Thom Yorke

by Trevor Baker

  “I had a four-track of it when we were doing Pablo Honey,” Thom said in a 1995 TV interview. “I don’t know why we didn’t do it really … I poured all this rubbish out into the song. Then it all started happening, which was a bit odd. I was completely taking the piss when I wrote it. Then the joke started wearing a bit thin.”

  By the time The Bends was finished Thom felt like they were back on track. “Somewhere along the line,” he said in another interview, “the enjoyment went out of what we were doing and it all got a bit silly. But by the time we finished The Bends we thought, ‘Yeah, this is why we started this.”

  Another exciting moment came when they added strings to ‘Fake Plastic Trees’. It was the first time they’d ever recorded with other musicians and they went for the unorthodox combination of Caroline Lavelle, the cellist who’d played the haunting strings on Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ and John Matthias, the young violinist Thom had met at Exeter.

  “It was the first time on that album that they’d used other musicians,” John Matthias told this author. “And I think that helped make it real for them in some way. I got the impression that it brought the process to life.” John has since gone on to make highly regarded music in his own right but at the time he was aware not everybody was delighted that Thom wanted to employ an old college friend.

  “When they arrived I realised we had this violinist who was a student from Oxford, and probably the best cello player in the world,” said John Leckie in a Melody Maker interview. “So there was a slightly uneasy atmosphere to it.”

  “I wasn’t a student,” says John, “but I wasn’t a regular professional and she [Caroline Lavelle] was brilliant. She was an amazing musician. Thom had to stick his neck out to get me on board, I think. I think he had to argue with EMI. He said, ‘No, I want John Matthias.’ Which was pretty brave at the time for someone in his position. I was a completely unknown quantity. He probably had to argue with Jonny as well I should think! I was really appreciative of that.”

  On the morning of the session, John met Thom at an exhibition by photographer Annie Leibovitz. He was struck by how excited and upbeat the singer was at that point. There was no sign of the angst or confusion that had been the hallmark of earlier sessions.

  “I don’t know what the atmosphere had been like before,” John says, “but I got the impression that the sessions hadn’t been easy and there was a lot of pressure on them to get the album right. But certainly they were very excited about it. There were some tracks that just ended up as B-sides that sounded great.”

  However, just as with Pablo Honey, the pain wasn’t over yet. They still needed to get the record mixed. At first, the mixes they were hearing just didn’t quite sound right. The band and the record label weren’t at all sure what to do. Then somebody had the counterintuitive idea of calling Pablo Honey producers Paul and Sean to see if they’d do it. It was a controversial decision because, although they liked the two Americans, the process of mixing Pablo Honey had not been smooth either. Remember, towards the end of their relationship things had got a little tense. It was only in retrospect that they started to think they might have done a pretty good job, considering the material they had to work with.

  “It was one of those things where they were kind of thinking, What the fuck, who can do this?” says Paul, “and somebody raised his hand, I don’t know who it was, and said, ‘Well, these guys mixed the million-selling hit that we had. Let’s call ’em’. I think they were just taking a shot … they were just trying anything they could think of and it just happened to work pretty well.

  The first song we mixed was ‘Bones’ and we went, ‘Yeah, this is like the Pixies’ and mixed it like that and sent it back to them and it was a home run. They started pitching them at us and we started hitting them back. The whole process took a while and several of them were done several times. ‘Just’ we must have mixed five times. The band … would say, ‘No, try again, this part should be louder, or whatever.’ So we’d send it to them again and pretty soon they were all in the ‘Done’ pile. It was over a long period of time and we were doing other things.” Some of John Leckie’s mixes were also used – for example, ‘Street Spirit’ and ‘Iron Lung’ – and so the record ultimately came to have a fine balance.

  Regardless of their own part in the process, Sean admits that Leckie’s production skills and those of his (then unknown) engineer, Nigel Godrich, were one of the key factors in the success of The Bends.

  “One of the reasons working on The Bends was such a thrill and a pleasure was that the tracks were immaculately organised,” he says. “I think to an extent Paul and I might have got a little too much credit for mixing it, because the tracks were just there. It was just 24-tracks. No fucking Pro-Tools and we cranked it through our board and said to ourselves, ‘Let’s make this sound like Van Halen!’ I’m being a little facetious when I say that, but I think they did want to showcase the guitar power that they had. When they started to work with Nigel they said, ‘We don’t want all that guitar stuff anymore.’ Which is great. The Bends is the penultimate Radiohead, guitar-band album. That’s how Paul and I entered the situation because we had this skill of recording loud rock ’n’ roll guitars.”

  At one point during the mixing process, Ed flew out to America on holiday and while he was there he visited Sean and Paul’s Fort Apache studios. They were shocked when he told them how close they’d come to losing it while making the record. “They nearly packed it in making The Bends,” says Paul. “The way Ed described it to me was that, ‘We thought we’d made the worst record. We had a chance and we lost it.’” “There was that panic,” admitted Jonny later, “when we thought, ‘oh no, we’re rubbish after all, our music’s shite! It’s a disaster.”

  “They went through that thing that’s so prevalent in the studio where the thing you didn’t pay any attention to turns out good,” says Paul. “The harder you try the worst it gets. Because they truly believed they’d lost it, they won. They truly believed it. They weren’t just like, ‘Maybe we’ve fucked it up?’ They were like, ‘We have screwed it up and lost. We’re over. Radiohead is finished.’ Right then the mixes started coming back from us in America and they were like, ‘Wait a minute – maybe it’s good!’ And everybody started pounding each other on the back going, ‘This is good!’ And everything changed. But they really got so far down. They really came close to breaking up. The fact that record came out as good as it did and did as well as it did is a miracle. It’s similar to the miracle of ‘Creep’ – how the hell did that come out when the rest of what they did was still forming? The real important story of the band is how they fought their way out of that trap.”

  Although Sean was joking when he said they wanted it to sound like Van Halen, the album undoubtedly rocks. Paul thinks that The Bends is defined by the fact that many of the songs were written when their primary means of winning new fans was simply by playing live. They needed an album of songs that would work well in that context. They wanted to redefine stadium rock from something bloated and vacuous to something intimate and warm.

  “I think it’s because they were in a cycle of touring and playing and they wanted to really kill people,” he says. “They wanted to hit them hard. A song like ‘The Bends’ – Thom would never write a song like that today. That kind of heraldic, anthemic guitar part. He wouldn’t have a need for that. But because they were out there playing [live] they needed ammunition. Some of those songs, I think, it was Thom saying, ‘Well, if I’ve got to drag my body round the world and try and grab people’s attention, I’ve got to have a body of songs that’s slamming.’”

  When they got the mixes back for the first time, Thom was convinced he’d got exactly that. For the first time since they were kids, he and Jonny listened to the finished work over and over again. They’d hardly ever listened to Pablo Honey after recording it, but this one he knew was good. It was really good.

  However, when the new material from the second album – T
he Bends – was released, it was met with an initially disappointing reaction. First of all they released the My Iron Lung EP and, just as they had with ‘Creep’, radio programmers took one listen and said a definite ‘No’. They’d listen to the first two minutes, nod happily along to the gentle melody and then abruptly switch it off as it exploded into the warped, violent guitar assault of the last two minutes. “I wrote the verse,” Thom said in a TV interview, “and thought, That’s great, that’s beautiful, so we just had to screw it up by putting the other bit in.” He had intended it to make people forget ‘Creep’ but it didn’t quite work out that way.

  “There was one press junket they did when ‘Iron Lung’ came out, [and] Thom and Jonny flew out to the US do a live show,” says Paul Kolderie. “I was in the truck with them because I was friends with the DJ and the woman said, before we went on, ‘Is there anything you want to talk about or not talk about,’ and Thom said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t talk about ‘Creep’, I don’t want to play it tonight, I want to play our new stuff.’ So she goes ‘OK’. Then the interview starts and the first thing she does is say to the crowd watching us outside, ‘Hey, they say they’re not going to play ‘Creep’ tonight! What’s up with that, people?’ So of course everybody goes ‘Boooo! Fuck you!’ Thom just went completely white. First he turned red then he turned white. Then he goes, ‘I’ve got to get out of here!’ So he jumped up and ran out of the interview. Me and Jonny finished the interview but it was one of the things where you go, ‘We just talked about this! What, you think that’s a scoop or something?’ He was completely pissed but he ended up giving a really good show. It sort of energised him in a strange way. I don’t blame him. Different people might have dealt with it in a different way but it was Thom’s way to just run out and go, ‘Agghhhhh’. But it worked for him.”

  “The main thing that we wanted to do was not repeat ourselves,” Thom said in a TV interview. “It would have made certain people very happy if we’d done twelve versions of ‘that song’ but by that point we’d really had enough. Even if we’d wanted to, we can’t repeat ourselves.”

  This was the point when many ‘Creep’ fans started to disappear but a new breed of Radiohead fan was slowly replacing them. Despite muted radio support, sales of the My Iron Lung EP were better than the worried record label had expected and it became clear that, even without the backing of the radio or much of the press, they had a loyal fan base. It was an important boost after an extraordinary, confusing couple of years and it helped fire them up for the release of The Bends.

  11

  COMING UP FOR AIR

  Radiohead’s second album bears none of the signs of being recorded over such a long period of time. It’s as taut and powerful as a clenched fist. Despite its recurring themes of sickness and physical decay, it exudes all the energy of the great live band they’d become.

  “The whole concept of The Bends goes back to ‘My Iron Lung’ and that weird breathing thing,” says Paul. “I don’t think he meant to do a concept album but in a way he kind of did. It’s about claustrophobia and feeling hemmed in and unable to breathe.”

  Songs such as ‘The Bends’, ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, ‘Bones’, ‘High And Dry’ and ‘My Iron Lung’ could be seen as throwbacks to Thom’s childhood hatred of hospitals, but he would always angrily deny that the record was autobiographical.

  “It’s not my fucking day-to-day,” he said in a Melody Maker interview. “It’s not my life. These lyrics aren’t self-fulfilling. The Bends isn’t my confessional. And I don’t want it used as an aid to stupidity and fucking wittery. It’s not an excuse to wallow. I don’t want to know about your depression – if you write to me, I will write back angrily telling you not to give into all that shit.”

  He’s always insisted that many of his lyrics are written in a spirit of sarcasm or outright humour. “The biggest battle I have at the moment,” he said in a late 1990s TV interview, “is to persuade people that a lot of the lyrics I write are very funny.”

  At the time, many people might have gone along with Colin’s wry response to this: “Funny peculiar – not funny ha ha”. But undoubtedly there is humour in many of Thom’s best lyrics on the record. Even ‘My Iron Lung’ is obviously blackly comic. Not many people would have the brazen ingratitude to slag off their biggest hit in such a way. Thom has the ability of many creative people to simultaneously feel an emotion and to mock it.

  This was an ability he shared with his old college friend Dan Rickwood. Dan’s art, too, often dealt with serious subjects by making them absurd. At university he was regarded as “a good laugh” by friends and his artwork had a similarly spiky sense of humour. Thom hadn’t been happy with EMI’s early decisions on their record sleeves and therefore when they came to do the My Iron Lung EP, he gave Dan a call.

  “Radiohead were unhappy with the amount of money they’d had to pay for design,” says John Matthias. “[Before now] it was music industry people trying to be grungey. It was only really with the ‘My Iron Lung’ EP that they started becoming much more autonomous. I think when they first got signed they did what they were told and it was a bit like being at school. They gradually realised that EMI didn’t know everything; they didn’t know what Radiohead wanted to do. It was a very gradual movement away from them in a sense. The realisation that they were actually in control of their own stuff.”

  This was when they started to make decisions about more than just the music. They’d been disappointed with the artwork and the videos as well as the way they were promoted generally. The cover of The Bends then, was the first album that came under a broader aesthetic of which Dan – now working under the name Stanley Donwood – was very much a part. It featured a doll that Oxford hospital The John Radcliffe used for resuscitation practice. Thom and Dan liked the way its mouth lolled open. It was hard to tell whether it was in ecstasy or in agony, the perfect Radiohead image.

  From then on the artwork and the music would be tied together as closely as possible. Often Dan would join the band in the recording studio, coming up with ideas as he listened to them play. “He’s either in a little room adjacent or above us in the mezzanine, or in the shed at the bottom of the gully,” said Ed O’Brien to AV Club. “He’s always with us, and we need him in that creative process. Not just for his artwork, but because he’ll say, ‘I know nothing about music, but that was fucking brilliant!’”

  When The Bends was released, most critics thought it was brilliant, too. It received rave reviews in the two main music papers, NME and Melody Maker, and later on appeared in numerous ‘Album Of The Year’ lists. Despite this, in 1995, Thom’s relationship with the press, never exactly warm, hit a new low. The first bruising encounter had come in 1992 with an early live review in NME. Writer Keith Cameron famously described them as a, “a lily-livered excuse for a rock band.” This was just his opinion but the knife was twisted by a montage of unflattering pictures of Thom captioned: “Uglee – Oh yeah!”

  They could cope with that. They even took the “lily-livered excuse for a rock band” moniker on board as a kind of ironic mission statement. Then, in March 1995, Thom – who’d always been a vociferous reader of the music press – was shocked to see a Melody Maker feature that asked its readers whether he was likely to be the next great rock casualty after Kurt Cobain and Richey Manic (then missing for just a month).

  “I stopped reading the press when they printed I was going to top myself,” Thom said to NME at the end of that year. “And my girlfriend rings me up, really, really upset, saying, ‘What’s all this, what have you been saying?’ You know, that’s when I stopped reading it. That was enough for me.”

  In reality, writers The Stud Brothers didn’t say that he was going to top himself. Buried in the text was the line, “Thom Yorke, 26, is already marked for destruction. But Thom doesn’t see it like that. And frankly, neither do we.” Their piece was a deliberately provocative attempt to look at the unfortunate obsession of rock fans and the media with martyrs like Richey
and Kurt. Unfortunately any subtlety that the piece might have had was overshadowed by the line below the heading which described Thom as, “a man who will soon know the price of fame, and who already knows the cost of being born ugly.”

  The music press’s obsession with Thom’s supposed “ugliness” was always rather vicious. By “ugly” they just meant that one of his eyes didn’t open properly. That kind of gratuitous abuse was the real “price of fame.”

  In fact The Bends came out at a time when the music scene was moving away from the darkness of albums like In Utero or the Manic Street Preachers’ bleak classic The Holy Bible. The big albums of the era were Blur’s Parklife and Oasis’s Definitely Maybe. They had an upbeat, optimistic sound, which was far removed from The Bends. Still, at least people weren’t talking about the fact that they didn’t always play ‘Creep’ anymore. Their decision to – temporarily at least – drop it from their live sets, no longer seemed like the act of precious prima donnas.

  “It might have seemed [like that] at the time,” says Paul, “but then you realise later on that it’s just having the courage of your convictions. It was like, ‘We’ve got to get past this!’”

  And get past it they did. And they were still as ambitious as ever. Following the release of The Bends, they headed back to America for an astonishing five tours. When asked why they did it, Thom said, “Don’t fucking ask me, it wasn’t my idea!” In the USA, The Bends was a definite flop in comparison with Pablo Honey for the first couple of months, yet they were determined to prove themselves all over again. In the summer of 1995, they had their best chance when REM invited them on tour. It had been a running joke that the only bands they would support were U2 or REM. When they got the call from Michael Stipe’s band, Thom couldn’t believe it. Stipe had been one of his biggest heroes since he was at school.