Thom Yorke

by Trevor Baker

  But Thom remained something of an enigma. He appreciated the friendliness of the Irish band but, at the same time, a tour for him was a kind of mission. It wasn’t about partying and socialising with the support band. It was about the music. Nothing else.

  “The other lads we knew quite well,” says Ash, “but we’d get to a venue and Thom would take himself off with his guitar to some corner and change the strings and be strumming away and getting ready for the soundcheck. And they’d put as much effort and enthusiasm into doing a song at the soundcheck as they would at a gig, which is admirable. Because when you’re touring for a long time, you’re fed up with music and you’re just going through the motions. But you could see they were really honing the whole thing and working on their craft.

  But he wasn’t odd or rude or anything. If you chatted to him, he’d chat back and I’d have full-blown conversations with him but he wouldn’t instigate a chat. He didn’t seem like a, ‘Let’s have a chat over a cup of tea,’ kind of bloke. He seemed quite reserved. I guess he was just shy. It’s hard to think of someone who’s a huge rock star and an icon to millions as shy, but I guess looking back he was just a shy, young guy who was just trying to get on with his life and write songs and play music as well as he could.”

  Ash says they couldn’t help but be influenced by Thom and the rest of the band’s dedication. “By the end of the tour, we were pretty much taking the lead from Radiohead, getting home, getting a good night’s sleep, and then getting up and eating a good breakfast,” he says. “Instead of busting open the tin of Tennent’s Super in your anorak pocket! With Radiohead it was very much back to the hotel early. They used to take their instruments with them and start working on stuff. Jonny was always fiddling with the guitar and anything else. He had that sort of brain. He wanted to know how things worked and how he could get them to work so they’d suit him. I’d imagine he was up in his room taking the trouser press apart and getting it to work more efficiently. Or he’d have his guitar and he’d be writing the intros for the next twenty albums. They were always up early, always got breakfast, always at the venue before time. They were like the model band. At that time, being in the music industry was something you did while you were waiting to grow up, but they were different.”

  But Radiohead learned from the Frank And Walters, too. At a time when things didn’t seem to be going according to plan, with their records not selling and EMI breathing down their necks, the successful gigs gave them a massive confidence boost. Frank And Walters also, perhaps, taught them the importance of relaxing every now and then. Certainly on later tours, they weren’t always back to the hotel room straight after the gig to work on songs. And there was one thing about the Irish band that Radiohead would always appreciate. At a time when it was the norm for support bands to have to buy their way on to a tour, the Frank and Walters refused to take a penny.

  “EMI got on to us saying, ‘How much do you want for the tour?’ says Ash, “and we’d never encountered that before, paying to get on to a tour, we were shocked, we thought there’s nothing worse than a band having to pay to play. So we went, ‘Jesus! Nothing! They’re a great band, we don’t want anything.’ [People were] going ‘Fucking idiots! You could get ten grand or fifteen grand for this!’ We were like, ‘No way.’ It was nice, a couple of years later, I read an interview with them where they name-checked us and said that bands toured with them on merit, nobody ever had to pay to play on their tours. It was nice that a tiny bit of their inspiration for that decision came from us.”

  An indication of the way their audience had grown over the course of the tour came with the release of next single, ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’. It wasn’t bad but it was no ‘Creep’ and yet it was much more successful, giving them their first Top 40 hit. It was a song that, lyrically, summed up Thom’s already ambiguous attitude to the concept of rock stardom. He’s complained in the past that it’s been taken as an entirely sarcastic sentiment when, in fact, he meant it as a celebration of the guitar. But it seems to be both. “I do want to be in a band when I’m in heaven,” he said in an interview, “it’s the best thing you can do with your life.” But he also said that, “rock ’n’ roll just reminds me of people with personal hygiene problems who still like getting blow-jobs off complete strangers.”

  Just like ‘Creep’, ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’ exhibited a simultaneous fascination with the beautiful people and the glamorous life, and a contempt born out of knowledge that he would never feel part of it. There was a small part of him that really did want to be Jim Morrison but, increasingly, it wasn’t a part he had a lot of respect for.

  Not long afterwards, the debut album Pablo Honey was released. It did pretty well too, peaking at 25 in the charts. But they still weren’t shifting units in the way that EMI hoped. It didn’t help that they insisted on releasing a single that wasn’t on the album, ‘Pop Is Dead’. It was their first real dash for independence and it wasn’t a great success. They decided to produce it with their live sound engineer, rather than using, as Thom put it, “expensive producers”. In consequence, it had a powerful, raw guitar sound but it was a little muddled. It sounded like it was something that Thom just needed to get off his chest. The lyrics were all about record labels killing pop by concentrating on their back-catalogues rather than new music. It was something he felt passionate about but the record buying public as whole probably didn’t. It was a flop, causing an outbreak of gloom in the band.

  “Nobody saw ‘Creep’ as a failure when it first came out,” says Nigel. “The Drill EP went in at 101 and ‘Creep’ went in at 88 so it was like, ‘Hey, we’re twenty places higher than we were last time!’ Nobody saw ‘Creep’ as a problem. The thing that deflated them and made the atmosphere get a bit darker was ‘Pop Is Dead’. ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’ went in at 35 or 38 I think but then ‘Pop Is Dead’ didn’t make the Top 40. They did a tour in slightly bigger places and they weren’t full. Everybody had expected ‘Pop Is Dead’ to do better than it did and so they booked them into bigger venues and there weren’t quite so many people there and they all thought, ‘This isn’t quite as much fun!’”

  To some insiders, it looked like there was a real risk that they would get dropped if things didn’t improve but the man who signed them, EMI’s Keith Wozencroft, denies that this was ever on the cards. “Parlophone and EMI generally were always known for sticking with their artists and growing over a long period,” he says. “I don’t believe that we would have dropped a band after one album, especially a band that were very good and had built a solid fan-base.”

  EMI could also have argued that they’d advised against releasing a single that wasn’t on the album. It seemed like they were right but Radiohead’s managers Chris and Bryce always had their eyes on the long-term. Paul Kolderie believes that their contribution to the band’s success has been much underrated.

  “The strategy that the managers were pursuing from the start was to hire an American producer and maybe focus a little bit more on America at the time,” he says. “They went to America first and kind of worked it back that other way. The one thing I would say, and I think it’s really important if you’re going to write about Radiohead, is that the managers have been there from the beginning. When we first met them, Chris and Bryce drove me around and they told me their whole story of how they’d been in bands in the 1980s and they’d gone for the whole ride … they were hip to the game. They weren’t going to let Radiohead get screwed … they were letting me know right away. It was kind of like parents letting me know that if I was going to take [their] little girl out, I’d better behave. I’d better do a good job!

  Everybody says you’ve got to have a great drummer to have a great band, and you do, but you’ve also got to have a great manager. It’s no accident that U2 have a really terrific, smart manager. Even The Beatles. Every band that’s successful has somebody doing that job because if they don’t, they’re not going to make it. They’re not going to have the direction and they’re goin
g to blow it. It’s a marriage. Those guys couldn’t have managed just anyone but Radiohead could not have done it on their own either.”

  But before anything happened in America, and while they were still despondent from the relative failure of ‘Pop Is Dead’, success came from an unexpected source. “Luckily that’s exactly the time when ‘Creep’ got big in Israel,” says Nigel, “so we went out there. And that was when it was still a really dangerous place to go. There was fierce airport security. Lots of people with guns on the streets. It was weird, you’d chat to teenagers at the shows afterwards and say, ‘What have you got coming up?’ and they’d say, ‘Oh, I’m joining the army. I’ve got to do that for six months.’”

  As it was such a small country, individual DJs had a great deal of power in Israel. When their equivalent of John Peel got hold of ‘Creep’ and started playing it all the time, it became a big hit. In Israel, all of a sudden, they were pop stars.

  “I think the fact that very few people played gigs there helped,” says Nigel. “All the gigs were sold out and we got treated really well. You can tell when a band gets successful because even the crew gets treated well. That came immediately after the ‘Pop Is Dead’ tour when everyone was down and [Israel] picked everybody up again. From there, there was a European tour and that went straight into a US tour. That was good for the band because it didn’t give everybody a chance to dwell on ‘Pop Is Dead’ doing a bit shit. It was just a case of, ‘More stuff to do, forget about that, carry on!’”

  Before the first gig in Israel, they were approached by a fan asking if he could play the bass on ‘Creep’. It was their first indication of a different kind of fan than they’d had before. They were taken aback but Colin cautiously let him take over at the soundcheck. He realised what it would have meant for him to be able to play bass on one of New Order’s songs. That night there was an air of hysteria in the crowd before they even went onstage. When Thom leaned into the audience halfway through a song, he had clumps of hair pulled out by over-enthusiastic fans and his favourite bangle broken around his wrist. It was unlike anything they’d experienced in the UK. They had 1,200 people at their biggest gig and they were told that there would have been more but Israel’s equivalent of Glastonbury was happening at the same time. ‘Creep’ eventually went to Number 1 in that territory and Pablo Honey peaked at Number 2. For Thom, it was simply proof that if people got to hear his songs then they would like them.

  And Nigel agrees with Paul Kolderie that Radiohead’s success overseas was more than just a stroke of good fortune. “I think Chris and Bryce were very good for them,” he says. “They saw exactly what was happening and they thought, ‘Right, we’ve got to really push in another territory now, because we’ve done everything we can in the UK. We’ve got to go elsewhere and try and make it happen there to convince Parlophone that it’s worth doing another album. So after that they concentrated a lot of their time on America. It was only after ‘Creep’ was a hit there that they re-released it in England.”

  ‘Creep’ arrived in America when a DJ on San Francisco’s Live 105 radio station got hold of a copy on import and started playing it. The phones then lit up with more requests for the song and the station put it on heavy rotation. Within a few days, it had been picked up by other stations on the West Coast and on the highly influential KROQ station it was the second most requested song. This meant that their American record company, Capitol, got behind them in a far bigger way than EMI had in the UK but it also meant they expected far more. As far as they were concerned, there was no time to lose. Radiohead had to go out to the States straight away. From a gig in Paris they were driven to the ferry at Calais, then straight to Heathrow in London where they took a plane to New York. When they got there, they were astonished to be picked up in a white stretch limo with a bar in the back. At the Capitol Building itself, the staff were all wearing Radiohead T-shirts. From New York they then had to take a coach to Boston. When a completely shattered Thom arrived in his hotel at 7a.m. in the morning, he switched on MTV and there was ‘Creep’.

  All the attention, the praise and the hyperbole didn’t come without a price. They were expected first to schmooze the executives of various retail outlets and radio stations. Then they had a packed schedule of interviews where Thom would be asked over and over again about the girl that he’d successfully forgotten about years ago. In the end, he just insisted that people should decide for themselves what the song was about. Amusingly, in one interview he anticipated music file sharing by about seven years when he joked: “What’s vinyl? We’re experimenting with fax machines at the moment. I think that people should sort of just be able to fax songs as well as listen to them. You should be able to plug your fax into your hi-fi.”

  At another interview with KRoq he was asked to sing a jingle about how “special” the radio station was to the tune of ‘Creep’. When he refused the DJ twisted his arm by asking, ‘You did actually sing on the song, right?’ In the future, nobody would ask him to do anything quite so ridiculous but Thom gave in. It was one of many “never again” moments that they went through on that tour.

  Most of their interviews were even less entertaining and the gigs weren’t quite what they’d hoped for either. They were playing shows to a crowd who were only interested in one song. In retrospect, they’ve painted it as a grim experience and, in some ways it was, but it was also everything Thom had always wanted. Still, their marketing executive Carol Baxter later said, “I’ll never make my bands do this again.” But at the time Thom and the rest of the band did everything that was reasonably asked of them.

  And Capitol knew what they were doing. MTV’s decision to playlist the video was crucial and ‘Creep’s popularity rocketed. They were invited to play MTV’s ‘Beach Party’ where they played the song while bikini-clad models jiggled behind them. It was, in a funny way, a highly appropriate setting for a song about feeling inadequate and resentful in the presence of beauty.

  “I don’t think the irony was lost on people,” said Thom, “all these gorgeous bikinied girls shaking their mammary glands and we’re playing ‘Creep’ and looking terrible.”

  Luckily “looking terrible” was all part of what being “that ‘Creep’ guy” meant. They were even invited on to the popular Arsenio Hall show. Backstage, before they went on, Thom was so nervous he was actually shaking, but he gave an extraordinary performance of the song, rasping the words and coming across like a hybrid of the Hunchback of Notre Dame and the Phantom of the Opera.

  The fact that America had accepted them when it had rejected other bands such as Suede was a massive vindication. This was even more the case when they re-released ‘Creep’ in the UK and promptly had a Top Ten hit as the radio stations who’d ignored it the first time were forced to admit they’d been wrong. It seemed like the weaker they got the stronger ‘Creep’ got. They would finish touring the song in one territory only for it to become a hit in another. While ‘Pop Is Dead’ had sank without trace in the UK, Pablo Honey was racing towards eventual sales of over two million copies (much of them in the US). But the live shows, half the reason they were in the band, were becoming increasingly demoralising.

  “There was a marked difference between the US and the UK,” says Nigel, “which was that even though the audiences were smaller in the UK, everybody stayed for the entire gig, where as in America, certainly some of the co-headline tours, Radiohead would play ‘Creep’ halfway through the set and 100 or 150 people would go, ‘Hey, ‘Creep’, I like that one,’ and then they’d leave as soon as they’d played that song. They were a ‘pop hit’ band. They’d had the one big song and the follow-up in America didn’t do as well as ‘Creep’ – they released ‘Stop Whispering’ but it didn’t have the same impact as ‘Creep’, [so] there were quite a lot of people who only knew that one song.”

  The band always felt that their success in America at the time of ‘Creep’ was somewhat exaggerated in the press. “Things became polarised between us being extremely famou
s, megastars in America and utterly unknown in England,” said Jonny in a TV interview. “It’s somewhere between the two really.”

  They occasionally liked to point out that the first time ‘Creep’ was released in the UK, it ultimately went on to sell 20,000 copies over the course of their tour, which, while not a big hit, wasn’t bad. It didn’t quite justify the Evening Standard’s headline ‘British Pop Unknowns Storm The USA.”

  The Pablo Honey tour lasted, in various guises, for the best part of two years and it almost broke them. For the first time since they’d been signed, they wondered whether it was all worth it. “Immediately towards the end of the Pablo Honey tour, it seemed like there was a little bit of fatigue and uncertainty about what to do next,” Nigel says, “but I think all they needed was a break. I think the long history helps at that point. When you get to that kind of point of feeling angry and frustrated and thinking, ‘Do I want to carry on with this?’ if you’ve been in a band for six months you go, ‘Bollocks, I’ll get another band.’ But if you’ve been in a band for eight years or whatever, there’s a little bit more to lose.”

  The most frustrating thing about the Pablo Honey tour was that they had new songs, better songs, than the ones on their debut album and yet few people were interested. They’d had ‘High And Dry’ for ages and other songs were also falling into place.

  “They’d been playing ‘The Bends’ from the ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’ tour,” says Nigel. “In fact they might have even been playing it on the ‘Creep’ tour. That was the earliest one they ever played. I hung around the studio when they were demo-ing ‘High And Dry’ and I thought it was a really great song. That was the point when Thom went, ‘Now I just want to do what I want to do.’ Whereas Pablo Honey was more like, it needs to be a bit grunge to fit in with what the industry expects. The Bends was like: ‘No, I want to do it this way …’”