Thom Yorke

by Trevor Baker

  “I thundered offstage, really ready to kill,” he told writer Andrew Mueller for the website, www.thequietus.com, “and my girlfriend grabbed me, made me stop, and said, ‘Listen!’ And the crowd were just going wild. It was amazing.”

  From feeling like they’d royally messed up, Thom had to accept the word of thousands of fans that it was one of the best gigs they’d ever done. “I said to them afterwards, ‘That was the best I’ve ever seen you,’” says Mark Cope, “but not one of them really enjoyed it. It’s horrible to play a gig like that and not enjoy it. It’s strange. But I think they learned from that. What’s really good is that they’re very humble. They still don’t believe that they’re as good as they are. That’s one of the things that’s kept them going and kept them in front of everyone else.”

  That performance consolidated Radiohead’s position as the most acclaimed band in the country. If many music magazines had overlooked The Bends then they were rushing to catch up now. Perhaps there was a degree of over-compensating. For several years, OK Computer was acclaimed in various polls as the best album of all-time. This, typically, made all of Radiohead feel uncomfortable. But, then again, it is an extraordinary album. It combines gorgeously simple, nursery rhyme tunes like ‘No Surprises’ and ‘Karma Police’ with complex, disturbing prog-rock like ‘Paranoid Android.’

  “When I heard it, after a couple of listens, it became one of those things where it was all I could listen to for a month,” says Paul Kolderie. “I’d run into people and be like, ‘What are you listening to?’ OK Computer. Only. That’s all I listen to.’ Everyone would be like ‘Yep, that’s me, too.’ It was one of those things where, man, they just nailed it to the wall. If Pablo Honey’s a ‘one’ and The Bends is ‘ten’ then OK Computer is ‘100’. A factor of ten every time.”

  The first single to be released from the album was the brilliant, decidedly loopy six-minutes plus of ‘Paranoid Android’. This time Thom was determined to underline the fact that the song was supposed to be, among other things, funny. The band were all big fans of animator Magnus Carlsson and his late-night cartoon Robin. Robin was an odd, slightly random character who wandered through his brightly coloured life with odd, slightly random things happening to him. They approached Magnus to see if he’d make a video for ‘Paranoid Android’ featuring Robin. He accepted, locked himself in a room and listened to the song over and over again. “We had really good fun doing this song,” Thom said, “so the video should make you laugh. I mean, it should be sick, too.

  The result was both – a brilliant, comic, surreal vision. It featured a man being dismembered, rescued by mermaids and then turned into a baby to be fed by a bird, among other highly memorable images. Typically, when it came out, MTV were happy to let all the violence appear but they insisted that the bare-breasted mermaids needed to be given bathing suits.

  In the UK, one sign of Radiohead’s new status as, in Nigel Powell’s words, ‘RADIOHEAD’, the most important band in the world, came with BBC Radio 1’s decision to playlist ‘Paranoid Android’ in the daytime. “Each time I’d hear it, I’d keep thinking about people doing intricate jobs in factories,” joked Thom to Nick Kent in Mojo, “working on industrial lathes – getting injured from the shock of being exposed to it.”

  It meant that the song was Radiohead’s biggest hit so far in the UK, reaching Number 3 in the charts, although it was less successful in the rest of the world. Originally they’d planned to commission videos for every track on the album, but the relative commercial failure of ‘Paranoid Android’ in America meant the plans had to be scaled back. In the end, they only made videos for the singles, which were, first, ‘Karma Police’ and then ‘No Surprises’.

  “I think they had about half a million quid set aside to do every video,” says Grant Gee, who directed ‘No Surprises’. “The first video was Magnus Carlsson’s ‘Paranoid Android’; the next one was Jonathan Glazer’s ‘Karma Police’. They’d done two and spent [most] of the 500 [grand] and I think then it was like, ‘Oh shit!’”

  The video for ‘Karma Police’ wasn’t as striking as ‘Paranoid Android’ but was also a work of art in its own right. It features a car slowly following a man who’s growing more and more tired as he runs along a deserted road. Halfway through the video, the camera pans to the back of the car where a completely blank, dismissive Thom is sitting occasionally mumbling the lyrics to the song. Director Jonathan Glazer later described the video as a “complete failure”. He’d tried to make it as minimalist and subjective as possible but he felt that it didn’t have the dramatic power that he wanted. Nevertheless the way it switches your sympathy between the runner and the car is highly effective. To begin with it seems like the car represents Karma, chasing down an offender, but as the terrified man turns the tables on his pursuer, lighting a trail of petrol and blowing the car up, it seems like it might be the other way round. It was typical of Thom that, rather than being the man chased, he preferred to portray himself as the chilling figure in the back of the car. His blank expression might have owed something to the fact that, as he sat there lip-synching to the music, something went wrong with the car and it started filling with carbon monoxide.

  But it was the ‘No Surprises’ video, a genuinely minimalist affair, that was to be the most memorable and significant video to come out of OK Computer. The disturbing image of Thom, with his head in a glass bowl slowly filling up with water came to represent in the public mind exactly what being in Radiohead was like for him. This image was reinforced by the documentary made by the same director, Grant Gee, the ironically titled Meeting People Is Easy.

  13

  MEETING PEOPLE IS EASY

  They must have wondered what they were thinking. At a hotel in Barcelona, Radiohead were literally surrounded by journalists. There were journalists walking down every corridor, sitting in the lobby and waiting by the bar clutching Dictaphones and swapping notes. For the launch of OK Computer, they’d decided to get all the interviews out of the way in one mighty splurge but they hadn’t realised quite how many there would be. It was the equivalent of a child eating their greens by piling them high on a fork, covering them in ketchup and wolfing them down all at once.

  “They were doing this crazily intense launch scene in Barcelona,” says Grant Gee. “So while they were off touring if anyone asked they could say, ‘Fuck off, we already did the interview.’ It was something like a hundred interviews over three or four days and two shows. All in one hotel. It was something to see – corridors full of journalists!”

  Grant was in an odd position. He was part of the media scrum yet not really. His role was to film the chaos for some, as yet unspecified, future DVD. At the time he was relatively unknown. He’d directed videos for the band Spooky, who Thom really liked, but he wasn’t (yet) a big name like Jonathan Glazer. Nevertheless when they were looking for somebody to shoot some footage of the press day Dilly Gent, who commissioned videos for EMI, suggested Grant.

  “They knew it would be very crazy with hundreds of cameras pointing at them and their commissioner, Dilly, who’s a very smart woman, very important to the whole thing, said, ‘Why don’t you get somebody who’s going to be on this side of all those cameras with you.’ So I got the job.”

  It was just supposed to be a one-off thing but when he looked at the extraordinary footage that he’d got in Barcelona, Grant realised that there was something bigger there. “I just had this four day job and I got all this footage and showed it to Dilly and she really liked it,” says Grant. “And I said, ‘Look, if you keep me on this job I can do something really good.’ And then it took about another four or five months before anybody said anything and I wrote a proposal saying, ‘This is what I want to do’ and after four or five months they said, ‘Alright, come and film them on tour.’”

  It was a brave, even perverse decision, for a band who’d largely managed to preserve a degree of privacy. Apart from Thom and perhaps Jonny, the rest of the band were rarely recognised even in t
heir hometown of Oxford. Nevertheless, when they met Grant, they liked and trusted him. So much so that, as with everybody they worked with, they gave him free rein to do whatever he wanted. It helped that Grant was, in some respects, a similar character – polite, diffident and middle-class.

  “It was little things like they’re from Oxford and I went to college in Oxford,” says Grant. “Ed said he remembered seeing me at this indie club that we used to go to. He’s about four years younger than me and he said, ‘Yeah, I think I remember you.’”

  When they went on tour, Grant came with them and it wasn’t what he’d expected at all. “It was sort of insane,” he says. “It was situations designed to make you mad, the repetition, the long stretches of boredom … the repetition. You meet someone new and they say the same things to you. You go to a new city and it looks the same and people talk to you the same. I know it’s what anyone who goes on tour says, but I’d never seen it before. Because of identifying with them as sensitive twenty-something blokes, and being able to see it through their eyes, and because it was all kicking off and spiralling very quickly, how big a band they were over that year, it really sharpened what happened.”

  The resulting documentary, Meeting People Is Easy, shows them struggling to cope with the endless demands of the promotional machine. Even little things seem too much. At one point, recording a thank you for an NME award, Thom looks like a little boy being forced by his parents to thank a distant aunt for a hand-knitted pullover. It’s hard to tell whether the rest of the band, sitting behind him, are more frustrated with him or the situation.

  It looks like a kind of hell but Grant has always admitted that there were plenty of good times. “The shows were great,” he says. “I had a nice time. We listened to music, went to bars and things like that but as an activity you just realised that this is not good, this type of behaviour all the time. As sensitive and intelligent men, you could really see it affecting them. But it certainly wasn’t awful. The hotels were really nice, the food was really good.”

  Jonny said later that the film was accurate in that it emphasised the parts of touring that somebody who’d never done it before would find surprising. “Obviously it isn’t like that all the time,” he said to JAM. “Sometimes you are sat on the beach in Australia having a day off, thinking this is the greatest. I think he was surprised to see what goes on, so he made a film about it. That is always going to be far more interesting than the guys having a beer backstage and laughing.” “We could’ve edited it to make it look like we were having a really good time,” said Thom in a TV interview, “there was just as much footage of that.”

  The main problem, for Thom in particular, was that he’d never been somebody who could just unquestioningly accept being told what to do without good reason. A large part of the promotional process seemed to consist of doing ridiculous things over and over again with no obvious purpose. Like many people who’ve met Radiohead, Grant remembers the rest of the band as incredibly nice, friendly characters but Thom, while perfectly courteous and accommodating, was never so easy to figure out.

  “He could seem quite intimidating because he’s so intense,” Grant says. “I don’t know what he’s like now, but then I’d never met anybody whose nerves were so much on display. It was as if he had no skin at all. Whatever anyone else was feeling, he was feeling a few times more intensely. Which was the great thing about him. Which was why he was such a fantastic rock star.”

  But it was also why he has always found elements of the job so difficult to deal with. At times, the whole band did. Nigel Powell is dubious about how accurately Meeting People Is Easy portrays life on the road with Radiohead but he admits that there were moments when it’s extremely odd.

  “I’m sure that given the amount of footage that a documentary maker shoots, if he’d wanted the make the tour look like the fun-est (sic) time you could have with your clothes on, then he probably could have,” he says. “There was an editorial bent to it of emphasising what a load of old bollocks it can be. The only time I got the impression that Jonny was really hacked off with it all was when they went out to America to do two weeks straight of promo, no playing, just talking to people and I talked to him halfway through that and he said, ‘This is awful.’

  “I can understand because I’ve done a similar kind of thing myself [in the Unbelievable Truth] and you almost forget why you’re a musician. You can do eight or ten interviews a day and everyone’s asking you the same questions. It gets very strange.”

  Eventually Radiohead would come up with games to make even more interesting. Just to keep themselves sane. “They’d set little rules for each other in phone interviews like: ‘In this one you have to say the word ‘no’ fifteen times in a row. So at some point they’d go ‘No, no, no … no, no, no, no, no … no, no, no, no, no, no, nooo.’ Just stuff like that,” says Nigel. “One particularly classic one was Ed doing an interview with a magazine called Good Times but I think Jonny told him he should do it as if he was talking to (marijuana subculture magazine) High Times, so throughout the interview, he was making reference to that kind of thing, trying to make the interview relevant to the demographic of the magazine!”

  It was always much easier for the rest of them than it was for Thom. He was the leader of the band, the face of Radiohead and the person everybody wanted to talk to. Even playing live, the part of the job he loved most was hugely draining.

  “You have to go into this completely different mindset,” he told Pitchfork. “It’s great, but you are exposed to all this extra stuff that you don’t have to deal with when you stop. I’m getting used to it now, but it’s kind of just the fall-out. It’s really weird. It’s not a natural situation to be in. It sounds like moaning, because I know that’s what I’m supposed to do, and I’m not moaning.”

  “You can say what you want about Thom’s fragile persona,” said Colin in an interview with Yahoo, “but someone who works as hard as he does and then performs in front of 10,000 people every night and reveals his emotional candour – physically, he is a strong person and emotionally, he is very sensitive, too. People think he is fragile and fucked up, but not really, don’t think so. Do an eighteen-month tour around the world and see how you feel.”

  After eighteen months, Thom felt wrecked. After the jubilation of Glastonbury he just wanted to go home. He didn’t think they’d ever be able to top that. Every other day he would say to the rest of the band “I don’t wanna do this!” And the management or the band would coax him on. People would tell him that if he did it just this once, he’d never have to do it again. It was the opposite of the normal situation in the band. Normally, Thom would be the one driving everybody on, telling them to try that bit harder when they were ready to give up.

  “I guess they were right,” he said to Q afterwards. “Go and flog yourself to death, make the most of it. But I think it was unwise. Because we were playing badly, we weren’t interested. By the end we weren’t listening to each other. If you want the truth!”

  One problem was that, having had the kind of highs they’d experienced making the record and playing enormous gigs, going back to normality felt like an equally enormous low. “Everything that’s happened after Glastonbury has been a let-down,” Thom said to Melody Maker’s Neil Kulkarni in 1998. “The feeling when I shouted at the lighting engineer to turn the lights on the crowd so I could see at least one person, ’cos we couldn’t see anything … there were 40,000 people up the hill, holding lighters and fires burning, and tents pitched, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt like that in my entire life. It wasn’t a human feeling, it was something else entirely.”

  After that, the relatively run-of-the-mill gigs on tour, night after night, couldn’t quite match up. And Thom always had a horror of going through the motions. This is captured at one point in Meeting People Is Easy where Thom tells the rest of the band that he’s struggling to cope. Grant’s not sure whether his presence there influenced how the band felt or not. “There’s a scene in th
e film where Thom says ‘Why don’t we just call it off. I don’t know if I can do this anymore’,” says Grant. “In retrospect, I’m not sure how much of that was because I was there. I could be completely wrong but it might be that Thom wanted to say that and have it recorded. But I didn’t have any doubt at the time that it was the real thing.”

  He’s adamant that there was no editorial bent to Meeting People Is Easy but his status as an insider within the Radiohead camp meant that he was careful about what he shot. “That’s the interesting thing,” he says. “When is it OK to turn the camera on and when should you really turn it off? How much trust do you have with someone in that situation? There were a number of times when stuff was happening and I just couldn’t turn the camera on. I know it’s awful because you should be like one of these war guys who go, ‘Just get in there, film everything!’ There was lots of funny stuff. There were things I filmed literally like that [holds hands up as if unable to look through the viewfinder].”

  One thing he left out of the film was the appearance of Marilyn Manson backstage after a show. They got a message from the American star’s ‘people’ just before they went onstage that he’d like to see them. When he turned up later they were relieved to see that he was perfectly nice and normal. Until, bizarrely, he gave Thom a present. It was a piece of jewellery.

  “It was this sort of Gothy, batty thing,” says Grant. “It was one of those things where Thom was just a bit bemused and Marilyn was trying to be nice. Nobody was quite understanding each other. It was really funny but if we’d put it in the only way of seeing it would have been that we were taking the piss out of the American rock star. But it was funny.”