Thom Yorke
Page 3
They weren’t great songs by any means but for a teenage band that’d played only a handful of gigs they were pretty impressive. Most teen bands struggle to master one genre, yet Thom already had them hopping from one distinct style to another in every track. It was a sign of his talent but also an indication perhaps that he hadn’t yet found his voice. For someone who loved performing so much, it is surprising that he didn’t get the band to play more shows at this point, but then they were only kids, and the student-dominated live music scene in Oxford must have been quite intimidating. Thom had lived there since he was eight-years-old but he had highly ambiguous feelings about the city. In an interview with The Observer, he once said that it made him feel like an outsider, one of the few places in England where the expensively educated members of Radiohead wouldn’t feel middle-class.
“The middle-class thing has never been relevant,’ he told journalist Andrew Smith. “In Oxford we’re fucking lower-class. The place is full of the most obnoxious, self-indulgent, self-righteous oiks on the fucking planet, and for us to be called middle class … well, no, actually. Be around on May Day when they all reel out of the pubs at five in the morning puking up and going, ‘Haw haw haw’ and try to hassle your girlfriend.”
Nevertheless he also said, in his first interview with fanzine Curfew, that although it was a “weird place”, it was “very important to my writing.” He would often sit and just watch people, scribbling ideas for lyrics in his notebook. His main inspiration was purely negative. He learned to despise certain elements of the student population, a feeling that may have been bolstered by the fact that, in the poorer southern parts of the town, he would have been considered much more like a student than a townie. He was desperate to disassociate himself from some of the grating public school types who poured into the city each year.
“Seeing these fuckers walking around in their ball gowns, throwing up on the streets, being obnoxious to the population,” he said to Q. “They don’t know they’re born and they’re going to run the country. It’s scary. Of all the towns in the country, it’s one of the most obvious examples of a class divide.”
At one point he even considered changing the name of the band from On A Friday to ‘Jude’ after the protagonist of Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude The Obscure. It is, in part, the story of somebody desperately trying to get into Oxford University and being driven mad by their failure. By then Thom was already starting to get bored of repeatedly being told how awful the name On A Friday was, but for some reason they couldn’t think of anything better. They considered calling themselves simply ‘Music’, which says something about how seriously they were taking things. But the name On A Friday stuck, even if no particular style of music did. They tried country, ska, funk, punk and rock. “We used to change musical styles every two months,” Colin Greenwood once said.
If they’d wanted to get attention fast, the best thing would have been to take their inspiration from My Bloody Valentine’s 1988 album Isn’t Anything. At that point, a whole swathe of bands in Oxford and the surrounding area were about to do just that, inventing the so-called ‘Shoegazing’ scene. Bands like Ride would soon be the ‘Big Thing’ in the music press, with a sound that relied on a wall of guitars and dreamy, ethereal vocals. But Thom was always much too spiky and acerbic to be interested in anything purporting to be “blissful”. Instead he leapt from one sound to another, constantly finding inspiration from new bands. His latest discovery was an American act called the Miracle Legion. He and his brother Andy were obsessed with them and their singer Mark Mulcahy. Miracle Legion were similar to REM but with a darker, more intense sound. Thom wanted his own music to have the same emotional feel but he wasn’t quite sure how to find it. The result was an incredibly prolific burst of songwriting that he’d still be drawing from years later.
“They just stuck with it,” says Nigel Powell. “Everybody else was shooting about going, ‘I’ll try this, I’ll try that, I’ll do the other’, whereas even though these extra people, like the saxophonists, came and went, the core of the band were just there plugging away going, ‘Let’s try new things’. Even when the band weren’t playing very often, Jonny and Thom would borrow the school four-track and go and demo stuff in Jonny’s bedroom, using drum loops and Soul II Soul [style] loops and throwing stuff over the top of them. They seemed to be able to forge ahead better than a lot of people.”
Perhaps they could have made it then, in 1988 or 1989. Things could have been very different. But they weren’t rock ’n’ roll outlaws with no option but to play music or starve. They’d had expensive educations and there was a lot of pressure on them to make good use of that. They had a foretaste of what would happen when Phil disappeared off to Liverpool University to study English. The following year Colin, Thom and Ed also had to make a decision about what they were going to do next. Colin had a promising academic career ahead of him. He got top grades at A-Level and went to Cambridge University to study English, while Ed had gone to Liverpool to study politics. Thom was reluctant to follow them. He was starting to form an impressive songwriting partnership with Jonny (who was still at school). He also had a slightly tortuous and intense relationship that he didn’t seem to be able to get out of. (“Have you ever seen Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? It was like that for a year and a half,” he said to Melody Maker, “lots of fighting in public”.)
He deferred his place at university and spent a gap year doing unrewarding jobs while continually writing songs and recording demos with Jonny. One of his jobs was at a clothes store selling suits. When his boss asked him why he hadn’t managed to sell any he replied, “because they’re crap and no one wants to buy them.”
This kind of honesty wasn’t going to get him anywhere in sales. His boss took over the role of his designated hate-figure, a replacement for Abingdon’s much-loathed headmaster. The day he handed in his notice, after wrongly being accused of stealing some stock, was a great moment but Thom was uncharacteristically restrained. “I wish I’d told my boss to fuck off,” he said later. “He had this twisted little mouth and you could tell that he was desperate to make everybody’s life hell.”
Still, it was a frustrating year. The band could only rehearse and play very occasionally. After leaving the shop, Thom – with characteristic perversity – got a job at a mental hospital as an orderly. He still hated hospitals as a result of his childhood memories and now his experiences dealing with people who had severe problems shocked him. He was particularly amazed when many of them were released.
“I used to work in a mental hospital around the time the Government was getting passionate about care in the community,” he said in an interview with The Times in the late 1990s, “and everyone just knew what was going to happen. It was one of the scariest things that ever happened in this country, because a lot of them weren’t harmless.”
After another job working in a bar, Thom eventually headed off to Exeter University to study English Literature and Art. In some ways it was another perverse choice. He claimed to despise the spoiled rich kids he saw in Oxford but Exeter University, at that time, was known as the place where middle-class kids who weren’t clever enough to get into Oxford or Cambridge went to create a similarly cloistered environment. It was a fairly long way from Oxford but socially it wasn’t a giant leap. It was the same thing on a smaller, less intimidating scale.
Nevertheless, it had its advantages. At a place like Exeter it was much easier to be seen as ‘alternative’. And when he got there Thom found that although there weren’t many people who shared his tastes, those who did formed a much more solid bond than they might have done elsewhere. Also, when he arrived in 1988, being ‘alternative’ was suddenly about to become fashionable and much more mainstream.
Just like a young couple heading off to different universities, the rest of the band must have wondered whether their relationship would survive. What would happen, say, if one of them met somebody else?
3
HEADLESS CHICKENS
“I used to run the University magazine,” Martin explained to me. “And I was trying to get new people to write [for it]. I saw him over the other side of the room and remembered him and went, ‘Thom!’”
Thom had a long blonde bob at the time. He was looking at the floor with his usual air of not wanting to talk to anybody and yet unmistakably wanting to be noticed. Nevertheless when he realised that there was somebody at university that he already knew, Thom was undoubtedly relieved. After his experiences at Abingdon, coming to another institution was an intimidating prospect.
“He was quite dweeby in that he’d walk into a room and be very shy about talking to anybody,” says Martin. “He’d just look into his fringe and was generally quite shy but he had this self-concept about being a rock star. When you’re at university everybody carries their guitar around all the time with that, ‘I’m gonna be someone’ thing. And often it was the ones who were like, ‘No, I really am’ who you knew absolutely never would. He wasn’t quite a joke in the, ‘I’m going to be a rock star’, sense but you didn’t need to ask him what his future was going to be because he was very clear.”
But, beneath his self-conscious ‘rock star’ persona, Martin found that Thom was still the same person he’d been at camp. “My main recollections from that time,” he says, “are that he was a very nice bloke, right from the start, very friendly and keen to be nice.” Martin was in his second year. The previous year he’d been in a band with another student, an old school friend called Simon ‘Shack’ Shackleton. They’d played covers but were planning on starting a new group to play original songs. Shack would sing and play bass and Martin could play drums so they still needed a guitarist. Thom was the obvious choice. “I knew that he could play guitar and I knew he had some attitude and he looked good,” Martin says.
At this point, the band had the ridiculously ‘studenty’ name of ‘Git’. Despite this, Thom readily agreed to join. His university life couldn’t have had a better start. It was far removed from his experiences at school, particularly in the art department where being moody and creative was the norm. Thom quickly made far more friends than he ever had at school. He was still self-consciously “different” but at university so were lots of other people. His desire to make a statement no longer seemed unusual.
“I love that sensation when you walk into a room and everyone looks at you twice,” he admitted to Andrew Collins in Select magazine later. “That’s great. Pure vanity, you’re there for effect. When I went to art college it was the first time in my life that I’d ever been with people who did the same thing as me, they’d dress up for effect, get on the bus for effect.”
Thom discovered that Exeter University had everything he loved and everything he hated. He couldn’t stand the lazy complacency of so many of his fellow public school educated students but the art course offered him a huge amount of freedom. Initially it was almost too much freedom. They told him he could do whatever he wanted but, for most of the first year, nothing appealed. His sketchbooks were full of lyrics and designs for possible future record sleeves. He was heavily into Francis Bacon so, on the rare occasions he did touch a paint brush, the results were large, morbid pictures with heavy splashes of black and red. He once said the best painting he did in the first year was of “a man blowing his brains out”.
In the first year, he lived in halls and found himself part of a large scene of people who didn’t feel like they fitted into Exeter’s dominant, ‘Sloaney’ ethos. The band quickly dumped the name Git, only to choose the almost-as-bad moniker Headless Chickens; nonetheless, it provided a ready-made social life. In the first year, as well as Thom, Shack and Martin, the band included two talented violinists, John Matthias and Laura Forrest-Hay. They felt like they were part of their own, very distinct arty clique. Although Thom never took Headless Chickens entirely seriously, he appreciated how it gave him a social standing at Exeter, as well as a ready-made group of friends.
“He had a kind of awkwardness about him, that somehow he didn’t quite fit, so when people were nice to him he really appreciated it,” says Martin. “I wouldn’t say for a moment that I took him under my wing, but the fact that on the second or third day of university there was somebody who knew him and said, ‘Do you want to join a band?’ I think he appreciated it. And I used to pick him up and tell him where things were and he definitely appreciated it.”
To their surprise, Headless Chickens quickly became very successful, albeit in the tiny world of Exeter student life. Thom might not have liked everything about the university, but the fact that it was so conservative made it even easier to stand out and make a statement.
“Because Exeter was such a Sloaney university, there was an awful side to it,” Headless Chickens’ violinist Laura told the author, “which was all these very rich, upper-middle-class kids who hadn’t got into Oxbridge who’d been sent by their parents to Exeter and were definitely not clever enough to go to university. They had way too much money and lived out in farmhouses in the countryside and had gambling parties. But what that meant was, those of us coming to Exeter from less well-off backgrounds, or normal backgrounds, were a little minority and that brought us together. Anyone who wasn’t Sloane-y and who was remotely interested in the arts formed this weird little gaggle of people who weren’t into anything else. We all mixed together and it was quite intense. We went to Edinburgh, and we had these one-off Dada nights and [we had] Headless Chickens, anything not to be with the Sloanes.
“It was very easy to be alternative at Exeter because the norm was so conservative,” she continues. “It was so conservative it was embarrassing. There were so many very comfortable people. If you were in Headless Chickens you were the pinnacle of the alternative scene! If you were a bit unsure of yourself and knew that you didn’t fit in with the main crowd, it was great to have the kudos of being in this band.”
Despite its reputation, that era of Exeter University produced a number of people who would later be highly successful. JK Rowling was there a couple of years before Thom, while Basement Jaxx’s Felix Buxton was a contemporary, as was sculptor John Isaacs and presenter and documentary maker Toby Amies.
“Exeter was still quite a provincial place and everything had to stop at 1a.m. in most places,” says the band’s other violinist John Matthias. “But there was a lot going on. There were six or seven really good student bands and there were clubs set up by students. There were six or seven really dynamic people around and that’s all it takes to make something happen in a small place like Exeter. The art college was full of lots of very talented people.”
“Looking back,” Laura says, “I think that generated an intense atmosphere of activity. We started up a magazine as well. It was supposed to be a little bit alternative and not about the things Exeter was supposed to be about, which was twin-set and pearls. I would say that atmosphere pushed anyone who was interested in anything alternative together. I lived with Martin, Toby Amies and John Isaacs. Felix used to come round, who was in Basement Jaxx later. There were two semi-detached houses and there was always somebody there planning something. There was always something happening.”
In his first few months Thom also wrote for the university magazine, 3rd Degree. Martin remembers he wrote an adulatory piece about U2’s album of the previous year The Joshua Tree. “He adored Bono for years and years,” says Martin. “I remember U2 was the number one, most important thing in his life. He was also a massive REM fan as well.” But initially Headless Chickens were much rougher and rowdier than that. They were as much about making a visual statement as they were about the music. Thom wasn’t even asked to audition. He looked
right and then at their first rehearsal they all realised how talented he was.
“I remember thinking his voice was lovely even though he was doing backing vocals while I was in the band,” Laura says. “His voice was so distinctive already.”
“We were a noisy guitar band,” says violinist John Matthias. “But Thom has always had a great pop sensibility and he can’t help writing great tunes that work in a pop sense. The exciting music at the time was people like The Pixies and Fugazi. That was what we were playing in the clubs. Our band was kind of a bit like that but a bit more English and a bit more poppy.”
At the time bands like The Wonder Stuff were very big in Britain and, with two violinists, there was an element of that sound in Headless Chickens. “I think they were into that but Shack was more into heavier stuff and quite experimental stuff,” says Laura. “On one of our videos there’s a whole ten minutes where Shack has gone over to the keyboards and is just freewheeling and Thom was putting stuff in with his guitar and nobody really knows what’s happening. There was a nod at The Wonder Stuff but with lots of heavy guitar, thrashy with lots of pedals and effects. Bit odd. A bit of an odd mixture!”
It was basically Shack’s band to start with. He was lead vocalist and Thom contributed backing vocals. Perhaps surprisingly, considering his talent, Thom made little effort to stamp his own personality on proceedings, at least at the start. He was just happy to have an outlet for his creativity while he was away from On A Friday. He made no effort to try and take over.
“It is bizarre that we didn’t let him sing to start with,” Martin says. “I used to do some of the singing, which is really bizarre, because I’ve got a crap voice and he’s got quite a good voice! But he really loved performing live and really lived for it. You could tell that when he was onstage his slightly awkward, dweeby side would disappear and out would come a pretty crazed rock persona.”