by Trevor Baker
“‘Info Freako’ by Jesus Jones was a hit at the time and I recall trying to dance to it on very lumpy ground with Thom and other friends, surrounded by TV sets playing the cult film Koyaanisqatsi!” he remembers. “The rave was followed by some performance art around the quarry ponds and we slept in the open, huddled around bonfires.”
It was the kind of thing that Thom might have sniffed at in Oxford a couple of years before but, despite himself, he was swept up in student life for a while. At the same time, music was still far more important to him than anything else. He would take his guitar with him to parties, he was writing constantly and his songs had reached another level. He was inspired by the new direction that REM had taken with a more mainstream, classic songwriting sound.
“I really noticed the passion in his singing in the student bar when I heard him singing the REM song ‘The One I Love’, says Shaun. “The way he sang it, that’s when I realised how good his singing was. He did a really emotional performance of that with just him and his guitar.”
Despite the fact that Headless Chickens were so popular, it was becoming very clear that, as he kept practising, Thom was beginning to stand out even among his talented peer group. At the end of Thom’s first year at Exeter, Laura Forrest-Hay and Martin Brooks graduated and left the band, which carried on by recruiting a new drummer Lindsey Moore and a new bass player Andy Hills. Thom was starting to have a greater input.
“I just thought he was an incredibly talented musician,” John says. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the same room as him playing the guitar, but it’s quite an awesome experience, really. A lot of the tracks that are on [Radiohead’s debut album] Pablo Honey he would play at parties on acoustic guitar.”
Among other songs, he would also play ‘Stop Whispering’, a particular favourite among his peer group. But it was at Exeter that he first came up with an even later Radiohead song ‘High And Dry’. “At the time everything was flowing between all sorts of different projects and bands and things,” says John Matthias. “They were just songs. Sometimes he’d say, ‘This is a song I wrote with Jonny’, or ‘This is a song I wrote with my band at home’. We’d basically rehearse once and then do a gig at a party or a ball or something like that. Then we wouldn’t see each other for ages and then we’d rehearse in a student house and do another gig. It was very ad hoc. But, for example, we played ‘High And Dry’ in the Headless Chickens.
This caused some confusion for fans of Headless Chickens when The Bends came out. “When I first heard ‘High And Dry’ I loved it and thought it sounded really familiar,” says one Exeter contemporary of Thom’s, Eileen Doran, “but I thought it was just one of those songs that strike a chord straight away. Then I realised that I had heard it many times! I’ve got a video of them doing it and it’s a really interesting version. It was slightly faster and they had this black girl singing backing vocals and that added a different sound to Headless Chickens. When they did ‘High And Dry’ it had this really lovely backing vocal to it.”
Increasingly Thom believed that pop music, with its directness and endless possibilities, had a lot more to offer than the elitist world of fine art. Although he would still diligently study his English Literature texts, he wondered what he was doing in his art class. Apart from anything else he just didn’t have enough time. “That’s the amazing thing,” says Shaun. “He had his course and Headless Chickens and he was going back to Oxford to do On A Friday as well.”
He’d always known that he wasn’t a great artist technically. “He wasn’t good at drawing,” says Shaun. “He wasn’t an academic, traditional artist. He was interested in outsider art. Art done by insane people, or people who are not conventionally trained. And all that comes through in the artwork he does with Stanley Donwood. It’s ‘badly drawn’, scratchy stuff but it’s wonderful. He was just interested in his own style. He was one of the few people who started to use computers in his art.”
“They told me I couldn’t draw at art college,” Thom said to Q. “At least I’m honest about it. My whole argument at art college was, ‘What’s the fucking point in painting or drawing this thing in this way when I can go and buy a camera for two quid and do it like that? Why should I bother drawing it?’ I could never quite work out how I blagged my way into art college anyway.”
Although he’d always had a strong sense of self, and of where he was going, at Exeter Thom’s ideas about the world crystallised. He became disillusioned with the art scene, seeing it as an elitist, phoney playground for pseuds and their rich backers.
“I did a few things on computer,” he said. “But I spent most of the time bragging about my future as a pop star.”
This is no exaggeration.
“With Thom it was literally, ‘What are you going to do when you leave?’ ‘I’m going to be a rock star’,” says Martin. “That’s an actual quote. I remember people asking him that and it was almost a standing joke, ‘Oh, I wonder what Thom’s going to be then.’”
Laura remembers that too, above everything else about Thom Yorke. “He was absolutely convinced, without any doubt whatsoever, that he was going to be a rock star,” she says. “There was no question about it. He was studying art and a lot of people who were studying art would have been looking to that as a career of some sort. But I remember us all talking one night about what we wanted to do after university and Martin, I think, was into politics and various people had other ambitions and Thom just said, ‘I’m going to be a rock star’, and I thought, ‘Yeah, right!’ Looking back now he was completely focused on it and there was no suggestion that he was going to do anything else.”
To people outside the band, this claim was starting to look more and more plausible. Eileen says that Thom always had something different about him. “It sounds like the sort of thing you say in hindsight,” she says, “but one thing I really remember is that when we saw Thom onstage, we all thought he was destined to be a rock star. He just looked completely in his element. He was onstage with a few people who were talented. Him and Shack were joint lead singers and Shack went on to have lots of success as well, but there was something about Thom’s presence onstage where he just came alive. He looked like he was in the right place. We used to say, almost laughing, how ‘at home’ he was onstage. We used to say, ‘He’s going to be a rock star’. He just looked like a rock star. But we had no idea that he’d be in this amazing band and go on to the level of success he’s had.”
“I think it’s one of the most impressive things about his achievement,” says Shaun McCrindle, “that he knew he’d be doing what he did. He knew he was destined for it all the time he was there. In the house you couldn’t get away from the music. When we used to go out to parties it was like, ‘Oh, no, he’s getting his guitar out again!’ It sounds funny now. He wasn’t playing Radiohead classics but he was obviously honing his craft.”
“When I heard of the success of Radiohead, I was thrilled for him but I was also surprised,” says Laura. “I’d not dismissed him but I’d not taken him seriously. A few of us were doing things like that and there was a lot of talk and I was surprised it had gone so well. I always laugh at myself because I didn’t take him seriously, when he obviously took himself very seriously. I always think, Who’s laughing now? with me scoffing and going, ‘Thom’s saying he’s going to be a big rock star! Give us a break!’ The egg’s on me. But I’m absolutely thrilled because he deserved it. There were so many others talking about stuff but he actually did it and it’s fantastic.”
Ironically, at the time, Thom was probably even more acclaimed for his sideline. He had a job as a DJ at Exeter University’s main bar, the Lemon Grove. He would play a night of mostly guitar-based music called ‘Shindig’ on Friday evenings, while, on another night Felix Buxton, who would go on to be half of hugely successful duo Basement Jaxx, would play dance music. Thanks to the burgeoning rave and clubbing scene, DJs were now given considerable respect. The days of the middle-aged 1980s DJ with the flashing set of traff
ic lights and one bag of records were over. He would be bought drinks all night until, by the time the club was closing, he was so drunk he could barely put the records on the turntable. But, despite this, it was a career that would be surprisingly successful.
“When we were first at Exeter, the Lemon Grove wasn’t a place you particularly wanted to go to,” says Eileen Doran. “But when Thom DJ-ed it was really popular.” When he started, there were only about 250 people and he just played the relatively limited selection of tunes he had in his own collection. This was only about twenty albums and a few singles. Then, as it became more popular and he played every week, he realised that people were very quickly going to get bored. He borrowed £250 from the bank and went record shopping. It was probably one of his shrewdest investments. A few months later there were about 1,000 people at the Lemon Grove and he was making a significant amount of money for a student.
Yet his set wasn’t the selection of Joy Division or elitist art-rock bands that you might expect. Eileen remembers him regularly playing ‘Push It’ by Salt-N-Pepa. He had a knack for knowing what people wanted to hear and an innate populism which would mean that, years later, even when he was going as far ‘out-there’ as possible, there would always be a part of his music that was unashamedly pop, even when he didn’t necessarily want it to be.
“He used to make a fortune,” Colin Greenwood once said. “And he’d blow it all on crap records!” At the same time Headless Chickens was starting to fall apart. Right from the beginning they’d known that it wasn’t going to be a long-term thing. There were too many obstacles in their way. “Thom always had On A Friday as his ‘real band’,” says Martin. “I remember there were times when we wanted to practise at the weekend and we couldn’t because he’d gone back to Oxford to see Ed and the other guys.”
At this time it also became clear that, although they never fell out, it wasn’t realistic for Shack and Thom to be in the same band. They were both natural front men in very different ways.
“Shack was a music scholar at school,” says Martin. “He was very technical. He could conduct an orchestra. Although he’s since gone on to do many years of crazy grunge and quite niche stuff, the performing side of it and the whole rock star thing was nothing like as important for him as it was for Thom.”
“We had two front men,” says John. “That was one of the problems with the band, really. They kept talking over each other all the time. Which wasn’t great in performance! They’re both quite charismatic front men, which was one of the reasons the band wasn’t going to go anywhere. They both needed their own band in a sense.”
Headless Chickens wasn’t the main thing in any of their lives, either. Shack was starting to become more interested in electronic music and, for Thom, On A Friday was always his main concern. “At university you get loads of bands but Headless Chickens was actually a really popular university band,” says Eileen. “They had something that made you think they could have gone somewhere with it but Thom kept saying, ‘No, I’ve got this band back in Oxford and I’m really serious about them.’”
“We didn’t take it all that seriously,” says Martin. “We took it seriously in that if we were going to play a gig we’d rehearse but we never had any pretensions towards serious recording. Good bands have to be about something. It’s like any great art. You have to have an idea at the heart of it. And we didn’t. We just did it because it was fun and we enjoyed it. And people came along and it was self-perpetuating. If we’d done three gigs and nobody had come or they’d gone badly, we’d have given up on it. It wasn’t like we had a burning thing to express our teenage angst. It was just we were at university, in a band, and it was great fun. If anything, it was cool that Thom was doing this other thing as well.”
Despite this, when Shack eventually got bored with their relatively generic indie and moved on to a new electronic band, Flickernoise, Thom and John joined him. When Flickernoise started, rock music was deeply unfashionable. Bands like the Stone Roses were the cool thing in the press and, in the UK indie scene, there was an undignified scramble for guitar bands to bring in turntables, electronic beats or other dance elements. The next big thing in rock music, grunge, was still very much an underground concern and it was only just starting to filter through to the UK with Nirvana releasing their debut album Bleach. It was still the time of raves and ecstasy and although none of Flickernoise were exactly ravers, they were heavily influenced by the scene.
“They had a track called ‘MDMA’” remembers Shaun, “which tells you a lot about the time, the early 1990s. It was a really beautiful song. There was one song (‘Apocalypse’) where Thom did a guitar solo, which I was very impressed by. I thought, ‘Oh, he can do that as well!’ It was his singing that struck me but he was always a good guitarist as well.”
“It was an amazing guitar solo that he did,” agrees John Matthias. “Really quite astonishing.” But Thom never felt entirely comfortable in Flickernoise and he only stayed with them for a handful of gigs. He described it later as a “computer-with-dreadlocks” band. However much he might have appreciated elements of electronic music, he was still an indie kid at heart and, having already written many of the songs that would later appear on Pablo Honey, he knew where his destiny lay and it wasn’t with Shack.
“Shack didn’t want to play guitars anymore,” John says. “For a time we all worked together and then Thom went back to Oxford and … that was a fait accompli, really.” Despite his keenness to get back to On A Friday, Thom’s eyes had been widened by his experiences at Exeter. Although his new influences wouldn’t come out in his own music for almost ten years, with 2000’s Kid A, he’d already begun experimenting with new sounds.
“That was really the most influential period for all of us,” he said to Rolling Stone’s Mark Binelli later. “The Happy Mondays. The Stone Roses. At the end, Nirvana. It was just an interesting period of transition: lots of electronic stuff, lots of indie bands, and it was permissible for it to be all mixed up.”
He also took part in a performance called the Contemporary Music Festival, set up by John Matthias, which was an art ‘happening’ far removed from the grunge bands he was increasingly listening to. John and Shack wrote a piece of music called ‘Flickernoise’, which was based on a mathematical formula that was found in many sounds in nature. It was semi-random and Thom’s role was to sing behind a curtain, almost wailing his vocal over the top.
“It was interesting,” Shaun remembers. “John, Shack and Thom worked together to create this semi-random music. It was determined by chance. Thom did an imitation of an Islamic singer calling people to prayer. He was doing it quite convincingly, standing behind a curtain.”
In his third year at Exeter, Thom also became increasingly politicised. It was towards the end of Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister and the country was changing. In 1990 she introduced the Community Charge, better known as the Poll Tax. Thom was one of approximately 200,000 people who congregated in Trafalgar Square in London for what turned into the biggest riot the city had seen in the 20th Century. What he saw shocked him. The police couldn’t disperse the crowd and they were terrified that they would attempt to force their way past the newly installed gates in front of Margaret Thatcher’s residence on Downing Street. They ended up charging the crowd on horseback and driving police vans right through the centre. Five thousand people were injured. It was unlike anything he’d ever seen before and the images stayed with him. Years later he’d use the footage in the video for his single ‘Harrowdown Hill’, using it as a symbol for on-going government oppression. Thom was also involved in the protests against student loans, which were brought in by the then Conservative Government in 1990. Thom’s time at Exeter had an enormous impact on him in numerous different ways. He’d been introduced to new art movements, he became increasingly politicised and he wrote dozens of songs on the acoustic guitar. Jonny wasn’t the only person who thought that many of them would stand up even now.
“He’s prob
ably got about twenty other songs that he wrote that will be on the next album,” says John Matthias. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all. He’s got hundreds and hundreds of songs stored up and most of them are absolute classics. One of my favourites was ‘Stop Whispering’. He used to play that a lot but I think they ended up ruining that song in the end. Or it wasn’t as good a song as I thought it was when I was eighteen!”
He also, incidentally, passed both Art and English with reasonable ease. His early press releases with Radiohead seemed to imply that he’d failed art, perhaps to suggest he was that classic rock archetype, the “art school drop-out “. In fact he got a 2:1. For his degree show, he cleverly scanned a picture of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling into his computer and changed all the colours.
But the most important thing that happened at Exeter was his meeting with Rachel Owen. He would still be going out with her 20 years later and they would have two children. Almost every reference to her he’s made in interviews has been to the fact that she has encouraged him on the frequent occasions when he’s suffered a crisis of confidence. Intriguingly he met her at around, or not long after, the time he wrote ‘Creep’ – the second most important thing that happened during his time at Exeter. He’d written the song after a long obsession with a girl from Oxford. She used to hang around with the beautiful people who frequented the town’s fashionable Clarendon Street quarter of Oxford.
“When I wrote it,” he said to John Harris of NME later, “I was in the middle of a really, really serious obsession that got completely out of hand. It lasted about eight months. And it was unsuccessful, which made it even worse. She knows who she is.”
He felt simultaneously attracted and repulsed by her, by her life and by her friends. “I feel tremendous guilt for any sexual feelings I have,” he said to Rolling Stone, “so I end up spending my entire life feeling sorry for fancying somebody. Even in school I thought girls were so wonderful that I was scared to death of them. I masturbate a lot. That’s how I deal with it!”