Thom Yorke

by Trevor Baker

  Nor were they fazed by Chris’s invitation to come and record at Courtyard after the gig at the Jericho Tavern. What they came up with was still only a demo but it further boosted their confidence. They re-recorded many of the songs from the Easter 1990 demo – without the brass this time – and gave many of the tracks new titles. Later that year, they went back to the studio again to record a more professional demo that would be known as the Manic Hedgehog tape after the shop in which it was sold. It was to be the first recording that was unmistakably Radiohead. ‘I Can’t’ was the closest they got to a ‘Shoegazing’ sound, with jangly guitars and Thom’s voice sounding unusually breathy. Another song, ‘Nothing Touches Me’, was even more impressive. It was based on the story of an artist who’d been imprisoned for abusing children and who spent all his time locked away in a cell, painting. More specifically, Thom said, “it’s about isolating yourself so much that one day you realise you haven’t got any friends anymore and no one talks to you.”

  That was the song that convinced Chris Hufford and Bryce Edge to offer to manage them. Apart from anything else, it showed off the whole band’s talents, particularly an alternately lithe and then heavy bass line from Colin. Although they’d never managed anybody before, Thom was impressed by their enthusiasm and ideas.

  At the time, Colin worked in a branch of Our Price and one of the sales reps who used to come in regularly was Keith Wozencroft. One day Colin learned that Keith had got a job in A&R at EMI and he handed over a copy of the ‘Stop Whispering’ tape saying, half-joking, “You ought to sign my band!”

  At that point, Keith was actively looking for bands to sign and so he listened to the tape. Like everybody he was impressed by ‘Stop Whispering’ and he arranged to come and see them play at an open-air show in a park near Oxford. They were playing in a tent with just a couple of their girlfriends watching but, just as it had for Chris and Bryce, the extra power they had live made a huge impression. The buzz about the band was growing rapidly. One night Keith was the only A&R man at a Jericho Tavern gig; two weeks later they played again and there were 25 of them. It was no less than Thom expected. This was what he’d been waiting for.

  “I remember being at the Jericho Tavern when there were loads and loads of A&R people there. It just seemed like, ‘Hey, this is what happens!’” says Nigel Powell. They may have taken their increasing success in their stride but as they improved as a band, Thom’s expectations also rose. He found it hugely frustrating if he couldn’t get the sound exactly right or if he or another member of the band screwed up a song. At one gig, they were supported by a band called Money For Jam and their bassist Hannah Griffith said to Record Collector magazine, “Thom was like a little kid, having tantrums all over the stage.” He knew that they were close to breaking through and yet they still weren’t the finished article.

  When the Manic Hedgehog tape was released in November 1991, the band had their first interview with the highly prescient local fanzine Curfew. The editor, Ronan, was slightly surprised to discover the dark subject matter of ‘Nothing Touches Me’ because, at the time, most of their music was relatively upbeat or at least up-tempo and highly energetic. The article contained a quote from Thom that summed up their attitude so far.

  “People sometimes say we take things too seriously,” he said, “but it’s the only way you’ll get anywhere. We’re not going to sit around and wait and just be happy if something turns up. We are ambitious. You have to be.”

  That was why, just over five months after Thom graduated from Exeter, they decided to sign with Keith Wozencroft and EMI. It was a more controversial decision than you might think. On A Friday were, in their sound at least, an indie band. In the early 1990s, for an ‘indie’ band to sign to a major label certainly wasn’t unheard of but it was a definite statement of intent. To the guardians of indie purity at magazines like NME and Melody Maker, it was a major turn-off. It meant that they unashamedly wanted to be huge. This was distinctly uncool. It would cause them problems in the press later and, although they respected many of the people they worked with at EMI, would also cause many disagreements but, for now, it meant they had the chance to take the next step – a huge leap.

  Their first meeting with their new collaborators wasn’t entirely a success though. Label boss Rupert Perry stuck his head round the door and, according to an interview Colin gave to NME, said “‘You’ll never see me again until you sell 500,000 units and then we’ll shake hands and take a photo. By the way, I really like that song ‘Phillipa Chicken.’”

  Typically, they would never play ‘Phillipa Chicken’ again.

  It didn’t take long for EMI to suggest they make some changes. There was one thing in particular they weren’t happy with: the band’s name. In an early NME review, the name On A Friday drew some scorn because the otherwise impressed reviewer, John Harris, thought that it was a laddish reference to going out boozing on a Friday night. He said they, “hinted at extremes that belie the just-got-paid/let’s get pissed overtones of their moniker.” If he’d known that it was actually a reference to the only day they could rehearse at public school, then that would have been much worse. The label was right. On A Friday was a terrible name.

  “I remember them changing their name to On A Friday,” says Mark Cope, “and everybody said to them, ‘But everyone’s just going to think you’re playing on a Friday. If the gig’s on a Monday, that’s no good. It’s like calling yourself ‘Free Beer!’ But when they called themselves Radiohead, everyone thought, That’s a rubbish name too! It’s alright but it doesn’t really mean anything. But then all band names are rubbish until they get really big.”

  In 1991, it seemed like every new band had one word names: Ride, Lush, Blur, Curve. On A Friday were very different to all of those bands. They wanted something that would sum up their sound without being too specific. They’d already tried out dreadful names like Shindig and Gravitate before finally choosing ‘Radiohead’, the name of a relatively obscure song from the band’s favourite Talking Heads album True Stories. “We always felt this massive affinity with them,” said Ed O’Brien, “because they were white folks grooving in a ‘college geeky’ way and still making records as good as Al Green.”

  A&R people regularly get a bad press, taking all the blame for bad advice and getting none of the credit for good advice; however, the band realised that this time EMI knew what they were talking about. “Radiohead was cool and it’s still cool,” said Thom, “because it just sums up all these things about receiving stuff. All these people in America have teeth you can pick up radio on. They have this metal on their teeth and some of them can pick up radio with it.”

  At this point Thom also took the opportunity to have singing lessons. He’d been a great, instinctive singer since he was very young but the teacher, although extremely impressed by the quality of his voice, was appalled by some of his habits. At that point Thom still smoked. He had no idea how to look after his voice and his teacher would end up shouting at him every time he turned up for a class stinking of tobacco. He explained to Thom that if he wasn’t careful, he wouldn’t be able to sing at all in a few years.

  Jonny, too, had a decision to make. While the rest of the band had acquired the safety net of university degrees, he was still studying music at Oxford Brookes when the band started to go places. As they began playing more and more gigs and spending more time writing and rehearsing, it was becoming increasingly difficult for him to study as well. Particularly now they had a major record deal. Since he’d moved on to guitar, his role had expanded and he was Thom’s key songwriting partner. He brought something to the band that wasn’t quite like any other guitarist. He had none of the traditional qualities or drawbacks of a virtuoso. He never saw himself solely as a guitarist and he didn’t fetishise his instrument in any way. Later on in his career, a journalist from a guitar magazine was shocked to discover that he didn’t even know what make his guitar was. To him it was just a means to an end. The EMI deal meant that Jonny, who’d
always had tremendous faith in Thom’s songs, was able to quit college to join the band full-time.

  6

  RADIOHEAD

  The first thing Chris and Bryce did for Radiohead was send them back into Courtyard Studios to record some more songs. It wasn’t an entirely successful experience. The problem was that Chris and Bryce had never recorded anything quite like Radiohead before. For his part, Thom had never had anyone tell him how his songs should sound before. He wasn’t sure he liked it. With great honesty, Chris described the situation later as, “a huge conflict of interests. I think Thom was unsure of my involvement … (and) I can be quite overbearing and opinionated in the studio.”

  Nevertheless, the resulting Drill EP had its moments. Opening track ‘Prove Yourself’ sounds very much of its time, now. It could have been the work of any number of indie bands, with its mixture of British and American influences, but it had a strong chorus and a haunting central refrain. The problem with the other tracks ‘You’ and ‘Stupid Car’, in particular, was that the three guitars, which made them such an exciting proposition live, just sounded cluttered and messy.

  They knew that they could do better. The songs on the Drill EP were never supposed to appear in that form. Originally they were just going to be demos to get a record deal. The experience of launching their rough sketches into the world via a major label wasn’t what they’d expected at all. The transition from being a little independent band to having the advantages and disadvantages of big money backing took some getting used to. Before pressing the Drill EP, Thom got in touch with his old friends from Exeter Art College asking for ideas for the sleeve design. A few years later Dan Rickwood would get the job full-time but at that point Radiohead weren’t sure what or who they wanted.

  “He asked a few of us if we wanted to do a cover for the Drill EP,” says Shaun McCrindle. “He wrote letters to all of us to see what ideas we came up with.” But either EMI dissuaded them or else the ideas didn’t quite work. In the end, they used a professional design company. It cost them many thousands of pounds and they still weren’t happy with the results. Then, bizarrely, the first three thousand copies of the record were lost, just as most of the copies of the Hometown Atrocities EP had been. The release ended up having to be delayed by two weeks. Even worse, a promo was sent out bearing the brand new name ‘Radiohead’ but the actual music was by another EMI artist: Joe Cocker. It wasn’t an encouraging start to their career on the major label.

  When it finally came out, the Drill EP was met with relatively little interest. Steve Lamacq, then at NME, was the most positive: “Does this mark the end of the shoe-gazing era?” he asked after announcing that it had been stuck to his stereo for two weeks. Yet it received almost no radio play and peaked at number 101 in the charts. Still, although it seemed like an anticlimax after the excitement of being signed, nobody was expecting Radiohead to break through straight away. At that point, in the early 1990s, bands were given a little more time than they would be in later years. Nevertheless, EMI weren’t particularly pleased. They didn’t think that the production on the record was right for a major label band.

  By now grunge was exploding, EMI wanted Radiohead to be a British version of Nirvana and Thom and the rest of the band seemed only too happy to concur (at least on the surface). “‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ had the kind of feel we’re after,” Thom said to John Harris later, during their first national press interview. “When it came on the radio, you had no choice but to listen to it. You couldn’t just drive along and ignore it, it came out at you. I hope we’ll come out of people’s speakers in the same way.”

  Thom was still a fan of bands like The Pixies and Throwing Muses and he wanted Radiohead to have a similarly collegiate take on rock music. If British indie bands in the 1980s and early 1990s were stereotypically lightweight and fey, and American rock bands stereotypically lumpen and one-dimensional, then bands like The Pixies had found a third way. The problem with On A Friday, prior to this, was that they were never quite sure what kind of band they wanted to be. John Harris told Q magazine that, when he was first taken to see them by their new PR team, Hall Or Nothing, they seemed somewhat erratic. “They looked awful,” he remembered. “Thom was wearing a brown crew neck jumper, had cropped hair and looked very small with none of the presence he has now. Musically they were all over the place. They’d start with something Rickenbackery that sounded like All Mod Cons-era Jam and then they’d flip it with something that sounded like The Pixies. All the raw material was there but they hadn’t found their feet stylistically.” But his actual review at the time was much more positive. “Promising seems something of an understatement,” he said.

  Their biggest selling point live was the way they interweaved the three guitars of Jonny, Ed and Thom. Thom later described his musical contribution to the band as “inaudible guitar” – when they were mixing the sound there was rarely much space left for him. But the three very different styles gave them a unique sound at a time when, in many ways, they were still pretty derivative. This was what they wanted to capture on record but nobody was quite sure how to do it.

  By sheer chance, at this point two American producers, Paul Q Kolderie and Sean Slade were in the country. They were from Boston and had produced records for The Pixies as well as Throwing Muses, Dinosaur Jr and Buffalo Tom.

  “We flew over to England,” Paul Kolderie told me for this book, “and a record we’d done for the band Clockhammer was on (EMI director of A&R) Nick Gatfield’s desk and we said, ‘We did that!’ And he said, ‘You did all of it?’ In England at the time, it was very common for people to take credit for doing something when they didn’t do all of it. You’d mix it and say, ‘I did that record’. He said, ‘Did you get the guitar sounds?’ We said, ‘Yeah’ and he said, ‘Well, we have this band and we’re trying to sort out the guitar sounds and I like the guitar sounds on this record. Maybe you could try to work with them?’ We said, ‘Sure, that sounds good.’ So he played us a couple of songs. I think they were demos that Chris had done. I think that song ‘I Can’t’ was on there.

  My first impression was that the kid [Thom] had a great voice, sort of an angelic, choirboy voice. That was something that struck me. You’re always looking for a singer. There are enough bass players in the world, you know! You’re looking for a lead singer. I had no idea what they’d be like or sound like or anything like that but we said, ‘Sounds great, we’re looking for a job, if you think we can do something for them, great.’ So they brought us back over.”

  “If you’d asked me the least likely place we’d have got a job, I’d have said EMI,” says his co-producer Sean Slade. “Showing up at the fabled office building there, I said, ‘OK, these guys are the total rock establishment of England.’ I don’t know what they’re going to think. We’d made a bunch of American indie records and I didn’t know if that counted for anything.”

  But Sean, too, was hugely struck by one thing. “Nick played us two songs,” he says, “and I remember being immediately impressed by Thom’s voice. I was just sitting there going, ‘My God, this guy can sing. This isn’t gonna be that hard!’”

  The first time Radiohead met Paul and Sean, neither side knew what to make of the other. Thom was impressed that they’d produced Miracle Legion, as well as The Pixies, Buffalo Tom and the others. But the Americans were very different characters to Radiohead. They came from similarly privileged backgrounds – both Harvard educated – but they were confident and outgoing where the band were reserved and reticent. To begin with, the Americans found it hard to get a sense of what Radiohead were all about. The five of them were much less experienced than most of the US bands they’d been recording.

  “Initially it was pretty tough,” says Sean. “They were very, very young. They hadn’t gigged that much. They had a kind of basement band kind of thing. They were all friends. They grew up together and they dug each other. I got that vibe immediately. I thought, ‘This group has a chance’, because these guys really like each
other and they want to play. But they hadn’t played in front of that many people. They were just starting out. Just getting a feel. Also, the fact of our ‘American-ness’ struck them as being a little strange. They gave us the chance to do it because we had done these indie records, which had made an impact in England. But at the same time, there was something about our general demeanour that was very American. Sometimes I’d catch the guys and they’d be on the phone to the managers and they’d say (posh English voice) ‘Oh, the Americans …’ I think there was something about our whole trip, we had a certain swagger and I think they kind of liked it but they might not have … I don’t know! There was a little bit of a gulf there culturally. But I think they appreciated the fact that we did want to go in there and make a rock record – three guitars – that was how Nick Gatfield laid it out to us.”

  “The first time we met them, I don’t remember thinking anything really good or bad,” says Paul. “They looked like a bunch of friends from school, which is what they were. They were sort of a motley crew. You’ve got Ed who’s tall and handsome, Thom who was kind of cool looking and short, the Greenwood brothers had a very English look with shaggy hair on their faces; they were all over the map. But they were obviously friends. They got along well at the time. And they were definitely keen to get on with it. They were itching to get moving and make a record: ‘Let’s do this!’”

  But after the relative failure of the Drill EP, EMI weren’t taking any chances. Rather than hiring Paul and Sean to make a whole album they gave them two songs to work on. “When they first hired us, they asked us to produce ‘Inside My Head’ and another one,” says Paul. “They weren’t great songs. I was very disappointed. They’d already played us a few. We had a tape of some of the better songs and all of a sudden it seemed that we’d been assigned to do the worst songs as a kind of safety measure maybe, to see what we could get from them. It turned out later that Wozencroft really liked one of them but that was my subjective feeling – that they weren’t very good songs.”