Thom Yorke

by Trevor Baker

  But, for a long time, nobody would give them a chance to do it their way. ‘Creep’ had created an image of the band – and of Thom in particular – that was almost more powerful than the reality. But if the success had its downside, in the end, its upside was much more significant. ‘Creep’ is still an incredible song. The problem with it now is that so much of its impact came from sheer shock value. It was a classic tune with an instant hook, perfectly tuned to the MTV era. This was captured by the famous Beavis and Butt-head sketch at the time when Beavis explained why the song needed “the bit that sucks” and, by inference, explained most of the great rock of the 1990s. With familiarity ‘Creep’ lost much of its impact, but go back to that extraordinary bit where Thom sings “Ruuuuuuuun!” and holds the note for so long that it sounds like he’s going to explode … and be blown away all over again.

  9

  IRON LUNG

  On August 27, 1993, Radiohead were due to play the Reading Festival. Instead Thom Yorke woke up with laryngitis, his voice reduced to a feeble croak. Rachel phoned up Chris and Bryce to tell them that he wouldn’t be able to play, while he sat there gloomily plucking at his acoustic guitar, composing a new song. The melody that came out was characteristically pretty but the lyrics that followed were anything but. They were a bitter take on the last few months of Radiohead’s career, tearing into ‘Creep’, the song that had saved them, and dubbing it with an unforgettable metaphor, ‘My Iron Lung’.

  It was an image Thom had stored in his head since he found a picture when he was at university of a child in an iron lung. These devices were respirators that were frequently used during the polio epidemics of the first half of the 20th Century. The unfortunate child would be placed inside a giant metal tube with only their head outside and a vacuum would be created inside the tube to cause the lungs to expand and suck in air. They saved lives but some people were stuck inside them for years.

  In September 1993, when ‘Creep’ was re-released in the UK and Thom was fully recovered, Radiohead didn’t even bother to stay in the country. They went back to America where Thom spent much of his time at the back of the tour bus working on songs. By now the band weren’t talking to each other much. When he went back to ‘My Iron Lung’, Thom decided that the melody was much too pretty for the lyrics. With perverse glee, he added a second half to the song, which was as brutal and unrestrained as the words. It was, many people noted later, the same thing that Kurt Cobain had done with In Utero – mixing the sugar of his melodies with broken glass as if to deliberately sabotage any possibility of mainstream success.

  At the end of the year, when Radiohead finally made it home for a sustained period for the first time in two years, Thom bought “the house that ‘Creep’ built” on the strength of the royalties that were now coming in. But he was shattered.

  “As soon as you get any success, you disappear up your own arse and lose it forever,” he said in an interview with Stuart Baillie of NME. “When I got back to Oxford, I was unbearable. You start to believe you’re this sensitive artist who has to be alone, this melodramatic, tortured person, in order to create wonderful music. The absolute opposite is true. All these things happen to you anyway, you don’t have to sit there and make them happen. Otherwise you’re not a human being.”

  The pressure on Thom as “that ‘Creep’ guy” was very different to what the rest of the band experienced. “Ed and Colin and Phil have stayed refreshingly the same,” says Nigel Powell, “because they’ve had less of the limelight, they’ve all dealt with it very well. They’re all still as charming and humble as they need to be. Thom, maybe, his moods got slightly amplified by all the attention but it’s not like his personality changed overnight.”

  Colin later described the period at the end of the Pablo Honey tour as a kind of “break down” rather than a “break up”. They weren’t falling out. It was just that after two years on the road there was nothing left to say.

  They’d been waiting for months to get back into the studio but when they got off tour they were in no fit state to record. Luckily the success of Pablo Honey had bought them time. They were also able to call on the services of one of indie’s key figures, producer John Leckie. He hadn’t been that impressed with Pablo Honey but the demos they sent him of early songs like ‘High And Dry’ and ‘The Bends’ were a different matter. He was fresh from the gruelling, massively extended recording sessions for the Stone Roses’ tardy second album but if he was looking forward to an easier challenge, it wasn’t to be. At the end of February 1994, Radiohead went into RAK studios in west London but almost immediately things turned sour. They weren’t listening to each other.

  “We had one song that had loads of strings and heavy guitars. It was very epic and sounded like Guns N’ Roses’ ‘November Rain’,” Ed O’Brien said to Steve Malins of Vox. “By this time, Thom was trying to shut off from everything. There was a lot of pressure for us to make a loud, bombastic record and all I ever wanted to do was the exact opposite.”

  Initially, of the tracks that would eventually appear on the second album, they just had a demo version of ‘High And Dry’, which by then was stuck in a drawer somewhere, virtually forgotten about, and a very rough version of ‘Nice Dream’.

  “We were really scared of our instruments,” Thom said in the same interview with Vox. “That might sound over-dramatic, but that’s how it felt. It must have been tortuous to watch. I know it was very hard on John Leckie, who didn’t know what the fuck was going on. We’d be going to him: ‘So what do you think? What shall we do?’ He was like: ‘Well, I don’t know, it’s up to you. You can do what the fuck you like, just do it rather than sit there thinking about it.’”

  Luckily for them, John Leckie had seen it all before. He’d worked with everybody from solo members of The Beatles to The Verve and he knew he just had to wait until they were ready. The record couldn’t be forced.

  “John Leckie seemed to be about the most relaxed human being you could meet,” says Nigel Powell. “At the time I questioned what he did because every time I’d pop round, I saw him at RAK Studios and a couple of other places, and it seemed like the only thing he did was sit at the back of the control room … while this other, small, short-haired guy called Nigel Godrich (who at the time nobody knew) was doing all the work rushing around setting up mics. But now, looking back, I can see what John Leckie was doing. He was just keeping it chilled. He’d be sitting at the back going, ‘Yeah, it sounds alright …’ He was making sure the hammer wasn’t down. He’d say, ‘It sounds alright. Maybe we can do one more.’ He was still driving the record on but he was trying to do it in the most relaxed way possible.”

  But the label certainly weren’t relaxed. One executive supposedly left the studio after listening to what they’d come up with so far and raged, “Look, I don’t intend to take some fucking prog rock album. What the fuck is going on?”

  By contrast, EMI’s Keith Wozencroft says now that it was always clear that The Bends was going to be a great record. “Songs like ‘Street Spirit’, ‘Nice Dream’, ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ etc were testament to that,” he says. “I don’t recall ever hearing any comments along those lines. Also, it wasn’t a prog record anyway.”

  But, whether or not the label meant to pressurise them, there was a definite sense that they needed to produce another ‘Creep’. John Leckie says that EMI wanted them to write another hit single before they did anything else. “It kind of affected the first few weeks of recording,” he said to Melody Maker. “Because every three or four days, the record company or the manager would turn up to hear these hit singles and all we’d done was got a drum sound or something.” Thom ended up simply refusing to take the label’s calls, causing even more concern, but John dealt with that as well.

  “He viewed everything with a lack of importance,” Thom said to Nick Kent of Mojo later. “And thank God he did! He’s been doing it for so long he realised sometimes a producer is simply someone who just creates the right atmosphere for thi
ngs to happen. In a way, he was like a caring uncle. He might see you as his little nephew who’s in a right fucking mess – but he still lets you get on with it.”

  “He’s a wonderful man,” Thom also said in a TV interview. “When we went in to do this album, we were in a pretty bad state really, fragile to put it mildly, and he was able to make the studio a place conducive to work. A lot of producers tell you what to do and you scurry around and go, ‘OK’. We’d run around the studio and go ‘What do you think John?’ and he’d go ‘I don’t know, you decide, you’re the band! I’ll tell you when you’re going wrong.’”

  But, in America, Capitol wondered if they’d already gone wrong. There were rumours that they wouldn’t even release Radiohead’s second album. It seemed like the band had had their day in the sun with ‘Creep’ and they might have run out of steam. The problem was that the lack of communication on tour continued into the studio. Thom needed somebody to bounce ideas off but the tension was crippling. He’s described the decision-making process in Radiohead as, “like the UN – and I’m America” but this was one moment when the rest of the band rebelled. They couldn’t take anymore.

  At that point, they had a world tour booked. It had originally been intended to promote an album that they’d barely started recording. Thom wanted to cancel it and stay in the studio until they’d got things right but Jonny, Colin, Phil and Ed suggested that they go anyway. John Leckie agreed. It was clear they were getting nowhere. A couple of months break would do them good.

  “Towards the end, we had all these tour obligations and I thought, ‘Fuck it, no, I want to stay in the studio for three months’, Thom said later. “Everyone said no, you’ve got to get out of here and they were absolutely right.”

  However, when they hit the road, the atmosphere became unbearable. Their friendship had always felt like an accident of circumstance. Initially they’d chosen to hang around with each other because they were musicians, not because they had much else in common. They’d always dealt with things in a very English way, holding back and swallowing their feelings. There were no arguments, there was no strife as Jonny told B-Side magazine. It was just that they’d forgotten that they used to be friends.

  “‘Strife’ implies arguments and things being thrown,” he said, “but it was worse than that. It was a very silent, cold thing, away from each other. No one was really talking to anyone, and we were just trying to get through the year … there were never rows or anything, which is worse in a way. Everyone withdrew away.”

  Halfway through the tour, in Mexico, something snapped. They hadn’t been sleeping. There were twelve people crammed into a small tour bus. Thom had suddenly decided that they weren’t a good live band anymore. Their first gig was in a tiny, filthy club that was very different to the venues they had been playing. It had a low stage with tables placed in front of it as a barrier between them and the small crowd. They had to clamber out of a small window at the back to get offstage. A few months before they would have found it an amusing, exciting experience, but now they were too tired, sick and bored of each other to take anymore.

  “It all just came out,” Thom said to Andy Richardson in NME. “Years and years of tension and not saying anything to each other, and basically all the things that had built up since we’d met each other, all came out in one day. We were spitting and fighting and crying and saying all the things that you don’t want to talk about.”

  They could have broken up right then but instead everyone knew exactly where they were for the first time in years. At the end of the tour, they went into another studio, the Manor in Oxford, in the knowledge that everything that could be said had been said. The barriers were down and suddenly the record began to take shape. They realised that if they were getting upset about the way the record was going, it was only because they all cared about it so much.

  “If someone disagrees with Thom, he only gets upset because he trusts them,” said Jonny much later in a radio interview. “It’s not like he’s saying, ‘No, it’s great, I’m not listening to you.’ He goes, ‘Maybe you’re right, maybe it is no good.’ It’s upsetting. Sometimes your judgement’s wrong and sometimes it’s right.”

  10

  THE BENDS

  Their decision to go back out on the road was vindicated by a May 1994 performance at the Astoria in London. Most of the fans would have been expecting a run-through of Pablo Honey but what they got was over half of The Bends. It’s odd now to think of Radiohead playing a show where ‘Street Spirit’ would get a less rapturous reception than ‘Pop Is Dead’, but in the DVD of the show, the audience simply look stunned at what they’re hearing. They wouldn’t hear most of the songs again for almost a year until The Bends finally came out.

  “This is yet another new song,” Thom half-smirks before introducing an astonishing version of ‘My Iron Lung’. It was so good that when they listened to it afterwards they decided that they weren’t going to top it in the studio. Thom just re-recorded his vocal and they kept the rest for the EP and the album.

  “They always seem to work their best when there’s a certain moment when they all get into the flow,” says Nigel. “It just seems to take them a long time to get there. Once they’d got ‘My Iron Lung’ down suddenly they were like, ‘Hey, maybe we can do this,’ and it all went quite quickly from there I think.”

  What at the time seemed like an agonising combination of paranoia and creative paralysis would turn out to be merely Radiohead’s normal working method. This would only become clear when they tried to record subsequent albums. The Bends was the first time they’d had absolute freedom to do whatever they wanted. It turned out that was a lot harder than they’d thought. It was perhaps their hardest album to record because they had no idea what to expect. Revealingly, Thom once named a painter called Alan Davie as one of his heroes because, he said, Davie wasn’t afraid to admit that art could be a frustrating, gruelling experience.

  “He always talks about how he finds creating a really painful experience,” he said to NME. “How he really despises himself when he’s creating and how it always takes him ages, how sometimes he won’t think of anything good for six months and then it all comes pouring out; I really identify with all that.”

  The second breakthrough on the album came when they went back into the studio to record ‘Fake Plastic Trees’. It was a day, Phil said later, when they just couldn’t get anything done. Characteristically Thom put it in more melodramatic terms. “I had a complete meltdown,” he said. John Leckie suggested they take a break to go and see Jeff Buckley at the Garage in Highbury, London.

  Inspired by Buckley’s extraordinary vocals, Thom went back to the song afterwards and came out with the beautiful, keening falsetto that’s on the album. After months of indecision and paralysis, most of The Bends then came together in one or two takes. When they knew what they were trying to achieve, it suddenly seemed much easier. Opening track ‘Planet Telex’ was recorded with Thom, drunk, spitting out his vocal while crouched in a corner, barely able to stand. ‘Bones’ was captured in one go on the same day as ‘The Bends’. ‘Black Star’ was recorded while John Leckie was away with, according to Jonny, “a real ‘teacher’s away’ larkiness” to it. From being barely able to pick up their instruments, suddenly they were recording a song a day. “I went into The Manor and did the whole fucking album in two weeks – having realised what we were doing wrong,” Thom said later. “That easy, but sickening!”

  In retrospect, the moment they knew they’d really done something special was when they recorded The Bends’ last track, ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’. It was initially another day of going round in circles and feeling that nothing was going to happen. Then suddenly the melody came pouring out. Those were the moments, Thom said later, that justified everything else. Those two or three minutes of complete happiness when the song came together made the long nights on the tour bus and the weeks of studio madness worthwhile.

  At that point, they also went back to ‘High A
nd Dry’. Thom said later that he had his “arm twisted” to put it on the album. Perhaps somebody at the record label thought that they needed something simple and straightforward as a counterpoint to songs like ‘My Iron Lung’. The band weren’t convinced but, for the only time on The Bends, they gave in, much to Thom’s consternation. He was perhaps put off the song later by the fact that it provided a blueprint for the many bands, such as early Muse and Coldplay, who were openly influenced by this period of Radiohead. But, after the magnificent ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, it has one of the best lyrics on the record, seemingly a thinly veiled band biography disguised as the story of a dare-devil motorcyclist.

  “It’s about Evel Knievel, but not really,” Thom said in a TV interview when it was released as a single. “One of the first things I noticed when we started doing this was that people around us, other bands and ourselves, were changing into complete idiots, losing their friends and losing their connection with reality very fast. I saw us doing that.”

  This doesn’t sound quite right. When he wrote ‘High And Dry’, Thom was still at university and Radiohead didn’t even exist. In an interview with Billboard, he admitted that, “the words were originally about some loony girl I was going out with, but after a while, they got mixed up with ideas about success and failure.”

  But then many of the lyrics on the album seem eerily prescient. ‘The Bends’ sounds like it’s an autobiographical description of what happened when ‘Creep’ took off. It’s clearly an allegory about a band who rose too quickly and became ill from the pressure. Except that, too, was written long before they’d ever had any kind of success, long before ‘Creep’ made them stars in America.