Thom Yorke

by Trevor Baker

  “We weren’t having fights but there was a lot of [tight-lipped], ‘Well, we don’t really like this mix,’” says Paul. “When you make a record I don’t like to say, ‘We’ll fix it in the mix’ but there are always a lot of things where you put it off and say, ‘I know you don’t like that but we’ll fix it later’, but eventually it comes down to the point where all those things have to be done. If somebody then realises that, ‘Woah, I still don’t like it!’ sometimes there’s a limited budget for changing it. If Def Leppard and [producer] Mutt Lange want to go back and re-do a song, nobody’s going to go crazy but at that point, for us, the budget was pretty much done.”

  The only thing they did go and record again was ‘Creep’. It was pointed out to them that there was absolutely no chance that it would be a hit because of its lyric. In 1993, the lead lyric’s profanity would never get played on the radio, not even with a bleep.

  Sonic Youth had changed their lyrics in similar circumstances, so why not Radiohead? It was a bit of a ‘sell-out’ they admitted, but Thom duly went back into the studio to record a radio version where he’d sing a vitriolic, “very” instead of “fucking”. Ironically the version with “very” sounds even more antagonistic towards the subject – now he was clearly just being sarcastic. The only advantage of the re-write was that it gave him a chance to go back and improve the first verse of the song, too. At the time it had a different lyric to the one that would ultimately appear.

  “It was a filler lyric,” says Sean. “You know how The Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’ originally had those lyrics about scrambled eggs [before Paul McCartney came up with the finished version]? It was like that.”

  “We actually had an argument,” says Paul. “I said, ‘Now’s your chance to make it better,’ and Thom said, ‘No, it’s done, it’s written, we can’t go back to that.’ But I kind of leaned on him, as much as I ever leaned on Thom. I said, ‘I think the song could be huge but I don’t think the leg of lamb is going to make it.’”

  Thom wasn’t impressed. He thought he’d finished the song. He’d had enough of it. He didn’t want to go back and do it again. “He kind of got this funny look,” says Paul, “and he went away and came back with that first verse, which is much better. That’s the most producerly (sic) thing that I can remember doing.”

  “I understood why Sean and Paul said, ‘Maybe we should try some different lines there’, to make it less obscure,” says Nigel. “But I think I asked Thom about it and he said it was a reference to domesticity, just thinking about being married to somebody and being in the kitchen – nice stuff!”

  By the time of the mixing process, the fun part of recording was most definitely over. The band listened with increasing gloom to what they’d done and tried desperately to change things but it was too late. At one point, Thom decided he didn’t like the sound of the record. It was too much like other indie albums at the time. In a panic he instructed the producers to change course.

  “It was when we were mixing ‘Blow Out’,” remembers Sean. “Thom came in that morning when we were starting to mix it and said [abruptly] ‘No reverb!’ And we said [glumly], ‘Oh, alright’. And since reverb is the body and soul of recorded music, it was kind of tough. So we did this mix that was dry as a bone and then the record company guys show up and we play it for them and they’re sitting there scowling and I’m going, ‘I don’t like it either, man.’ So I had to talk to Keith [Wozencroft] and say, ‘This isn’t adding up’. We did the mix at this terrible, terrible studio,” he continues. “The console was terrible, the vibe was terrible, the record company showed up en-masse to criticise. The whole thing was fucked. I remember turning to Keith and saying, ‘Listen, man, I know nobody’s happy with this shit. Just let me and Paul go back to [their home studio] Fort Apache and we’ll mix the stuff and you take it from there. And that’s what Pablo Honey’ became.”

  “It was a hard record to finish,” says Paul. “We were mixing and we had people coming up behind us and going, ‘Could we just change this? And what about my part?’ At that point ‘Creep’ was already mixed but we went back to Fort Apache without the band there and they were basically forced to accept it and they weren’t very happy about it. At that point the label had spent a good amount of money and they needed a product. The band didn’t want Pablo Honey to come out the way it came out, as far as I know. We never really discussed it because at that point relationships were a little strained, after that long working on the record. They didn’t want it to come out like that because they knew it wasn’t great but the record company – as record companies do – kind of stepped in and said, ‘Guys, we’ve got to get you out there, we’ve got a single, let’s get you out there and get moving on it.’ I think ultimately they were right. You only get one chance to make a first record and if they didn’t have ‘Creep’ it would have sunk like a stone but they did have it. The label knew that they had something going and it was the touring and the playing that made them mature as a band.”

  The somewhat rushed nature of the Pablo Honey sessions comes across in the album title. It sounds very much like the first thing that came into their heads. It didn’t mean much or have anything to do with the record’s content. It was inspired by 1990s phone pranksters The Jerky Boys. One of their calls featured them impersonating an elderly Hispanic mother calling somebody she apparently thought was her son. “Pablo, honey, come home”, she begged. Radiohead had been given a tape by fellow Oxford band Chapterhouse and they’d got hooked.

  “Some of it’s really sick,” Thom said to Select magazine. “Some of it I can’t cope with. But the notion of phoning people up cold is so 1990s. It’s just the ultimate sacrilege. Turn up in someone’s life and they can’t do anything about it.”

  It’s funny, considering how imaginative and inventive Radiohead are, that they’ve always been so bad at titles. The long struggle to come up with a decent band name tells you that. You get the feeling that if they’d been listening to something else on the bus when EMI demanded they come up with a name for their debut album, then it could have been very different. But by then, perhaps, they’d had enough. It had only taken three weeks to record (nothing compared with the time they’d put in on later albums), but they were a little disillusioned. Only the thought that they’d soon be able to record a vastly better follow-up album kept them going.

  They appreciated Pablo Honey for what it was, a crash course in how to be a rock band provided, in part, by Paul Kolderie and Sean Slade. In an interview with Mojo’s Nick Kent years later, Thom was asked. “Would you have preferred a different producer?” “Oh no,” he replied. “That was great. They were rock ’n’ roll. They were brilliant.”

  Their long-term producer Nigel Godrich has also defended Paul and Sean from the accusation that they somehow let Radiohead down. The problem was that Radiohead simply had no experience of making a record at that point and there was no time to learn. “They’d been signed very quickly and put in a studio very quickly,” he told journalist Nick Paton Walsh. “The situation required somebody to take the situation in hand or the record wouldn’t have been made. As a result, they felt, quite justifiably, that they hadn’t had as much of an input as they’d have liked. They hadn’t made a record they felt was completely theirs – even the artwork was done by somebody else.”

  But Paul and Sean had the same frustrating yet encouraging feeling that Radiohead were capable of much more. “When the guys put me in their van and took me to the airport, I remember thinking, ‘These guys really have what it takes and if they could just go out there and play on a regular basis, then they will become a mighty band,’ says Sean. “I definitely had a very strong intuitive feeling that they were capable of it. Then all I can say is that ‘Creep’ was so Goddamned powerful and hit the zeitgeist at the exact right time that it enabled them to go out and play and become the mighty band that created The Bends.”

  It’s no coincidence that it came out the same year as ‘Loser’ by Beck,” says Paul. “There was a
lot of that kind of thing around. The thing about the first record was just that they needed to get off the ground. They needed to get up in the air. It got them a tour and that took them around the world and made them play together a lot and really gel as a band.”

  Both producers accept that Pablo Honey was nothing compared with what Radiohead would come up with next. But they make the fair point that it was the process of recording the debut that helped push them on to the next level. Still, it must have been a little frustrating when, right at the end of the sessions, when it was too late to record anything else, Thom played them two other demos that he had. They were ‘The Bends’ and ‘High And Dry’.

  One thing Pablo Honey and its subsequent tour taught Thom was how not to do things. It taught him not to listen to the record label. Not to try and copy what was going on elsewhere. Not to listen to what the press said or what other bands said. It was like one of those disposable rockets that they used to use to blast the Space Shuttle into orbit. It served its purpose. It got them off the ground, but once they’d finished recording and touring it, they didn’t want to think about it again. “When I hear the singing, I just don’t recognise myself at all,” Thom said to Nick Kent. They certainly didn’t realise that they would have to spend the next two years playing the same songs over and over, before they could go back into the studio and try again.

  8

  CREEP

  ‘Creep’ was the first single to be released from Pablo Honey and, after the Drill EP’s poor performance, expectations weren’t all that high. Even so, when it only sold 6,000 copies initially and peaked at 78 in the UK charts, the band, their management and the label were all disappointed. The problem was that it received very little radio play. BBC Radio 1, in particular, decided that it was just too dark. Other bands in a similar position have been helped out by the music press but, although the single enjoyed mostly positive reviews, the band weren’t given many column inches. They were in the unfortunate position of being seen as too weird and out-there for the mainstream and, as a major label band, too corporate for the alternative.

  Luckily, a series of support slots kept them from thinking too much about commercial success (or lack of it). As they played more and more gigs, they were getting better and better, even if the British music scene hadn’t realised yet. First they went out with Kingmaker, a band best known for their quotable front man Loz’s regular appearances in the press. Then they headed out again with Irish band the Frank And Walters. It was on that tour that they took another major step forward. In retrospect, the combination of the happy-go-lucky Frank And Walters and the ‘dark’ Radiohead seems highly bizarre but at the time nobody found it odd. The Frank And Walters were on a roll with their records selling quite well and earning highly positive, if slightly patronising, coverage in the press.

  “It was a sell-out before it started, so it was a good tour to get,” Frank and Walter drummer Ash told this author, “and there were a few bands in for it. We saw Radiohead at The Venue in New Cross and they were really good. So we said to our managers ‘Let them do it.’ It was the song ‘Creep’. They played it third song in or something and it was like, ‘Fuck!’”

  “It worked really well!” says Nigel Powell, who did the lighting for Radiohead on that tour and many others. “The Frank and Walters were lovely fellas. They were really friendly. This was the time before Radiohead were the most respected band in the world! They were just another band who’d signed to Parlophone and tried to break through.”

  To the Frank And Walters, meeting a band like Radiohead was something of an eye-opener. The Irish band were very young, too, and they’d always seen rock ’n’ roll as, essentially, a mobile party. Meeting somebody like Thom, who was so desperate to continually improve his songwriting and play better shows was, according to Ash, an inspiration.

  “They were definitely different from any other band we’d ever come across,” he says. “We moved to London in about 1990 and most of the bands we met were into the usual rock ’n’ roll stuff of getting drunk and meeting girls, but they were very different. Most other bands were thinking, ‘This is great, we’re on the gravy train, the record company are giving us money to go and tour and have a good time.’ But, with Radiohead, you suspected that they had the recipe for success in their back pocket. Over the whole tour there were only maybe two nights when they’d go and get drunk and let their hair down. They used the soundchecks for what soundchecks are supposed to be used for, practising the songs and getting things right. Other bands would get dragged up there by the tour manager suffering from a severe hang-over, just bashing out some noise for the soundman and hoping he could work with it. They were different characters to most other bands we’d come across, alright.” It was during the Frank And Walters tour that ‘Creep’ came out for the first time. Ash thinks that its relative failure hit them pretty hard.

  “It was a bit odd,” says Ash. “They were with EMI and there were a couple of A&R guys at the shows and they were getting mid-weeks [sales figures] through for the single and all wasn’t rosy. They were under a bit of pressure because, I suppose, if you’re on EMI, there’s some expectation on you because it’s such a huge company. I’ve been there myself when you’re in the van and the call comes through that the single’s peaked at 61, you start thinking to yourself, Oh, right, that’s the career over now then. We’ll just pack our bags and head off.

  We played Oxford, which was their hometown gig, on a Saturday night and I think the ‘Creep’ single had been released on the Monday and they got the midweek on the Thursday, so they knew it wasn’t charting. The tour manager at the time said the people at EMI weren’t very happy with it.”

  It was the worst time for them to hear bad news. The first few dates of the tour hadn’t gone badly but they weren’t blowing anyone away and now they had to play their hometown gig with a cloud hanging over them. They knew that EMI’s patience was in short supply. They also knew that ‘Creep’ was the best song on the album and if that wasn’t going to chart then how well were the follow-up singles going to do?

  “The band could have gone into their shell and felt sorry for themselves,” says Ash, “or they could do an amazing show and I think that was the first time I saw them and thought, ‘Jeez, these guys are something.’ For the previous gigs, they were OK but they didn’t quite let fly. Jonny Greenwood took the band to a different level. Back then Thom wasn’t that charismatic. Jonny seemed to carry the band. That was the first night I saw him going from one of two guitarists to the main attraction. It was the same songs but it was completely unlike the previous sets they did.

  When the tour started they were a bit stand-offish with the audience. It was as if they didn’t know how to interact with an audience. But that night in Oxford and for the rest of the tour, it was weird; it took the single not doing well for the band to step up to the mark. For the next twenty-odd dates of the tour, they were amazing. I remember a gig in Glasgow, which is one of those areas of the UK with a big Irish population [and] so a lot of people who’d known us from Irish radio [came]. They had an audience who didn’t know them and didn’t really care about them. But one or two songs in, you could watch them become instant fans.”

  Radiohead’s live show was very different to the other bands that were popular at the time. There was an intensity and a fervour to the way they played that lifted even their lesser songs. At a time when most other big-selling indie acts were all about a good, beery night out, Radiohead were trying to create something closer to a spiritual experience.

  “I suppose back then, ’91, ’92, it was an era of ‘Let’s all jump up and down together and hold hands and won’t the world be a great place?’” says Ash. “Gigs were all about moshing and jumping around and having fun. Ned’s Atomic Dustbin and Carter and all that sort of stuff. Radiohead were playing music that you couldn’t really mosh to. They weren’t being all, ‘Let’s clap hands for this bit.’ There was no ‘You fat bastard’ song (the opening tune for Carter USM)!
They were very different to the bands that were touring but they were still able to win over an audience. And I’d always assumed that to win over an audience they had to be jumping around and stage-diving and doing all the mad stuff. But for the first time I saw that a band were able to win over an audience who were just watching the performance of the songs.”

  As the tour went on, Radiohead were becoming a much bigger band almost surreptitiously. Although ‘Creep’ hadn’t sold well, Radiohead now had an ardent fan-base who were busily proselytising on their behalf. It was as though everybody who saw them play went home and told three more friends that they had to catch this band.

  “Word spread,” says Ash. “I don’t know how it spread, because it was pre-mobile and pre-internet and stuff, but I think when the tour started off, somewhere like Cheltenham, there were 200 people at the gig and 30 of them were watching Radiohead and 170 were in the bar. Then everything changed after that Oxford gig and the audience wanted to see them. I’m not sure why. Because I think the problem with ‘Creep’ from day one was that it didn’t get the radio play. EMI [struggled to] get it on the radio so it didn’t filter through but it seemed like by the end of the tour they were a really big band. Rather than people popping in for ‘Creep’ and then going back to the bar, people were there for half an hour before they went on. We used to try, where we could, to have a local act and the local act would be on and there’d be 300 people in the hall watching them because they didn’t want to miss Radiohead. We were just worried ‘Would they stay for us?’ I’m not sure how it happened, it must have just been word of mouth, unless people were sending smoke signals or writing to each other. We finished the tour at the Astoria in London and it was a sell-out gig and a great vibe and there were 1,500 people in there and they were all watching Radiohead, the whole gig, from start to finish. There wasn’t the usual support band chatter. People were watching and they were watching vigorously. It was a great tour. It was a great tour for us as well. Sometimes you don’t get the support band right but that time we got it right!”