Thom Yorke

by Trevor Baker

  Nevertheless, they were starting to warm to the idea of being a stadium band. Playing the new songs in vast, sterile concrete boxes gave them a new sense of direction. “A lot of the songs needed to sound quite big and messy, like they were bouncing off the walls,” Thom told Jam Showbiz. “When we went back into the studio, we were actually trying to recreate the sound of a shed soundcheck, or a baseball stadium thing, without sounding like bloody Def Leppard or something. That was really important to the songs.”

  When they got back they moved into a mansion called St Catherine’s Court in a secluded valley just north of Bath. Completed in the 16th Century it was an extremely imposing building, grey and gothic with ivy hanging beneath the windows. It was owned by actress Jane Seymour who’d bought it for £300,000 in 1984 and then spent £3,000,000 doing it up. In the last few years it had mostly been rented out for grand weddings and corporate events but in 1996 The Cure had hired it to make their Wild Mood Swings album. When Radiohead got there, with all of the shiny new equipment that Nigel Godrich had bought, they immediately felt much happier than they had done in any professional studio. “You don’t feel like lab rats, like you’re being experimented on all the time, which you normally do in studios,” Thom said in a TV interview.

  The house had large stone rooms and beautiful wood panelling. The acoustics and the atmosphere were very different to any other studio they’d ever been in. Among other things, they were amused to find pictures of the proprietor in her underwear in the bathroom. The Cure had used the dining room as the control room but there was also a vast wood-panelled ballroom and an entirely stone-clad room that gave a completely different feel to the acoustics. Phil set up his drum-kit in the children’s playroom, surrounded by soft toys. The sessions there were instantly much more laidback than on The Bends. Almost too laid back. The Cure had ended up spending sixteen months at St Catherine’s Court, making an album that was far from their best. It seemed quite possible that Radiohead might do the same. “We had as much time as we wanted to do it and that kind of got out of hand,” Thom said.

  After the trauma of trying to record The Bends, they wanted to make a simpler, more stripped-down record this time. There wasn’t to be the endless analysis and self-criticism. There wasn’t to be the darkness of The Bends.

  “You know, the big thing for me is that we could really fall back on just doing another moribund, miserable, morbid and negative record, like, lyrically,” Thom enthused to NME before they started recording. “But I really don’t want to, at all. And I am deliberately just writing down all the positive things that I hear or see. But I’m not able to put them into music yet. I don’t want to force it because then all I’m doing is just addressing all the issues where people are saying that we’re mope rock.”

  But as the sessions started, Thom realised that the record wasn’t turning out quite how he’d expected. It was as if it had a life of its own. They just had to follow wherever it wanted to go. It became a running joke in the studio, when things got too complicated, Thom or Jonny would say “Didn’t we say we were going to make an album like 77 (Talking Heads’ stripped-down debut album).

  That was never going to happen. Thom wasn’t listening to that kind of music. He was obsessed by Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew album. At the time, none of the band were listening to pop or rock. Jonny had got into dark, atonal classical composer Penderecki, best known for the use of his music in films like The Exorcist and The Shining and for his incredibly harsh and harrowing, Threnody For The Victims Of Hiroshima. The idea that they were going to come up with something light and accessible was, looking back, absurd.

  The songs Thom had written depicted the weird, depersonalised world of airport lounges, hotel rooms and bars. They had been his home for much of the last three years. It was a world where people alternately worshipped and preyed on celebrity and where constant travel by car and by plane meant, for Thom, a constant low-level fear of death. It was, he said later, “everything I never thought I’d write an album about.”

  Some of the most violent imagery on the record came directly out of an experience Thom had one night in LA in 1996. He went to a bar and was immediately surrounded by a group of coked-up, hysterical and over-ambitious wannabes in expensive, designer clothes. One woman had a drink spilled over her and Thom was astonished and shocked by her transformation from glamorous clothes-horse into howling harpy.

  “There was a look in this woman’s eyes that I’d never seen before anywhere,” he said. “Whether that was down to me being exhausted and hallucinating … no, I know what I saw in her face. [I] couldn’t sleep that night because of it.” She would later be immortalised by Thom as a so-called Gucci little piggy. Other hangers-on were skewered with ‘Karma Police’ – the woman with the Hitler haircut and the man who buzzes like a fridge.

  But if the subject matter was vicious and unpleasant, the experience of recording ‘Paranoid Android’ was anything but. It was everything they loved about being in a band. The way Thom has described it at times is reminiscent of the way an inventor might describe the process of creating a miraculous new product. As well as the sheer joy of artistic expression there was an element of solving a technical problem, finding the perfect balance between harmony and chaos. As ‘My Iron Lung’ had done, the song started with a beautiful melody, before taking an abrupt left turn, and then another one and then another one, until it finishes by thrashing around like a fish on dry land.

  In some respects, OK Computer was a continuation of the themes of The Bends. Travel was still a major preoccupation, with tracks like ‘Airbag’ and ‘Lucky’. It was an album that could only have been made by people who’d spent an awful lot of time in the last few years getting in and out of cars, buses and planes. There was also a major supernatural or alien presence with tracks like ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’.

  “I’m like most people; I’d love to be abducted,” Thom said to the Yahoo website. “It’s the ultimate madness. So many people go loopy when they’re abducted, whether you believe it or not. But if you take away the word ‘alien’ and replace it with the word ‘ghost’, it becomes less hysterical. Everyone believes in ghosts. Surely that is more significant than little green men, isn’t it?”

  Jonny preferred a more logical explanation of the same song. “I’m an enormous cynic,” he said to Launch. “That song is more about how for every generation, it’s a different thing. Before UFOs it was the Virgin Mary, and before that it was something else. People flock to the same places with their cameras and hope to see the same things. And it’s just about hope and faith, I think, more than aliens.”

  For Thom, too, it was half-joke (“in as much as my jokes are ever funny”) and half-metaphor for loneliness and isolation. It was about the same craving for something extraordinary to happen that is the hallmark of the song ‘The Bends’. But the songs he’d written were, seemingly, much more outward-looking than the tracks on The Bends album, and much less introspective. ‘Electioneering’, for example, was about the cynicism and mendacity of politicians. However, underneath there was surely still an autobiographical element that Thom didn’t seem to be able to get away from. It was based partly on his experiences on tour, constantly saying hello to new people and feeling like a fraud.

  “I went through this American tour where we just seemed to be shaking hands all the time,” he said to Jam Showbiz, “and I was getting a bit sick of it and upset by it. So I came up with this running joke with myself, where I used to shake people’s hands and say, ‘I trust I can rely on your vote?’ They’d go ‘Ha, ha, ha’ and look at me like I was a nutcase.”

  One of Thom’s main aims when he was writing the lyrics of OK Computer was avoiding the trap of easy sentimentality. As a result songs like ‘Karma Police’, ‘Paranoid Android’ and ‘Electioneering’ have a tone, superficially, of dark sarcasm. There’s very little ‘emoting’ except, perhaps, on the heartbreaking ‘Exit Music (For A Film)’. And even there the protagonists of the song, apparently runn
ing away in some kind of suicide pact, refuse to let the listener indulge in pity, finishing with the infamous line, later included in the album’s artwork, about choking.

  Yet, somehow, as they recorded the album the songs were developing their own undercurrent of deep sadness. “The Bends was a record of consolation,” Thom said afterwards. “But this one was sad. And I didn’t know why.” Despite these dark thoughts, the initial stages of recording were a huge buzz. The ‘teacher’s away’ vibe that they’d felt when John Leckie disappeared during The Bends sessions seemed to be there to stay. They had Dan Rickwood with them as well as Nigel; they were all in their mid-to-late-twenties and all heading, initially at least, in the same direction.

  The first two weeks were among the most enjoyable experiences Radiohead had ever had while recording. During that time they essentially finished recording the whole album and then, in their usual fashion, they set about pulling it to pieces. “It was heaven and hell,” said Thom.

  The house, from being a friendly, welcoming place suddenly seemed weird and sinister. They started to notice strange things going on. “There was a very odd presence in the house we were recording in,” Thom said in an interview with The Times. “I just didn’t sleep at all. I started seeing things, hearing things … I mean, we made jokes about it, but there was fear everywhere, coming out of the walls and floors.”

  Part of the problem was that the house was in a deep valley and it was incredibly quiet. Thom, who lived in the centre of Oxford, wasn’t used to the deathly silence. All night he’d lie there worrying about the sequencing of the tracks or about particular sounds. That might explain why he started crediting the house with its own, malevolent personality.

  “The house was oppressive,” he said to Pat Blashill of Spin. “To begin with, it was curious about us. Then it got bored with us. And it started making things difficult. It started doing things like turning the studio tape machines on and off, rewinding them.”

  But then Radiohead had never needed ghosts for things to start getting difficult. The closer they got to finishing a record, the more they started getting distracted by thoughts of what other people would think of it. Thom described the experience of making OK Computer as being like a man building a spaceship in the shed at the bottom of his garden. At first they were completely absorbed in the task at hand. They took great pleasure in every little effect, making Colin’s guitar sound like a car crash at the beginning of ‘Airbag’ or like a child’s toy in ‘No Surprises’. At some point, though, they came out of the trance and looked up, blinking, at what they’d created. How were they going to finish such an enormous project?

  The songs they had were extraordinarily complex and multi-textured. The lyrics were loaded with references to aliens, death and violence. All those “positive” things that Thom said he’d been writing down seemed to have been either thrown away or spliced with irony or confusion. By October 2006, they were painfully close to the finish line but they couldn’t get it quite right and, as they listened to it, they were concerned about what they’d created. It was, Thom sometimes thought, a little bit disturbing. “At the eleventh hour, when we realised what we had done,” Thom says, “we had qualms about the fact that we had created this thing that was quite revolting.”

  It’s an incredibly harsh verdict. It’s typical that the first person to come out against the view that OK Computer was the best album of the 1990s and, perhaps, of all-time, was the man who wrote it. But then again, if you listen closely you can hear what he meant. If The Bends had been about illness then this album sounded ill. It was woozy, disconcerting and claustrophobic. “I think people feel sick when they hear OK Computer,” Thom said later. “Nausea was part of what we were trying to create.”

  It made the final weeks of the recording incredibly difficult. The doubts he had about the album, not about whether it was any good but about whether it could be polished and put out as a normal product, made sequencing and mixing it a huge headache. “Making this record was really good fun but finishing it was a fucking nightmare,” he said in a German TV interview. “Everything was really spontaneous and then we had to mix it and everything went wrong.”

  For two weeks before mastering the record, Thom got up at 5a.m. every day and agonised over the track sequence, playing the songs in different orders on his Minidisc player. “I couldn’t find the resolution that I was expecting to hear,” he said. “I just went into a wild panic for two weeks. I couldn’t sleep at all, because I just expected the resolution to be there … and it wasn’t.”

  By now the rest of the band knew very well that they just had to let him get on with it. He kept compiling discs for them and they would politely take them and then throw them in the bin later. “They knew I’d fucking lost it!” he said later.

  And yet there is a resolution in OK Computer. Like The Bends, it’s another concept album where the ‘concept’ is almost subliminal, conveyed by the strange textures of the music as much as by the words. It’s that “fridge buzz”, the static of the end of the 20th Century, transformed into something beautiful and moving. The most obvious resolution is the one that they say they didn’t even notice at the time. It starts with ‘Airbag’ and a man pulling himself out of a car crash and it finishes with ‘The Tourist’ and somebody pleading to slow down.

  For the recording sessions, there was to be no definitive, obvious end. In January, Jonny had simply had enough. While Thom was still worrying about whether ‘Fitter Happier’ should come at the beginning of the album, halfway through, or maybe at the end, he walked into the studio and told them that they had to stop. Thom was still uncertain whether OK Computer was really finished but, at the same time, it was a huge relief that somebody had called a halt. He wasn’t sure what they’d done, or whether he’d still be “electioneering” after radio programmers got to hear it. Just as after recording The Bends, he thought that nobody would be interested in shaking his hand anymore. And maybe that was no bad thing.

  “When we finished it and were putting it together, I was like pretty convinced that we’d sort of blown it, but I was kind of happy about that, because we’d gotten a real kick out of making the record,” he said to Launch.

  That was initially many other people’s reaction, too. When Capitol got hold of the initial mixes, they immediately halved their projection of how many copies it would sell. And, just as with The Bends, the final mixing process proved more difficult than expected. Once again they sent Sean and Paul at Fort Apache tapes but this time they weren’t the only people the band tried. “They were sending the tapes around,” says Paul. “We did a mix of ‘Climbing Up The Walls’ and I remember thinking, ‘This is weird! Is this their new record? I don’t get it!’ It was very murky and kind of a mess.”

  After the satisfaction of finishing the record, Thom felt slightly sick that it was no longer in his hands. From purely having to think about whether he liked a song – and whether the rest of the band liked a song – he was suddenly back to having to think about whether the outside world would like it.

  “Suddenly you’re presented with it as a finished thing and you have to start thinking about the bullshit that goes with it,” he said in a TV interview. “You have to start thinking about the British press and you have to start thinking about how something you may have meant completely genuinely will be taken as something else. It’s out of your control and you have to say goodbye to it.”

  Nobody was more shocked than Thom when they saw the reviews. They almost all acclaimed it as a masterpiece. Suddenly, from having been ignored and occasionally derided in the UK, they were being hailed as the world’s greatest rock band. Thom was even more surprised at how many people seemed to have really listened to it and picked up on all the little nuances of texture that they’d put so much time into perfecting. Nevertheless, they couldn’t help but be cynical after the experiences they’d had in the past with the press.

  “In terms of people saying it’s the album of the year, people say that all the tim
e,” he said to Launch. “In Britain, it’s great – in the space of two weeks, our album was the ‘Album of the Year’ and so was Prodigy’s. Two weeks from now it will be another album. It’s just what people say.”

  But two weeks after the album was released, Radiohead played Glastonbury. It was their first public performance of OK Computer in the UK and their agent had spent a year negotiating a headline slot. Many people were still highly suspicious of them. Their aesthetic didn’t exactly fit the peace, love and hippies vibe of the festival. And it didn’t help that, for the first time in a decade at Glastonbury, it had rained solidly and the field in front of the main stage had turned into a swamp. Two stages actually sank and some people caught trench foot, a condition more commonly associated with World War I. Thom must have thought back to his old Headless Chickens, hippy-bashing song ‘I Don’t Want To Go To Woodstock’.

  When they started their set, everything seemed OK. Two songs in and they’d already won the crowd over. Then Thom’s monitor blew up. He stared out at the dark mass of the crowd in a blind panic but soon he couldn’t even see them. The lights had gone wrong and were glaring directly into his face.

  “I was going to kill,” he told Q later. “I was going to kill. If I’d found the guy who was running the PA system that day, I would’ve gone backstage and throttled him. Everything was going wrong. Everything blew up. And I was the one at the front standing in front of 40,000 people while that was happening. You’re standing there: ‘Thanks very much for fucking my life up in front of all these people.’”

  They played six songs unable to hear themselves properly and unable to see a thing. Thom turned to walk off, feeling that probably the most important gig of his life had been ruined. Then he had second thoughts. He screamed at the lighting guy to turn the lights around so that they were pointing at the audience instead of him. To his complete shock, there was an expression of rapture on the faces of most of the sodden, muddy crowd. The band carried on, confused but determined to finish the set. Then, when he walked off at the end, Thom decided to find out what had gone wrong but before he could find the soundman he bumped into Rachel.