Thom Yorke

by Trevor Baker

  Saxophonist Steve Hamilton met Humphrey when he joined Radiohead for a performance of ‘Life In A Glass House’ on Later With Jools Holland and he told this author that while the collaboration might have seemed incongruous to start with, it ultimately made perfect sense. “I knew Humphrey before and we were chatting in the canteen and it did seem a bit odd that he was doing this thing with Radiohead,” he says. “And it looked a bit odd as well, but it all came together and they were just making music together. I think he thought it was a bit of an adventure. It was at the BBC so he was on his own turf. He probably felt more comfortable there than anybody else. I think he thoroughly enjoyed it. You couldn’t fail to get stuck in and enjoy that sort of thing because it was very laid-back. He was at the BBC and playing with his quartet, playing his own style of music. It just happened to be with a really cutting-edge band. He seemed completely unfazed by it.”

  “It was a pretty inspired idea from Radiohead to put that New Orleans funeral cortege thing in their music,” says Andy Bush. “That’s what they were after and what better guys to get. I think Humphrey really liked it. Whether guys of that generation are into that genre I don’t know, but they all respected them for having really fertile ideas. I think they were genuinely happy to be there. It’s unusual for somebody to write a script, musically, that incorporates all those disparate elements and it really, really works.”

  Seven years later, when Humphrey died, Jonny wrote on the Radiohead website: “We were all sorry to hear of Humphrey Lyttelton’s death – he was an inspiring person to record with, and without his direction, we’d never have recorded/released ‘Life In A Glasshouse’. So go and find ‘Bad Penny Blues’, and celebrate his life with some hot jazz.”

  ‘Life In A Glass House’ confused people a little when it first came out but, like so many Radiohead songs, it’s an experiment that paid off and one that gets better with every listen. The fact that Thom was happy to put out a song with a coherent narrative, a story that may or may not have been semi-autobiographical, also suggested that he was starting to recover from the fear of self-revelation that had struck him prior to Kid A.

  He’d been surprised when he read Radiohead’s early press to see how much was read into his lyrics. Ever since then he’d retreated from the direct approach of, say, ‘Creep’, towards increasingly oblique messages. On ‘High And Dry’, when he wanted to write about bands losing the plot, or his own relationship, he transferred the story to Evel Knievel. On OK Computer, most of the tracks are observational, stories about the things he’d seen in the previous few years. By the time of Kid A and Amnesiac, even that seemed like too much self-exposure. Most of the lyrics are deliberately obscure.

  “We had this whole thing about Amnesiac being like getting into someone’s attic, opening the chest and finding their notes from a journey that they’d been on,” Thom told Nick Kent. “There’s a story but no literal plot, so you have to keep picking out fragments. You know something really important has happened to this person that’s ended up completely changing them, but you’re never told exactly what it is.”

  This is best represented visually by the video they made for ‘I Might Be Wrong’, the first American single release. “They wanted it to look like it’d been buried for years and then dug up,” director Sophie Muller says, “like it had been there for thirty or forty years and it had been attacked by worms and rotted.”

  The video is deliberately obscure, filmed in black and white with dark, blurred images of Thom and Jonny reeling about in front of the camera in a massive, empty room. It was made to look as uninviting as possible, the antithesis of the typical music video. “The suggestion I made was that we use a pinhole camera and make it look very unpolished,” says Sophie. “If you use a pinhole camera, there’s no lens, it’s just a sheet of paper with a pinhole in it, so the image comes through the pinhole and reflects on the back of the camera and that’s it. You need a lot of light for there to be any image. So we had to use a very powerful light and they’d be very near it. We tried a lot of things, like slowing the song down four times and getting them to sing. I couldn’t even recognise the song. It just meant that the lens would be open longer for each frame. Thom really got into that. He found it quite exciting because he finds it quite boring doing normal playback.”

  Thom liked it because, unlike so many of their other videos, it wasn’t a big, ‘showy’ statement. If it said anything, it was that they were desperate to go back underground. The title of the album referred to Thom’s feeling that, like a goldfish, he was just going round and round in circles and doing the same thing over and over again. Never learning from his mistakes.

  “Most of the stuff on Amnesiac is about being trapped in one particular lock in your heart or your head,” Thom said in a TV interview. It was a feeling he’d had a lot during the period after OK Computer, constantly thinking the same things over and over. Amnesiac then, also represented a desire to forget. It was a theme he’d go back to with his later solo album The Eraser.

  “The song [‘I Might Be Wrong’] really comes as much from what my long-term partner Rachel was saying to me, like she does all the time, ‘Be proud of what you’ve done. Don’t look back and just carry on like nothing’s happened. Just let the bad stuff go,’” he said to Nick Kent. “When someone’s constantly trying to help you out and you’re trying to express something really awful, you’re desperately trying to sort yourself out and you can’t – you just can’t. And then one day you finally hear them – you finally understand, after months and months of utter fucking torment: that’s what that song is about.”

  This sense of agitation and fear is one of the things that comes across most strongly in both Kid A and Amnesiac, but the latter album is a little softer and slower. Outside America, the first single to be released was ‘Pyramid Song’ and this might have surprised many people who’d read the reviews and assumed that Radiohead were now an unlistenable art rock band. It was a gentle, almost lush song with one of Thom’s most poignant vocals. It was written after a day spent looking at Egyptian figurines in a museum and it has an exotic, dream-like feel.

  “The Egyptians have these rowboats that when they die they go through the Milky Way in,” he said in an interview with Yahoo. “It was based on that and a fusion of experiences that I had dreamed … I was reading the Tibetan Book Of The Dead too; that is guaranteed to fuck you up.”

  Despite very little airplay, ‘Pyramid Song’ was Radiohead’s biggest hit in the UK since ‘Paranoid Android’, peaking at Number 5. It was a vindication of Thom’s belief that it was the “best thing they’d ever put on tape”. Further vindication came when they played their only UK gig of the year, back in their hometown of Oxford. It was an outdoor festival at South Park on the edge of the city with support from Humphrey Lyttelton’s band, extraordinary Icelandic newcomers Sigur Rós, Beck, and fellow locals Supergrass. In some respects it was similar to their Glastonbury performance four years previously. Inevitably it rained. It always seemed to rain for them at big festivals. And, despite the fact that it was their own show, they had the same problems with equipment meltdown that they’d had in 1997. “The only UK gig – no pressure,” Thom quipped as his keyboard failed completely.

  But, from the opening bass line of ‘The National Anthem’, they comprehensively proved how good the songs on Kid A and Amnesiac were. The idea that they were oddball experiments or deliberately inaccessible was washed away with the rain. They also proved that they’d finally accepted their past with a remarkable, communal sing-a-long performance of ‘Creep’. Even for a band who’d always insisted that Oxford was no more than the place they happened to live, it must have been an emotional moment. It was the climax of three incredible years when, for the second time, they’d almost lost it and come back even stronger.

  The second single to be released from Amnesiac, ‘Knives Out’, received more airplay than anything else they’d done for a long time. It was a little more conventional, with a jangly guitar sound that wa
s reminiscent of The Smiths. It wasn’t one of their best songs but, helped by a brilliant, bizarre video from French director Michel Gondry, it too went Top Twenty in the UK.

  Still, the long slog of recording had worn them all out. The next time they made an album, they swore once again, they would do it quickly and not over-think things. Amnesiac is dedicated to “Noah and Jamie”, the first children of Thom Yorke and Phil Selway and, inevitably, they were now the priority. The arrival of his first son was also the moment that Thom’s political campaigning took on a new seriousness and a new urgency. Even when he was a student he’d been socially concerned but he was starting to feel like many of the issues he cared about most were now a matter of life and death.

  17

  ELECTIONEERING

  On June 18, 1999, Thom’s commitment to political change took a far more concrete expression than it had ever done before. It was the G8 meeting in Cologne, Germany and he was there, with a delegation including Bono, Bob Geldof, Youssou N’Dour and Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction. The idea had been to have a photo call in front of the conference building and then hand a petition over to the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröeder, calling for the West to cancel Third World debt by the year 2000.

  But, as they were hustled down a narrow street by the German police, far away from the conference hall, Thom wondered why he’d come. “There were seventeen million signatures on that petition,” he wrote in an article for Jubilee 2000 (the international coalition seeking the eradication of such debt). “There were 50,000 people in a human chain around Cologne and yet we were patronised, trivialised and bullied by both the G8 and the media.”

  Throughout the day, the authorities changed the route of the march, causing increasing frustration. Eventually they were searched for weapons and then allowed to meet the Chancellor on the steps of a museum well away from where the G8 meeting was being held. It was, Thom thought, a kind of game. The politicians were trying to give them as little as possible while making it look like they agreed with every word they said. He’d always been highly dubious about whether there was any point to this kind of PR politics and his experiences in Germany confirmed his belief that he was right.

  “Thom Yorke has zero tolerance for politicians,” Bono wrote in an online diary of the protests. “That video where he looks like Johnny Rotten in a shopping basket (‘Fake Plastic Trees’) is closer to his personality than the choir of street angels that haunts your ear. He was bristling with nervous energy and I wonder if that was a rocket launcher in his bag.”

  “Politicians nod and say ‘yes’, but that’s what’s dangerous about this particular moment in time,” Thom said to the BBC, “because what’s predicted at the end of the G8 summit this weekend, after we’ve handed in the petition, is they’ll announce that they’ve come up with a package which is basically what we asked for, which is actually not true at all – it’s a complete fabrication.”

  Before getting to Cologne, he’d spent hours poring over facts and figures about debt, ready for any question that was put to him. Instead he found that journalists were confusing the Jubilee 2000 Campaign with the Reclaim The Streets riots back in London. There was little interest in the substance behind the protests. He saw how skilful the politicians were at taking credit for the movement towards dropping the debt, without actually promising to do anything. Tony Blair, in particular, was a target for Thom’s ire.

  “You have Blair standing there smiling saying, ‘It’ll all be fine, we’ll cancel all these debts now,’ he said to Ireland’s Hot Press. “He was scoring all these celebrity points with Bono and Bob Geldof, and Alastair Campbell running around, you know, making sure he got the coverage he wanted, even though they actually hadn’t delivered anything at all. And, you know, I kinda saw the light in a certain way, but in another way it was incredibly disillusioning.”

  But then he came from the generation that had seen Bono at Live Aid and seen that charity on its own wasn’t enough, so it wasn’t as if he was an innocent before Jubilee 2000. It seemed like every other month since then there had been another charity concert, they even played one, ‘Free Tibet’ in 1997, and yet the root causes of the problems remained. Since Live Aid, the West had taken vastly more money from the developing world in interest payments on debt than it had given back with charity. Thom likened the West to a loan shark and called the approach “basically extortion”.

  Thom had been willing to try the new approach to politics of Bono and Bob Geldof in the late 1990s. It involved, essentially, treating politicians as compassionate people who were open to persuasion. Instead of spitting at world leaders from the outside, they were now trying to change things from the inside. But when it didn’t seem to work, Thom was angrier than ever. This came across in the songs like ‘You And Whose Army?’ on Amnesiac, which was none-too-subtly aimed at Blair and his supposed ‘cronies’. If he thought things were bad in 1999, though, they took a distinct turn for the worst in 2000 with the election of George W Bush in America. As a highly prescient headline in satirical newspaper The Onion said about America that year, ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’.

  That year, Thom had a sense of hopelessness that was only occasionally blasted away by righteous indignation. He could easily have given up on politicking but there was another issue that seemed even more important than Jubilee 2000. The special edition of Kid A included what, at the time, seemed a bit of a curio, a chart giving details of the melt-rates of glaciers around the world. Even then there were still many people who disagreed with the science of man-made global warming but, as it became harder to deny that it was happening, Thom couldn’t understand why nothing was being done.

  “Like many of my friends and anyone who has kids, it’s a difficult thing,” he said later, in an interview to promote Friends Of The Earth. “You wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it. You look into the eyes of your children and hope that they don’t grow up in a future that has riots for fuel or constant floods and infrastructure collapse.”

  Part of his despair between OK Computer and Kid A came from a feeling of helplessness. Every new scientific study was producing more evidence to suggest that global warming was a massive threat to the state of the planet and yet it didn’t seem like there was anything he or anybody else could do. It would be several years before he would feel that there was any possibility of change. Despite this, he’d always gone through cycles of despair and enthusiasm. Even at university he was heavily involved in politics.

  “He’s always had a real conscience and been involved in politics, campaigning and standing up for his beliefs,” Exeter University student Eileen Doran told the author for this book. “A lot of us got involved in that. It was the time of fighting against student loans and all that. He’s always been somebody who cares about what’s happening in the world. Pretty much how he is now really. He’s not really all that different now as far as I can tell.”

  Thom’s politics have only rarely touched directly on his music. The cynicism of ‘Electioneering’ and the menace of ‘You And Whose Army?’ were exceptions but generally he liked things to be more oblique. An example was a new track that appeared at the end of 2001 on the I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings album. ‘True Love Waits’ was a treat for fans who wished the band would abandon all the electronic stuff and go back to something more ‘traditional’. It was a delicate, acoustic track partly inspired by a story Thom read about a child who was left behind by his parents when they went on holiday, living on a diet of lollipops and crisps. That was Thom’s territory. With the next album, though, they would choose a title that put politics right back at the centre of their stage.

  18

  HAIL TO THE THIEF

  “When we finished Kid A and Amnesiac, we were thinking, So, what kind of lurch in another direction are we gonna take now?” Thom said to The Daily Telegraph after the release of the band’s sixth album, Hail To The Thief. He knew by now that some kind of a “lurch” was exa
ctly what the public and the press were expecting. It was a new and bizarre form of pressure. The pressure to do absolutely anything they wanted, as long as it was completely different to anything they’d done before. He spent six months doing nothing except being a father until, he says, Rachel suggested: “‘Why don’t you just do a record where you let it happen? No agenda, nothing.’ And that sort of made things click.” Ed O’Brien said, “The whole thing was to do it quickly and not think about it too much, which was new for us, obviously.” They’d vaguely thought about knocking out an album quickly before, but this time they meant it. They couldn’t take another three years like the ones leading up to the release of Kid A and Amnesiac. They went back into their rehearsal space and tried out the new songs for three months as they had prior to OK Computer, recording the results every day and listening to the tapes every evening. But this time Thom refused to obsess over them as he had before. Instead, he let Jonny scrutinise the details. He wanted this record to be done without the endless over-analysis of previous albums. When word started filtering out about these sessions, it provided further encouragement for fans of their early stuff.

  “It’s all loud and it’s all guitars,” Jonny said. “It’s exciting to make loud music again. It’s sounding good and fresh.” He even said in one interview that they’d been covering Neil Young’s ‘Cinnamon Girl’, rediscovering the joys of guitar chords. “In two days of rehearsal, we’ve played it between ten and fifteen times,” he enthused. “Loud minor chords. Distortion. Fantastic!”