Thom Yorke

by Trevor Baker

  “He was never arrogant or cocky at gigs or rehearsals,” says Laura. “He didn’t try and take over musically, which I have subsequently come across in bands. Sometimes you meet somebody and there’s an arrogance that comes out in the music. They seem perfectly nice and then you realise they’ve cranked their amp up to 11 and nobody can hear anybody but them. You wouldn’t have got that with Thom. Certainly onstage he wasn’t arrogant. One of the interesting things about him in hindsight was that he was able to sit in the background on something even though he was so talented. He didn’t argue about doing the backing vocals and that’s quite a testament to his character I’d say. But then he knew he was doing it with [On A Friday] and we were a bit of fun to keep him going while he was at university.”

  At that point, although he’d had a fairly serious relationship before he came to university, Thom was still shy around girls, something he often blamed on the fact that he went to an all-boys school. Laura Forrest-Hay wasn’t quite sure of what to make of him.

  “I wouldn’t say he was moody but he was withdrawn,” she says, “which I suppose was shyness but coupled with his confidence it sometimes seemed like arrogance. I think I misinterpreted his shyness at the time.”

  Martin thinks that Thom partly relished his reputation as an outsider and an outcast. “I think he kind of enjoyed it,” he says. “He certainly nurtured that. Rather than walking into a room and going, ‘Hello everyone!’ He would walk in and look at the floor and be slightly mysterious.”

  At the same time there was genuinely a shy and unassuming aspect to Thom’s character. He wasn’t a raconteur but at Exeter he made several close friends and, even more significantly, met his long-term girlfriend Rachel Owen. Rachel was also doing a joint course, in Fine Art and Italian.

  “She really thought I was a freak,” he said to Melody Maker later. “She thought I was impossible to talk to, really moody, difficult, unpleasant and idiotic. And I think I was. But she bashed a lot of that crap out of me.”

  Rachel was heavily into music, too, and another Exeter contemporary of Thom’s, Shaun McCrindle remembers that it was Rachel who first got him into the Pixies. “The first impression he made on me was when he came into the Hall Of Residence we were staying in at the time singing ‘Gigantic’, the Pixies’ song,” he says. “Rachel had just introduced Thom to them.”

  If his initial attempts to woo her had been unsuccessful, then it must have helped that Headless Chickens were becoming increasingly successful, albeit in the tiny world of Exeter University’s alternative scene. Very soon Thom had the disconcerting realisation that his ‘fun’ band at university was much more successful and popular than his ‘real’ band back in Oxford. Martin, who now runs a successful internet advertising company, worked hard at promoting them and the band were able to draw, at times, several hundred people to their gigs.

  “We did start taking it more seriously,” says Laura. “We started getting asked to play the stupid Balls they have every term at places like Exeter. We got to headline some of those gigs and they were quite big, they’d be maybe 500 people and we’d get paid for that so we’d practice properly and work out our set. Shack was very driven. He was very focused on his music and it was an outlet for that.”

  “When we were there, Exeter University was about 7,000 – 8,000 people and a lot of them were Sloane Rangers who’d just rent a big house in the country and fuck off,” says Martin. “Which meant if you wanted to do something, you could get an audience because there wasn’t that much going on. Through the network of maybe fifty of your mates, you could guarantee 150 people turning up to whatever you did. If we’d been at Manchester or London we’d never have got that. So it was a massive confidence booster to us as a band when, at our very first gig, a load of people came. We genuinely had a following who knew our songs and really liked a few of them.”

  The main thing that made Headless Chickens so popular in their own little world was the amount of effort they put into their performances. Unlike On A Friday, they were as much about the spectacle as they were about the music.

  “Thom had that long blonde bob that he used to swish about onstage,” says Martin. “Shack had very long hair and I was a Goth so I had dyed, back-combed hair. We looked quite good and had a lot of energy and attitude onstage. We used to shout at the audience. People would scream and shout. There’d be lots of banter. It was always a fun night rather than, ‘there’s a band up there taking themselves seriously’. This was the fun band where Thom could let his hair down.”

  “We did lots of stupid covers,” Laura Forrest-Hay remembers. “Like a really heavy, thrash version of ‘Postman Pat’. And we did Prince’s ‘Raspberry Beret’ at four times the speed. Shack was quite into punk, as well, and anarchic music. Myself and John Matthias were bringing in more melodic stuff on top of it.”

  “We did a very hard, grungy cover of ‘Funky Town’, continues Martin. “Thom would prance up and down in a way that … although his onstage presence got quite professional, musically, he would definitely fuck about. We also used to get a lot of dancers in who’d strip off and paint themselves in funny coloured paint and all that. Part of it was that if you have a visual appeal and make it a party, people will come. I remember a couple of gigs where we had four to six dancers covered in DayGlo paint down to their underwear. We did a couple of gigs at farms in the middle of nowhere with properly decent light shows. There was definitely a buzz about it. I mean I didn’t leave [the band] thinking, Oh my God, I’ve just done a Pete Best. I was never good enough as a drummer to have gone the distance. But it had enough of a buzz about it that a lot of people would have remembered those times, regardless of what Thom had gone on to do. It was a good enough band and stage show and a good enough thing that happened for people to say that, ‘Yeah, there was a band called the Headless Chickens and they were really good and we had a lot of fun.’ We were better than the average student band.”

  This was proved when they achieved something else that On A Friday had never come close to – their own record. Local promoter Dave Goodchild had a record label, Hometown Atrocities, and when he saw the small following that Headless Chickens were building up among the student population, he suggested that they record a song for an EP of Exeter bands. The Headless Chickens’ song was called ‘I Don’t Want To Go To Woodstock’ and Dave arranged for them to go to a studio in nearby Honiton to record it.

  The other three bands on the record, Jackson Penis, Beaver Patrol and Dave’s own band Mad At The Sun, had a completely different sound, much louder and heavier. Headless Chickens were unmistakably a student band.

  “They were different from all the other punk bands in Exeter,” Dave told this author. “The big influence in Exeter at the time was hardcore. We were into Emo bands like Fugazi, which is very different to what they call Emo now, but they’d branched off into more of an avant-garde thing. It had more of an indie appeal.”

  “Thom had done a bit of demo recording before but none of us had been involved in anything like that,” says John. “It was great. It was a laugh. We went to a studio called Daylight Studios in Honiton. And it was just a day. I remember Thom over-dubbing lots and lots of very noisy guitar, very quickly. Then we over-dubbed the violin. I think we did the whole thing in about four hours and then took about an hour and a half to mix it and it was mastered the next day and that was it.”

  Despite the fact that it was a micro-budget recording, it was a fantastic moment for all of them when they heard the finished record. It was an anti-hippy piece beginning with Shack ranting, “with flowers in their hair/they say that they don’t care” and ending, “don’t let the hippies get me”. The biggest influence seems to be the cussed humour of The Wonder Stuff’s Miles Hunt. In the background you can just about make out Thom’s backing vocals, a falsetto that would later become very familiar.

  “It was brilliant, totally brilliant,” says Martin. “As a drummer I’d never heard myself play in a band before. I’m sure it wasn’t that p
olished at all but it did sound great. It was fantastic to hear, particularly Thom’s vocal over the top of Shack, [it] sounded really good. It was a real buzz hearing it and I remember thinking it would be great fun to do more of that.”

  “Thom’s very high backing vocals are probably the best thing in it, looking back!” says Laura. “I remember my string broke so I had to do it with three strings like Paganini because I didn’t have a spare violin string. It was very fast.”

  The result was the kind of frantic indie rock that was designed to be played live to an audience of enthusiastic, and, ideally, drunk students. “It sounds like The Wonder Stuff or something,” says John. “It’s very of its time, 1989, poppy, grungey English pop music.”

  Dave Goodchild arranged for an impressive 1,000 copies of the EPs to be pressed at a plant in Czechoslovakia. When he collected them, though, hundreds were missing. “What happened was a box of them broke and got lost somewhere in between the Czech pressing plant and Exeter,” he says, “so there’s not many of them around. I think a load of sleeves went missing as well. There were 1,000 run and literally about 600 of them got lost.”

  It didn’t cause the band too much concern. 1,000 records seem like rather a lot for an EP which would surely only ever be of interest within the small alternative scene of one small city. Plus the cost was spread between the four bands and Hometown Atrocities, so it wasn’t as expensive as it might have been. It was just one of those things,” says Dave. “It did end up costing us. One box arrived instead of five but because it was a collective, nobody really cared.”

  It also means that the EP is now worth a lot of money. There were two different sleeves and one is particularly rare. Above a picture of a fang-toothed female zombie it bears the legend: Hometown Atrocities Present … A Disgrace To The Corpse Of Kylie … The Hometown Atrocities EP.

  It was an incongruously ‘punk’ image for a band who had much more in common with the indie scene but the EP, and particularly Headless Chickens’ song, received an enthusiastic response in Exeter. In their own tiny world they were now almost pop stars and when it was sold in local shops their fan base expanded.

  “After the EP we had a following, not just in the university but in the town as well,” says Martin. “Dave Goodchild was a local rather than a university type and he bridged the gap. Quite a few people bought that EP and they’d love it when we played it and we’d always get encores and stuff.”

  As a band they were increasing in confidence. What had started out as a bit of fun was starting to become a little more serious. At that point, Thom didn’t particularly stand out from any of the other people in his clique in terms of his talent. They were all very talented. But he stood out with his attitude and his work ethic.

  “He was quite a good guitarist in the way that the other people in the band were quite good as well,” says Martin. “It was more in his attitude and his energy and his belief that he was conspicuous, rather than his actual ability at that point. Although he was an art student, there were no particular themes or passions or points that he was trying to make. It was kind of, ‘I want to be different like everybody else’. He had this general thing of wanting to do stuff and be passionate but not quite being sure of what he wanted to let out. So, later on, probably catalysed by his friendships with the other guys in [On A Friday], those things started to come out. He worked fucking hard at being a musician. We’d do a song and then the next time you saw him he’d really polished it and worked on it and made an effort to make it as good as it could be. He’d always got loads of ideas. He was very good at collaborating. So although some people might think it was all about him, it wasn’t. He was definitely passionate about the band and the music coming over well and everybody getting on. It’s interesting in that he’s gone full-circle in that his persona now is very much a shy bloke who doesn’t like talking about it, who just wants to get up and do it and doesn’t want to project himself as unusual or as a pop star or anything else. Whereas [back] then he was definitely all about his persona. He was an OK guitarist. He could kind of sing and looked alright onstage but it was almost the other way round.”

  As he started to feel more confident in Headless Chickens, Thom started contributing his own songs. One of them, in an odd throwback to his first, childhood song, ‘Mushroom Cloud’, was called ‘Atom Bomb’. It was just “generic indie”, says Martin, but it was a sign that Thom wasn’t just along for the ride. Nevertheless, even as he became more confident and started bringing more to the band there were still moments when they were reminded that he wasn’t a rock star, yet.

  “In the first year in halls, everybody was a little bit green,” says Laura. “I’ve got this video of our gig and everybody’s desperately trying to be so cool and Thom’s there in these cut-off shorts like your man out of AC/DC and we’re all onstage and he suddenly shouts into the microphone, ‘This one’s for everyone in Moberly’, which was one of the Halls Of Residence. Which was so uncool! The rest of us were going, ‘Would you shut up! You’ve just completely ruined our street-cred!’”

  4

  SUPERSTAR DJ

  In the second year, Thom moved out of halls and into a shared house. There were only 12 people on his course and so they decided to split into two groups of six. He lived in the basement of a big, three-storey house on Longbrook Street in the centre of Exeter. Unsurprisingly it was a very arty environment. Perhaps slightly too arty at times. One housemate, Shaun, was an amateur film-maker and he remembers that, although on occasion they worked together, there was some friction between them, too.

  “There were some funny things going on in that house,” Shaun recalled in an interview for this book. “I used to do a lot of my film stuff there. We’d perplex each other with our idiosyncrasies! I’d say me and him were quite similar but I’m a bit more easy-going. I would do weird things. I was doing films and things would come spilling out of my room. He just thought I was mad. And I think a lot of people thought Thom must be mad because of his music! But there was a conventional side to his character as well.”

  Nevertheless, Thom was happy to collaborate with his housemates on their projects. On one occasion Thom and Shaun went to nearby Dawlish-by-the-Sea to work on another film for their art class, almost getting trapped by the rising tide. Another time Thom sang ‘10 Green Bottles’ for one of Shaun’s films. “It’s nice that he was happy to get involved with something like that,” says Shaun. “It’s not the stereotype of the intense, depressed person.

  The rest of the house would regularly hear Thom working on songs downstairs and, on one occasion, Shaun and Thom wrote a song together. Thom was still experimenting and didn’t have a clear idea of what kind of music he wanted to make. Shaun says that the result was an odd hybrid of alternative, drone-rock bands like Loop or Spacemen 3 with a kind of Prince vocal on the top.

  “We sat down to jam a couple of songs,” he says, “and as we were playing, he had an idea for something and I was just tuning my guitar in and out and we ended up getting something that sounded really good. He was just singing, ‘Baby let’s grind,’ like Prince, or something.”

  In his art class, Thom was experimenting, too. Towards the end of the first year, when he finally came back to class, he discovered that they’d bought a load of Apple Macs. After that he spent most of his time scanning images, playing around with bits of text. Even then he felt that many of his fellow students were dubious that what he was doing was ‘art’ at all. One exception was one of his best friends at Exeter, Dan Rickwood. He had a similarly dark sense of humour to Thom and the same preoccupations with war and disaster. Talking to Craig McLean of the Observer, he remembered Thom later as, “mouthy. Pissed off. Someone I could work with!” Later on, using the name Stanley Donwood, he would collaborate with Thom on almost all of Radiohead’s artwork.

  “I think that my obsession with nuclear apocalypse, Ebola pandemics, global cataclysm and Radiohead’s particular brand of unsettling melody have gone together quite well,” he later qu
ipped in an interview with Antimusic website. Like a lot of students, they relished the feeling of being outsiders. Thom still retained the distaste for students that he’d had at Oxford.

  “I was embarrassed to be a student because of what the little fuckers got up to,” he said to Q. “Walking down the street to be confronted by puke and shopping trolleys and police bollards. Fucking hell. I used to think, no wonder they hate us.”

  That hatred was directed directly at him on one occasion. He’d taken to wearing a long overcoat and an old man’s hat. When a group of locals mocked him, he turned and blew them a kiss and they promptly pulled sticks from their own jackets and proceeded to batter him.

  To begin with, Thom had managed to steer clear of most student clichés. He drank but he wasn’t somebody who would have ten pints and then run amok with a traffic cone on his head. “He was a crap drinker!” remembers Martin. “He’d be asleep after a pint and a half. He was that kind of drinker. He wasn’t a raconteur. He wouldn’t stand there and entertain everybody. He was definitely somebody who was on the sidelines of things until he was onstage.”

  Thom had some of the best times of his life at Exeter. He was asked in a magazine interview years later about the best party he’d ever been to and he remembered one occasion where he was summoned to a kind of “happening” on a hillside outside Exeter. They were picked up at The Red Cow pub and driven to Dartmoor where, in the absence of any moon, it was almost pitch black. They then walked across the moor until they got to the edge of a deserted quarry. Then suddenly somebody switched on lights and the whole thing was illuminated. They smashed an abandoned car up and made instruments out of the pieces before crashing out in sleeping bags. Shaun, too, remembers it as being one of the highlights of their time at Exeter.