueprint: one note, no release, pressure accumulating until it becomes physical.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfQD1QiQ9o4
- Climbing Up the Walls — Radiohead
Early evidence that Greenwood was already thinking like a film composer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWip6vqId_I
- Prospector’s Quartet — Jonny Greenwood
Sustained strings, unresolved dread. Greenwood’s obsession with tension, stripped of songs altogether.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWip6vqId_I
- Ya Nabʿat Er-Reehan — Salima Murad
One of the Iraqi voices from the world that produced the Al-Kuwaity brothers.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6G5gYYTCIBM
10. Ya Rayah — Rachid Taha
Algerian chaabi refracted through punk and rock energy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBu2OXGWBFI
