Thom Yorke

by Trevor Baker

  Thom still hadn’t got used to the fact that major stars wanted to come and meet him. Radiohead were on a different plateau than they’d been on before. Even when ‘Creep’ went global they weren’t courted by celebrities. They were playing bigger venues than ever before and it looked like they were on the verge of becoming a stadium band like U2. It was a situation that Thom half-dreaded. He’d always been terrified of developing stage fright. He sometimes thought it could happen very easily. At one show in Ireland, it almost did.

  It was in front of about 33,000 people, by far their biggest headline show. Thom told Hot Press that he was ‘absolutely cacking’ himself. The night before he had an incredibly vivid dream that he would later describe as the most distinctive memory of the year. He was running down the River Liffey in Dublin, “stark bollock naked, being pursued by a huge tidal wave.”

  Grant didn’t know the state Thom was heading for but the video treatment he wrote for ‘No Surprises’ could be seen as a metaphor for somebody who’s starting to go under. The out-takes that appeared in Meeting People Is Easy, of Thom soaked, gasping for breath, became perhaps the most striking image of the singer at the time. Grant just hadn’t realised how difficult it would be for him to hold his breath underwater with the camera on him.

  “He’s not precious,” says Grant. “All he cares about is whether it’s a good piece of work. But I felt bad when he came to do it. All he cared about when I was talking about it was, ‘How long do I have to hold my breath for?’ ‘About fifty seconds.’ ‘No problem.’ He didn’t care. Until he had to do it.”

  When he came to do it, things were very different. For take after take Thom attempted to hold his breath but every time he came up spluttering after fewer than thirty seconds. By the end, he was swearing furiously. He couldn’t understand why it was so difficult.

  “It wasn’t that difficult if you weren’t under any pressure,” says Grant. “But as soon as you get any adrenaline, your breathing goes shallow and quick and that’s just what can’t happen. So we had these stand-ins who could do it. We knew that Thom could hold his breath that long. But as soon as you put lights on somebody and go ‘Action!’ you can see in the film what happens. It was really horrible. He started doing it and had four or five goes and it became apparent that it was nowhere near it. He’d be able to hold his breath for about ten seconds.”

  The atmosphere in the studio got progressively worse as the crew sat there not knowing what to do, not knowing whether it was OK to put somebody through this. “It was horrible for me because I didn’t have anything to do,” says Grant. “My whole thing with that was not to direct. Because I’m not a very good ‘proper’ director in that way. I just like setting situations going and then recording them. It was like designing a machine that will make a pop video. Then you just turn the camera on. So I had nothing to do after I’d given the lighting guy the cues. All I said to Thom was, ‘If you feel chuffed when you come out, don’t be afraid to show it.’ I said, ‘Don’t sing your heart out, you just need to talk through it.’ But it was unpleasant watching it because he was suffering. The more he couldn’t do it when he knew he should be able to do it, the more upset he was getting. He was shaking with rage. It was not nice to be around.” Ever the perfectionist, even at a personal cost.

  But by then Thom trusted Grant and he didn’t want to let him down. Part of the reason that, in their early days, they hadn’t enjoyed making videos was that they just didn’t like working with people they didn’t know.

  “The thing that always kills me stone dead about making videos is they cost so much money and you meet the director once and you never see him again,” Thom said to Spin magazine. “It’s like sleeping with someone and never seeing them again. Videos should be much more about having a group of people who hang out and do stuff whenever. I find it very destabilising to constantly have to work with different people.”

  “There was that American video woman,” Jonny Greenwood remembered of one video. “She came over with us on a video shoot and said, ‘Can’t you make the little chap jump up and down a bit?’”

  At least Thom knew Grant by then. He knew that if he could get through it they’d have something startling and different for the video. That was all that mattered. And, finally, he managed to triumph. “The Assistant Director on the shoot was this larger-than-life avuncular American character called Barry Vasserman, who’s a great pop video AD,” says Grant. “He sat with Thom all day and said, ‘OK Thom, we’re gonna do this, ten seconds at a time, five seconds more each time. Here we go, ‘OK, Tommy, and you’re out. OK, five!’ They got up to about 45 seconds and he said, ‘OK, we’re up to 45 seconds. We’re gonna do a take. Next time you’re gonna do a take Tommy. You’re gonna make it boy!’ It was that sort of thing. So he did it and, boom! Perfect. Then he did it again and I said, ‘OK, the first one’s better’ and we used the first one.” In the end it looked easy but it had taken almost two days. Thom later said it was “the most terrifying thing I have ever done in my life.”

  The famous video worked partly because the relief on Thom’s face when he finally managed to get through fifty seconds without coming up for air is genuine. The result, for all its simplicity, was mesmerising.

  Thom would have similar feelings two or three years later when he finally managed to deal with the fall-out of OK Computer and their endless tour schedule but, in 1998, the worst was still to come. “On the OK Computer tour,” he told Andrew Mueller, “we were in a situation where people were trying to persuade us to carry on touring for another six months, we should have said no but we didn’t, and I went bonkers.”

  It was a deliberately glib assessment of the way he felt but Thom was starting to feel distinctly uncomfortable again. He said that he was seeing things out of the corner of his eye. He couldn’t deal with the fact that so much of his time and of the band’s time was spent dealing with things that seemingly had no relevance to music, or to anything else that he cared about. What made it much, much worse was that he felt like OK Computer was a dead end. After that there was nowhere else to go. During 1998 they only played one gig, a benefit for Amnesty International. It was the longest period of inactivity they’d had since they started the band. Even when they’d been away at university, they’d managed to play more often. At the start of 1999, for the first time in his life, Thom felt like he couldn’t express himself the way he’d always been able to express himself – through music.

  “New Year’s Eve 1998 was one of the lowest points of my life,” he told Danny Eccleston in Q magazine. “I felt like I was going fucking crazy. Every time I picked up a guitar I just got the horrors. I would start writing a song, stop after sixteen bars, hide it away in a drawer, look at it again, tear it up, destroy it … I was sinking down and down.”

  It wasn’t the first time he’d struggled with feelings of doubt about what he was doing and where he was going but it was undoubtedly the worst. “I was a mess, a really bad mess,” he said later in a Dutch documentary. “I found myself in a place I didn’t want to be and I didn’t recognise myself and I wasn’t sure what it was we were supposed to have done. I didn’t have much to hold on to. Two year writing block, writing stuff and throwing it away. It’s like losing someone you love.”

  He ended up spending a lot of time walking around Oxford, just watching people, trying to get back some idea of what ‘normal’ meant. “It was bad,” he said later. “The ultimate reality check.”

  Unlike before and during The Bends, though, there was no question that the band were about to split up. They’d been through that stage and they knew that they were stuck with each other.

  “They gave the impression of having known each other forever,” says Grant. “They’d been together for about twelve or eleven years. People would sigh rather than get angry. They were a very mature band. You hear bands now when they get to their forties and fifties go, ‘I used to hate him but we’ve got over it now.’ Or if that doesn’t happen, the band splits up. They seemed
to have got beyond that already by 28, 29.”

  But if they weren’t going to split up and Thom had no desire to be a rock star or write rock songs anymore, then what were they going to do? It was something that he had to decide for himself. The rest of the band were left in a position where they didn’t know what would happen next. The massive acclaim that OK Computer received should have helped … but it didn’t.

  “There’s a pervading sense of loneliness that I’ve had since the day I was born,” Thom said in an interview with Rolling Stone. “Maybe a lot of other people feel the same way but I’m not about to run up and down the street asking everybody if they’re as lonely as I am. I’d probably get locked up.”

  And Thom had still not got used to being a rock star. He didn’t like the feeling of being public property. “I went to the supermarket the other day,” he told Launch, “and it was a really shitty day, and I had been drinking all day, which I don’t normally do. And I went shopping and I was walking out with all these bags, growling, and this middle-aged lady came up to me, and said, ‘It’s really good. You don’t have to worry. It’s a really good record. You don’t have to worry.’ And then she wandered off. That was strange.”

  Another time a fan managed to trace his email address, despite the fact that he was using a pseudonym that he thought nobody knew. On another occasion a stalker turned up at his house and demanded to see him. “He said, ‘What shall I do?’ remembers Mark Cope, “and I said, ‘Tell her to fuck off or you’re not going to make any more music.’ He said ‘why didn’t I think of that?!’”

  But not everybody was so easy to get rid of. At music industry parties, celebrities would suddenly demand to be his best friend, purely on the strength of the fact that they were both in the public eye. At one party an unnamed celebrity gave him a lecture about the way he behaved after he rudely refused to acknowledge his gushing compliments.

  “I couldn’t do it, you know?” he said. “I wasn’t really able to communicate with anyone except for people I really knew. I suppose the novelty of these people has worn off and I just sound like this sulky kid who has had a big birthday party but didn’t get the present he wanted and, you know, someone should just slap him around the face. And this guy was quite prepared to do that.”

  Thom suspected that the person in question would never have been interested in talking to him if it wasn’t for the fact that he was a star. He felt like a millionaire who wonders whether people are only interested in them for their money. “The sickness of it for me,” he said in a TV interview, “the bit that I couldn’t deal with, was that somehow this is a reason to exist. You get to a certain level of exposure or fame and then suddenly you can communicate with other famous people on a higher level and waft around going [airily] ‘Hiiii!’ I just thought that was a bit peculiar.”

  The way Radiohead worked also increased the pressure. They once read that Brian Eno had a card pinned to the wall of his recording studio reading, “Whatever worked last time, never do it again.” It had become their mantra, too, but it meant that every album was a massive full-stop. It meant that they had to go back to square one each time. After OK Computer, the only agenda Thom had was the same one he always had after an album was completed: next time everything should be completely different.

  14

  KID A

  “It sucks, fucking rock music sucks,” Thom said in a TV interview in 2000. “I hate it! I’m so fuckin’ bored of it. It’s a fuckin’ waste of time.”

  He didn’t mean that playing music with guitars, bass and drums was a complete waste of time (although he wasn’t quite as keen on that as he used to be). He meant everything that goes along with rock music: all the mythology and the marketing. On every album so far, he’d forced Radiohead to reinvent themselves but by this point it was hard to see where they could go. Thom even found it difficult to listen to OK Computer. He’d read all the press hailing it as the best record of the year, and then the best record ever made, but by now Radiohead’s influence was audible in many new records and he didn’t like what he was hearing.

  “I had this moment after OK Computer when I heard other people imitating what we’d done and I really didn’t like what it sounded like,” he told a German TV interviewer. “I had this moment of, ‘My God, this is really self-indulgent. Have I been responsible for this? That’s really awful.’”

  “Hearing people like myself on the radio made me not want to sound like me,” he also said. “I’d do anything to not sound like me.” Of course, he wasn’t responsible for people trying to imitate Radiohead and, in reality, The Bends had been much more influential than OK Computer. The Bends was a record that musicians listened to and felt that they could emulate if they tried hard enough. Not many bands tried to copy ‘Paranoid Android’. Talent spotter Simon Williams of the Fierce Panda record label has said that, after OK Computer, he came across noticeably fewer new indie bands. It wasn’t until The Strokes made it OK to make simple, three chord garage rock songs again that there was another surge in guitar sales.

  In 1995, even before they recorded OK Computer, Thom was already saying that he wanted to move towards electronic music. “I get really envious when I hear good jungle or stuff on Warp or the Tricky album,” he said to Ted Kessler in NME. “I get this sense that they made it in isolation and that there wasn’t this need to be in a bollocks guitar band going, ‘I want my guitar solo.’”

  However, the reaction to OK Computer completely freaked him out and, even after a year of inactivity, he still wasn’t ready to start making music again. Nevertheless, in February 1999 the five members of Radiohead met up at a studio in Paris. It was the first time they’d gone into the studio without any idea of what was going to happen. Ed and Colin wanted the next album to go back to something simpler. “My suggestion for OK Computer’s follow-up had been to say, ‘Let’s go back to the well-crafted three-and-a-half minute song,’” said Ed. Colin, meanwhile, felt the kind of electronica that Thom was now listening to sounded pretentious and emotionless.

  It made their meeting awkward and uncomfortable and the sessions were the worst they’d ever had. Thom had no idea what he wanted them to do next but he was very clear what he didn’t want them to do. They would start trying to play something and he’d explode with frustration, racing across the studio to stop the tape and insist that they try something else. What else? He didn’t know. There were two major things he now had a problem with: guitars and the sound of his own voice, both of which had previously been rather important to the success of Radiohead.

  “I didn’t want to use my own voice,” he said in a TV interview. “I thought we could still write good songs and not have to rely on this guy singing in this emotional hyperbole all the time. Let’s try something else. It can still be good.”

  He felt like the fixed idea that the world had of Radiohead was starting to become more of a hindrance than a help. “It ends up that you can’t be creative anymore,” he said. “That identity thing gets in the way.” The same fault lines that had emerged around the time of The Bends were back with a vengeance. The rest of the band appreciated and understood that Thom had a lot to deal with. They understood that he didn’t want to repeat what they’d done with the previous albums but they felt, understandably, that his perfectionism was preventing them from doing anything at all. Even worse, many of their arguments weren’t even about music.

  “It was just ‘fall-out’,” Thom said to Nick Kent. “Really sad. Personally speaking, during that time I was just a total fuckin’ mess. No one could say anything to me without me turning round and launching a vicious tirade at them. It got really, really bad.”

  Nigel Godrich was starting to lose patience with them. Talking to Mojo’s Nick Kent, he said they were acting like “a bunch of method actors.” Some days his role, according to Thom, was to act like “the adjudicator at a trial.”

  “My job involves a lot of psychology,” Nigel said to Rolling Stone in 2006. “The dynamic between people is very compli
cated. Ed is very much a diplomat. Jonny’s brilliant, and what comes out of him comes out very quickly. And with Thom – a lot of the time – I think he’s the king of self-sabotage. So I’m just trying to prevent him from destroying things he doesn’t realise are valuable.”

  It was a vicious circle. Without the release of making music, Thom was deeply unhappy and yet that unhappiness was preventing the band from getting anywhere. All they could do was just wait for him. The main problem was that he’d had enough of so-called ‘emotional music’. After months on tour, he started to feel like a fake when he sang songs that wore their heart on their sleeve. That’s why he was so keen on acts like Autechre or Aphex Twin, musicians who were finding new ways of expressing themselves without what he saw as the saccharine sentimentality of so much rock. This meant that he didn’t even like writing lyrics anymore. The words had been the cornerstone of Radiohead’s music since the Drill EP but not now. Thom was fed up of the scrutiny that his lyrics always went through, as they were strip-searched for clues to his own state of mind. This time he was determined to keep that closely under wraps. “Even now,” he said, “most interviews you do, there’s a constant subtext: ‘Is this you?’ By using other voices, I guess it was a way of saying, ‘Obviously it isn’t me.’”

  More seriously there were obsessive fans who had always looked to him for guidance, taking songs like ‘Exit Music’ and ‘The Bends’ as mantras to live by. Endlessly regurgitating his own feelings seemed hopelessly indulgent. There were more important things to worry about. He was obsessed with the way the global market-place took works of art and put them on the same level as a can of Coke or a pair of Nikes, as something to be sold. He’d been reading books by liberal and left-wing authors like Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein. The latter’s No Logo, a polemic about the ubiquity of advertising, made such a big impression on the band that they even considered naming the record after it.