Thom Yorke

by Trevor Baker

  At the time it wasn’t unhealthy at all. He made new friends, albeit only for a week, and he learned that there were people in the world who were as passionate about music as him. Being a fan of Joy Division, or even Sting, didn’t necessarily mean he had to sit in his bedroom, alone with his guitar.

  “It was a great way of trying new things, getting into new things and meeting lots of other kids,” Martin says. “When you go on a week’s camp, you kind of make friends with everyone and get to know them quite well. We weren’t close friends but there were about 70 kids and you remember one or two of them standing out, either for the way they look or the way they perform and stuff, and one of them was Thom. He was a very self-assured performer onstage but offstage he wasn’t self-assured at all.”

  “Sometime children arrive with an attitude that they’ve obviously got in everyday life,” says tutor Mike Oliver, who taught at the camp in the 1980s, “and in the camp people find a different outlook on life. Sometimes the attitude they’ve had disappears and they find they can mix in much better.”

  When Thom got back to school that autumn, he was determined to take his music further. He started recording his songs but he was taken aback when a close friend listened to some of the songs he’d been working on. “Your lyrics are crap,” she blurted. “They’re too honest, too personal, too direct and there’s nothing left to the imagination.”

  “She was right,” Thom said to Q later. “When I first started, I wasn’t really interested in writing lyrics. Which is strange in a way because if I didn’t like the words on a record, if it wasn’t saying anything, I would never bother with it again. But at 16 your own songs are half-formed and you don’t really expect anyone to hear them, so you don’t care what the words are.”

  At the time, Abingdon had one punk band, known as TNT. Their most talented member was the bass player, Colin Greenwood. Thom became the singer (because, as singers always say, “no one else would”) and, united by the fact that neither of them fitted in at Abingdon, they became friends. Colin used to wear catsuits, dressing in a way calculated to wind up the more conservative elements of the school. Thom would wear frilly shirts and the suits he’d bought in Oxford’s second-hand shops (altered by his mum). When Thom left TNT, bored of the rest of the band’s lack of ambition and originality, Colin soon followed and they started plotting to form a new, better band. Although Thom liked the kind of bands cool, outsider kids were supposed to like – Magazine and Joy Division for example – he was also a huge fan of U2 and had recently acquired a massive passion for the then relatively obscure REM. He wanted to do something like that. Something bigger and more emotional than punk. A month later he saw Ed O’Brien walking down the street carrying a guitar that he’d just been given for his sixteenth birthday.

  “He thought I looked like Morrissey,” Ed said in an interview with The Plain Dealer magazine. “I was a fan of Morrissey’s band, The Smiths – and Thom said I should be in a band.” “No one would let us be in their gang,” Thom said later, “so we had to form our own.”

  In fact, Ed remembered Thom from a school performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ed – tall, handsome and well-spoken – was one of the actors. Thom was crouched with his guitar way up at the top of a tower of scaffolding. He was supposed to be providing the musical accompaniment but, during the first dress rehearsal, the sounds he was making were becoming increasingly bizarre and inappropriate. He was playing what Ed described as “a kind of cod-jazz”. Eventually the teacher had had enough. He shouted up to Thom to stop, trying to find out what was going on and Thom shouted down, “I don’t know what the fuck we’re supposed to be playing. And this,” Ed remembered in an interview later, “was to a teacher.”

  To start with, the band was just the three of them and a drum machine, a Bon Tempe that they’d bought in a charity shop. They didn’t know anybody of their own age who was cool enough to own a drum kit. That seemed fine until they had their first gig. It was in a village hall with most of their parents in attendance. Halfway through every song, the drum machine would either crash or get stuck in one of its bizarre, cheesy pre-set rhythms. Thom got more and more wound up until he totally lost it, screaming obscenities into the microphone as yet another song fell to pieces. There was only one option. They had to ask the only drummer they knew, Phil Selway whether he would join.

  At that point, even talking to Phil was a daunting prospect. He was two years older than Thom and Colin and, at that age, two years seemed like a huge generation gap. “We were all scared of Phil,” Colin said later. “He was in the class above us and he was in a band called Jungle Telegraph so we called him the ‘Graf’.

  Ed, the most self-assured of the band, was sent to ask him whether he would consider joining but even then he couldn’t ask outright. “I was a bit scared going up to him,” he told journalist Clare Kleinedler. “It was like a scene from Grease. I was like, ‘Um, so how’s it going?’ And Phil was like, ‘OK, how was your gig last night?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, cool, man. We had a bit of trouble with the drum machine.’ Phil says, ‘Yeah?’ And I say ‘We’re rehearsing next week, wanna make it?’” He did want to make it. Phil turned up on the appointed day and was disconcerted when Thom listened to him play and then muttered, “Can’t you play any fucking faster?”

  “They had one of those Dr. Rhythm things,” Phil told Modern Drummer magazine later, “which always stalls after around ten bars. Of course, you get a drummer and he stalls after eleven bars.”

  Thom might have been shy and reserved in some circumstances but where music was concerned he was never slow to speak his mind. Even then he was highly critical of everything they did and, although they took a narcissistic delight in listening to tapes of their songs, he was frustrated that he couldn’t get them to sound how he wanted. He was intrigued when he heard the tape of another school band, Illiterate Hands. The recordings sounded much more professional than anything he’d managed. They’d been recorded by another pupil, Nigel Powell. At the time, Nigel was much more advanced in his musical knowledge than most of the kids at Abingdon. He’d gone there from London and had been in bands with his brother since he was eleven years old.

  “Thom thought, ‘That’s really good’ for some reason,” says Nigel of the Illiterate Hands tape. “Listening back I don’t know what he was thinking! He phoned me up and asked if I would do his band as well, which I did.”

  Nigel can probably claim to be Thom Yorke’s first ever producer, although he wouldn’t make any such claim himself. Essentially he was the one who knew where to put the microphones. He was also another source of advice and feedback on songs, something Thom always craved.

  “There wasn’t a lot of production going on because I was only 15!” Nigel admits. “One of the few things that I said that could be counted as production was that Thom should sing in an English accent. At the time he was a big fan of REM and he used to sing in a thick American accent. That’s about the only creative input I would have had apart from setting microphones up, stuff like that.”

  Thom eventually poached Illiterate Hands’ keyboard player, Colin’s younger brother Jonny Greenwood, for his own band! Jonny had wanted to join his older brother’s band since they’d started. He’d heard Thom’s songs and genuinely thought that they were as good as the records by Elvis Costello and REM that he was listening to at the time. He was already highly talented for his age on a variety of different instruments; piano, viola, violin and guitar. He also played with the Thames Valley Youth Orchestra. This might not have seemed a natural fit with a rock band and, according to legend, he regularly turned up to rehearsals with different instruments in a vain attempt to be allowed to join in. Eventually Colin relented, so during one Sunday morning rehearsal he persuaded the rest of the band that it wouldn’t hurt to let him play the harmonica every now and then.

  The week after that he performed for the first time at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford. They’d taken the name On A Friday and started gigging locally. They’d still on
ly played a handful of gigs and most of those were just in village halls or at the school. Sadly, before long, playing at the school was no longer an option. Another band had played a gig that turned – by the school’s conservative standards – a little rowdy and the headmaster promptly banned ‘pop music’ of all kinds. Perhaps as a result, Thom has always painted a picture of the place that sounds like Lindsay Anderson’s public school rebellion film If. He focused much of his teenage hatred on the headmaster, a man of stern morals and an old-fashioned outlook.

  “We went to a school where you had to go to church every morning, which is quite weird looking back,” said Jonny in a radio interview, “very weird.” “The headmaster was definitely a man out of time,” admits teacher, Andy Bush, who taught music once a week at Abingdon much later. “He was from a different era. It was incredibly British public school at that time, it’s moved on since then, but it was absolutely the antithesis of everything that Radiohead stand for artistically and politically.”

  Thom hated the headmaster and the school itself and some of that hatred was focused in the lyrics he was now writing. By the time Jonny joined the band, Thom was working much harder on the words. They were the springboard for the melodies and dictated the kind of music he was writing, too. It varied enormously in style, from four-track demos that were just a Soul-II-Soul rhythm and some vocals, to attempts to emulate U2 and REM. They were continually experimenting, trying to find something that worked. They weren’t a great band; initially Thom and Colin were some way ahead of the others in technical ability, but they worked far harder than most of their contemporaries.

  “For a school band they were very good,” says Nigel Powell. “But if you put a really good singer in any band they sound a hundred times better. They probably would have been a completely typical school band if it hadn’t been for Thom and, honestly, listening back to those tapes, Colin was well ahead of the rest of them in terms of playing prowess as well. He was a really good bass player.”

  But it was Thom who stood out.

  “Thom was already an amazing singer,” says Nigel. “I remember saying to somebody at the time, while we were still at school, ‘We’re all trying to make it and get record deals but if Thom doesn’t get one then there’s no point in anybody trying.’ He’d just got such an amazing voice and, even at the time, I recognised that it’s the voice that’s the most important thing about any band.”

  The five of them wouldn’t have been friends if it wasn’t for the band. Thom was in some ways a difficult person to get to know and there was something of the ‘mad scientist’ about the curious, creative Jonny but the other three were simply nice, normal blokes. Phil was the most mature and Ed and Colin were the most gregarious and outgoing, but they were all very different characters. Later they would hate having their picture taken as a band partly because they felt they looked so ridiculous together, particularly the towering Ed O’Brien at six-foot five and Thom at five-foot seven.

  By the time he was sixteen, people already found it hard to work Thom out. He was obviously shy and yet took great delight in making a statement with the way he dressed. He wanted people to notice him and yet he wanted to be left alone. He had a great sense of social justice and worried constantly about the state of the world, his own health and that of his friends and yet at times he would throw himself into music to the exclusion of everything else.

  His tendency towards nervousness and introspection was exacerbated when he got his first car at the age of 17. By this point his parents had moved further away from Oxford and he’d gone with them, so he was regularly driving back to go out with the rest of the band. One night he hadn’t slept and that morning he was driving with his then girlfriend when he had a serious crash, almost killing himself and giving her severe whiplash. When he did eventually get another car, an old Morris Minor, he was scared to go above 50mph in it. He told Addicted To Noise magazine that, from then on, things got worse and worse.

  “On the road that went from my house to Oxford, there was fucking maniacs all the time,” he said, “people who would drive 100 miles an hour to work, and I was in the Morris Minor, and it was like standing in the middle of the road with no protection at all. So I just gradually became emotionally tied up in this whole thing.”

  This came out later in a whole series of songs – ‘Stupid Car’, ‘Lucky’ and ‘Airbag’ – about crashes and death. He hated saying goodbye to friends when they had to drive home and he frequently dwelt on the everyday insanity of driving.

  He was also deeply affected by the events of August 19, 1987, when unemployed labourer Michael Ryan armed himself with two semi-automatic rifles and a handgun and walked out on to the streets of Hungerford. He shot sixteen people, including his mother, and then turned the gun on himself. Thom was sixteen at the time and he wrote the song ‘Sulk’ in response, which would later appear on Radiohead’s second album The Bends. Although oblique, it was said to originally contain a line about shooting guns.

  Still, his position as a sensitive outsider can be overstated. He had a girlfriend; he had a group of friends. At least part of his air of alienation and disillusionment was just the same pose that many people put on during their teenage years as a kind of protective barrier against the world. Everybody who knew him then and later said that once you got past that, he was a perfectly nice person and easy to talk to.

  But with On A Friday he was already creating a kind of cocoon around his creativity. They weren’t an ordinary group of friends. They respected his prodigious musical talent. They also gave him the security that he liked and the affirmation that the songs he was writing were genuinely good. Like many artistic people, he swung wildly between an absolute belief that he was destined to produce great work and a terrible feeling that perhaps what he was doing wasn’t any good at all. Even in the early days, this made producing music a painful process. He probably thought at the time that the feelings of inadequacy would go away but the writing process was still exactly the same, if not worse, years later …

  In classic pop psychology, this should all be laid at the door of that dodgy eye, the difficult childhood, the car crash and the bullies. In reality he would probably have been the awkward, creative type even if both eyes had functioned perfectly. His younger brother, Andy, born four years after him in 1972, was very similar in some ways. He also formed a band (the fleetingly successful and acclaimed Unbelievable Truth) and he too struggled with the mutually contradictory urges to be a “rock star” as against a private person. Andy gave Thom the nickname “Dodo” and there was a distinct vulnerability to both of them, a sense that they were targets because of their refusal to blend in with the crowd. Nevertheless, long after he ceased to be a child, Thom still occasionally had to explain himself over again.

  “When I was eighteen, I worked in a bar,” he said to Rolling Stone, “and this mad woman came in and said, ‘You have beautiful eyes but they’re completely wrong.’ Whenever I get paranoid, I just think about what she said.”

  2

  ON A FRIDAY

  In retrospect, it’s lucky that Thom didn’t become a star when he was eighteen. He was already talented enough that it was entirely possible. He had an enormous pile of songs, many of which would turn up in various forms years later. For example, a bass riff he came up with when he was just sixteen would later become the centrepiece of ‘The National Anthem’, a song that wouldn’t be finished until 1999. But if On A Friday had made it as teenagers, history would have been very different. On A Friday was very much a 1980s band. They had a faintly embarrassing whiff of white funk about them which chafed disturbingly with influences from the likes of U2 and REM. It’s not hard to imagine them becoming as big and important as, say, Fine Young Cannibals, if they’d had a break in 1987.

  Their very different sound is partly explained by the fact that the five original members of On A Friday were conscious that they lacked something. Thom wasn’t yet the charismatic front man that he became later and, onstage, they were just
another bunch of five blokes playing music. The solution, suggested by Colin, was to bring in a brass section. He had three friends who could play the tenor sax.

  “It’s just the way things are at school when you’re in a band,” says Nigel Powell. “You bump into somebody and say ‘Do you play anything?’ and they say, ‘Yes, I play glockenspiel’ and you say, ‘Hey! Join our band!’ There happened to be three saxophonists who were relatively close in age to them, so they got them in the band. Two of them were good-looking sisters, which certainly helped.”

  The three other members of On A Friday, Rasmus Peterson, Liz Cotton and her sister Charlotte were also pretty talented. By 1987 the band, as a collective, was getting better and better. They could have played more often but Thom wasn’t sure they were good enough. This might just have been the same lack of confidence that has dogged him throughout his career. They played a gig in 1987 at the Old Fire Station in Oxford (described by Thom as looking like “it was designed by the people who build Little Chefs. The stage is almost an afterthought, you feel like you’re playing on a salad bar.”) And Nigel was impressed by how much they’d improved.

  “I’d just done a demo for them and it was the release party,” he says. “They’d made lots of tapes and they were going to sell them to people. I particularly remember the horn section. They sounded really good that night. It was almost R&B.”

  This comes across in another demo recorded in 1988 at Woodworm Studios in a small village called Barford St. Michael in Oxfordshire. The studio had been set up by Dave Pegg, the bassist in folk rock band Fairport Convention. He was also the studio engineer and he did a good job of capturing their sound on three very different tracks. The first, ‘Happy Song’, has a jaunty calypso rhythm overlaid with jangly guitars like early REM. The second, ‘To Be A Brilliant Light’, has a sax opening that sounds like Duran Duran before it heads off, once again, in more of an REM direction and the third, ‘Sinking Ship’, sounds like a cross between The Wonder Stuff and Violent Femmes.