Radiohead bassist Colin Greenwood has ventured into literary criticism, reviewing Michael Palin’s Erebus: The Story of a Ship, about an ill-fated Arctic voyage, for British magazine The Spectator. Greenwood praises Palin, saying he writes “with a wry enthusiasm, bolstered by his own experiences as an eminent explorer and film-maker.”
“Palin’s inquest into the Franklin Disaster and the brave souls who perished is terrific in its detail, poignant, and with the suggestion of cannibalism, macabre,” Greenwood writes. He concludes, “Nature frustrates Palin too, in the end: his pilgrimage to the wreck of the Erebus below King William Island, on board a modern Russian ice-breaker, is foiled by present-day climate change. Warming seas have caused Arctic ice shelves to break up, causing massive ice floes that ironically echo the conditions Franklin found himself in, now frozen in time.”
It seems to be Greenwood’s journalistic debut, although he wrote a playful review when, in response to Radiohead’s launch of a newspaper, Guardian employees lined “Creep” in 2011.
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