Thom Yorke

by Trevor Baker

  But music had always been the way Thom dealt with his emotions. Having deliberately excluded himself from doing the same thing this time, he was spiralling downwards. What was music for if it wasn’t to express what he was feeling? The rest of the band didn’t know what to do with their singer and they weren’t sure what they were supposed to be doing in the studio.

  “Phil, Colin and I went through some major dilemmas at various stages,” Ed said to Nick Kent. “How could we contribute to this new music? We all wondered if it wasn’t better to just walk away. It was a very scary thing at first.”

  After a month in Paris the band gave up and scrapped most of what they’d done. “We soon became gridlocked,” Phil said. “Paris was very much a case of tripping ourselves up.” They next moved to Medley Studio in Copenhagen but these sessions only lasted for two weeks and were even worse. What did a band with three guitarists do in a studio while making a record with hardly any guitars on it? “Copenhagen was two weeks of us having a pretty horrendous time,” said Ed in Q. “At the end of it, we had about fifty reels of two-inch tape, and on each of those tapes was fifteen minutes of music. And nothing was finished.”

  In the past, when Thom brought in a demo they all knew what they had to do. Generally it would consist of him playing the acoustic guitar and singing. They could then build a song around it, adding bass, guitar and drum parts. This time the demos he was bringing in often just consisted of samples, weird noises and scraps of sound. It wasn’t clear what exactly they were supposed to do.

  In April 1999, they moved to Barsford Park in Gloucestershire, attempting to recapture the success of the early OK Computer sessions, but the slow, painful process of trying things out and rejecting the results just continued. Perversely, Thom got a corporate style whiteboard and wrote the titles of all the songs they were working on up there. There were fifty or sixty. Hardly any were finished. Some he hadn’t even played them and some were little more than ideas.

  Perhaps surprisingly, the member of Radiohead who was most enthusiastic about their new direction was Jonny Greenwood. By 1998 he was acclaimed as one of the most original and exciting guitarists of his generation but he’d started on keyboards and had no desire to be stuck in the rock band rut either. He once said that he often felt that ‘Radiohead’ itself was a sixth member of the band who, whenever they’d done something once, would shout “bored now”, forcing them to do something completely different next time.

  There must have been moments when the rest of the band thought that if Thom and Jonny wanted to make an electronic album so badly, then maybe they should just make it on their own. But Thom was adamant that he wanted to make a Radiohead album. He said that he wouldn’t have the confidence to go it alone. Things started to move on when he bought a piano. He couldn’t write songs on the piano anything like as easily as he could on a guitar but the new way of working helped overcome his block. Similarly, Jonny largely abandoned the guitar in favour of playing a kind of early synthesiser called an Ondes Martenot.

  At least this way they knew they couldn’t repeat themselves. Slowly things became easier. In June 1999, Ed O’Brien began keeping an online studio diary and the first entry finishes with the, almost defiant, line: “A fucking brilliant rehearsal. It’s great to be in our band.”

  A week later, the optimism has disappeared and things have gone backwards again. “A pretty frustrating day,” he says of July 27, “but now we’ve been doing this for so long, you realise it can’t all be like last week.”

  By then some of the band, Jonny in particular, were starting to think that maybe it was easier when they had a record company deadline. On August 4, they had another “frank” discussion. Once again they realised that all they’d learned during this recording process was how not to do things. But how many times can you learn the same lesson? “It’s taken us seven years to get this sort of freedom,” said Ed, “and it’s what we always wanted, but it could be so easy to fuck it all up.”

  It’s not surprising that things were taking so long. It was as if a group of people who’d never played the guitar, bass or drums before suddenly decided to make a rock record. First of all they had to learn how to use their new instruments. “I spent a year just learning how computers work,” Colin said.

  In September 1999, their new studio in Oxfordshire was finally ready and they were starting to feel much more comfortable. It was a beautiful converted barn in the middle of the countryside, not far from the village hall where they’d had their first rehearsals. It had a high, vaulted ceiling, perfect acoustics and natural reverb. By now, the rest of the band had figured out how they could fit in to the new way of doing things. After scratching around for month after month, things suddenly seemed to click into place. The only worry for any band having their own studio is that the economy and convenience can send the levels of self-indulgence sky-rocketing.

  “You set up your own studio and the first thing you think is, ‘OK, we’re gonna go so far up our own arses now and never come out the other end,’ said Thom to Hot Press. “And so I think we were quite heavily paranoid about that. It was something that we’d always wanted. But when we got it, we were a bit dumbfounded for ages, about the fact that we could go in and do stuff whenever we wanted and we weren’t paying anybody.”

  But things were moving forward much faster now. It helped that, although there was a great deal of digital manipulation, it was all done live. They didn’t record songs in a straightforward fashion and then mess about with them on the computer. When Thom created the weird, disorientating effects on his vocal, he would sing directly into the antiquated, proto-synth devices they were using. It was peculiarly satisfying. It didn’t sound like him and that was exactly what he wanted. He was bored of the sound of his own voice and bored of the sound of Radiohead’s guitars, but somehow they’d found a way around that.

  He also found a way to save the lyrics that, previously, he’d been writing and then furiously screwing into a ball and throwing away. He simply cut them up, put them into a hat and then shuffled them around. “That was really cool,” he said in an interview with Dutch TV, “because … I managed to preserve whatever emotions were in the original writing of the words but in a way that it’s like I’m not trying to emote.”

  It’s ironic that, during a time when “emoting” was becoming increasingly popular with all the bands who’d drawn inspiration from The Bends and OK Computer, Thom couldn’t think of anything worse. He’d discovered that however real the emotion might have seemed initially, it always started feeling false when it had been through the music industry wringer for a few months. Among other things it was impossible to sing a song onstage night after night and “mean it” just as much every time. It had taken him a long time to get used to that fact. It had also severely dented his confidence but the recording of ‘The National Anthem’ helped bring that back.

  It was based around a riff he’d had since he was sixteen. The band had recorded a version of it in the mid-1990s and decided that it was too good to be a B-side. But they’d never managed to get it quite right. Thom had been listening to a lot of Charles Mingus and he wanted it to have the same kind of aggressive sound as the jazz musician’s notorious 1962 Town Hall Concert. It was supposed to be a rehearsal for an album Mingus wanted to record but instead it was publicised as a concert. Most members of the audience thought they were there to listen to a new record, instead the poorly rehearsed musicians jammed hysterically over the top of each other as Mingus urged the crowd to ask for their money back. At the time it was considered a disaster but it was exactly the kind of inspired chaos that Thom was looking for.

  Unfortunately, he knew that it would be difficult to make the typical session musician understand that. He’d been frustrated in the past by some professional session players who came in, did a day’s work and then left. He wanted something different. Jonny was in touch with the Head Of Music at Abingdon School who’d taken over from Terence Gilmore-James and he asked him whether he knew a
ny good brass players. The new head suggested another occasional teacher at the school, Andy Bush, who was also a successful jazz musician.

  “I think they’d previously used a fixer in London to book their string players and it hadn’t been an altogether happy experience,” Andy told this author. “I’m sure they got musically what they wanted but they didn’t enjoy the work-to-rule aspect of a lot of mainstream session players. Sometimes you get a situation where people turn up, they’re not really that bothered what they’re doing, you’re there for three hours and then you go away. It’s not very personal. They’d had their fingers burnt with people watching the clocks and getting their contracts out. They wanted to find a connection with someone who was more sympathetic to their way of working. And, hopefully, somebody who was interested in their music. Which I was and, accordingly, I booked guys who all really liked Radiohead even before we met them.”

  Andy put together a group of eight players who were summoned to Oxfordshire to help out. For all of them it was a bizarre but inspiring experience. They arrived and Jonny handed them the sheet music that they were supposed to play but they quickly realised it wasn’t really necessary. Saxophonist Steve Hamilton, who played on the sessions, told this author that they were allowed to do pretty much whatever they wanted.

  “Jonny Greenwood presented us with parts which were completely dispensed with after about five minutes,” he says, “and we just made it up as we went along. There was a core part that they wanted to hear but only very subliminally, I think. We just basically digested that and made up our own thing and made a bit of a noise.”

  To start with, it didn’t quite work. The horn players weren’t used to performing together in such a loose, improvised fashion and it was hard to see exactly what Thom and Jonny wanted. It’s not entirely clear if they knew themselves.

  “It wasn’t gelling,” says baritone sax player Stan Harrison, who also played. “It wasn’t unified. I said to Thom and Jonny Greenwood, ‘One way for you to solve this problem would be for you to conduct us. If you want us to play louder then make this type of hand motion, softer this type of hand motion, more frenetic this kind of hand motion. At least then we’ll have more of an idea of what the whole thing is supposed to feel like.”

  They weren’t sure. The whole point was that it was supposed to be improvised and both Thom and Jonny felt slightly embarrassed about conducting a group of talented, professional musicians. [With admirable modesty] they were both conscious that their own creativity and imagination often outstripped their technical proficiency. Who were they to ‘conduct’ anybody? But when they accepted that the session needed some kind of direction, things took a sudden leap forward.

  “Thom or Jonny said, ‘I’ve never done anything like that before, I don’t know,’ says Stan. “But we tried it and within seconds they were jumping up and down and spinning around. I think Thom was on my side and Jonny was on the other side. It was something that I wish had been filmed. It was just so much fun to watch. All of a sudden they were taking these conductor roles when ten seconds before they were so reluctant to do it and then they were going crazy!”

  It was a hot day but, once he’d got started, Thom threw himself into the role of conductor with an enthusiasm and energy that startled and inspired the horn players. “It almost felt like he was doing a Jackson Pollock,” says Steve. “He was jumping up and down, doing what he does onstage, but he was doing that almost in an exaggerated fashion. It seemed a little bit bizarre. Musicians are typically, by nature, a little bit reserved sometimes but it was actually completely spot-on. He got exactly what he wanted out of us by whatever he was doing. I’m not sure what he was doing! It did actually inspire us to really give it some. He was saturated with sweat just from jumping up and down.”

  In fact Thom jumped up and down so vigorously that, he said later, he ended up breaking his foot. Nevertheless he was delighted with the result. He wanted them to create the kind of discordant, violent energy that he felt was trapped in a traffic jam and they got it absolutely right. On the finished version, you can almost hear the angry car horns.

  “On the day I said to them, ‘You know when you’ve been in a traffic jam for four hours and if someone says the wrong thing to you, you’ll just kill ’em, you’ll fucking snap and probably throttle them?” he said to Juice magazine.

  The horn players didn’t escape the band’s notorious perfectionism. Thom and Jonny were excited and enthusiastic about what they were hearing but they kept thinking that they might be able to get something better. “They kept coming up to us and saying ‘This is so good, this is brilliant, that’s the take we love,’” says Steve. “And then, ‘Can we do another one?’ It was the usual thing – ‘That’s perfect, let’s do another one.’”

  Meanwhile the rest of the band kept coming in and complimenting them on what they were coming up with. “It was a pleasure working with them,” Steve says. “They were so complimentary. They kept saying, ‘Oh, it’s so good, thank you for coming down and doing this.’ It was almost embarrassing how often they said how good it was. Well, actually it isn’t that good! We’re just mucking around on our instruments.”

  But they were all impressed by the creative relationship between Thom and Jonny. “Thom didn’t communicate that much with us,” says Steve. “It was more like he was driving the ship and Jonny was first officer relaying the artistic information to us. I remember it being very intense but I’ve never done a session where you could really just do whatever you liked within quite a broad framework.

  I remember getting in the car with one of the other players afterwards and the typical thing with musicians is that you give them a gig and they moan about it. We said, ‘It’s really bizarre, there’s nothing to moan about.’ They were really nice. They cooked us a really nice dinner and the music was good and they were really complimentary!”

  With its weirdly catchy bass riff, played on record by Thom, ‘The National Anthem’ proved that they could make electronic music that had the same bite as rock. Months later, when they played it live for a French TV station, they showed the session musicians how much they’d appreciated their contribution.

  “One nice thing they did in Paris, they presented us all with a platinum disc of Kid A,” says Steve. “Bands very often don’t bother to do that sort of thing and they did it personally. I remember being quite chuffed about that. They called us into a room when we were doing [French TV channel] Canal Plus and Thom said, ‘I’d just like to thank you for all your hard work and present these to you.’ It was very sweet. I was quite touched. Bands don’t tend to do that anymore.”

  15

  TRAVELLING CIRCUS

  By the end of 1999, Radiohead had finished six songs and it seemed like they were all moving in the same direction. Thom was pleasantly surprised to be able to sit back and listen as Jonny took over the demo he’d done for ‘How To Disappear Completely’, writing a string arrangement, conducting an orchestra and playing the Martenot. This record – to be called Kid A – was the album where Thom had dominated proceedings more than any other but it was a relief when he realised that the rest of the band were with him.

  “Thom drove the album,” said Ed afterwards to Q. “It was an eye-opener for me. He has a great art school ethic. He did art at university and he has that kind of drive: OK, I’ve done that. Now I’m going to move on. I think I can be vaguely objective about this, and I think Thom is in the line of the John Lennons, the David Bowies, part of that heritage. He has an incredible gift.”

  By now, all of Radiohead were experimenting with sampling, cutting-and-pasting rhythm, as well as finding new roles for themselves within the band. They had one more big bust up, on February 1, but by Spring 2000, all of a sudden, they had thirty songs. Many of these, typically, were tracks that they’d rejected back in Copenhagen and Paris when their confidence was at a low ebb. They listened to songs like ‘Morning Bell’ and ‘Spinning Plates’ and suddenly realised how good they were. According to Thom, the
y listened to them and said, “That’s fucking amazing, why the hell did we stop working on that?” Part of the reason why things suddenly accelerated was because many of the songs only needed minor tweaks. Often when they’d got close to finishing something, Thom had veered off to start something else. “I was doing that for about six months,” he said to Hot Press, “because I really didn’t want to finish things and have to put them out to people and have to deal with all that crap that I’d essentially forgotten about.”

  They’d had weeks and months of doing almost nothing but, eventually, Thom realised that was part of the creative process, too. It was much easier to deal with in their own studio where there wasn’t an accountant hovering in the background worrying about how much it was all going to cost. As with OK Computer, though, the hardest part was still to come. They had to choose what songs to put on the album and what order to put them in. It sounds simple but Thom always found it unbearable.

  “The track listing is always the hardest part for me,” he told NY Rock. “It is so difficult and almost painful. I can only use the old metaphor about songs being like children. My songs are my kids and some of them stay with me. Some others I have to send out, out to the war.”

  This might seem extreme but the rest of the band agreed about how important it was to get the track-listing right, even if they weren’t as obsessive about it as Thom. “I can assure you: it’s hell,” Colin said. “We have meetings that take hours – often from 4p.m. until midnight – only about the order of the songs.”