Thom Yorke

by Trevor Baker

  Then, as they had so many times before, they took the new songs out on the road, playing them during a tour of Portugal and Spain. Thom wrote and rewrote them as they went, never quite sure whether what they would play on any given night would be the finished version or not.

  “We booked this little tour where we actually didn’t decide what we were going to play,” he said to Launch, “because that was the only way that we were able to get it together fast enough. Certainly with me, I was writing stuff that I wouldn’t normally write lyrically, ’cause I really didn’t have time to think about it. Whatever I had, that was it, too late, tough.” Then, when they had the songs ready, they prepared to go back into the studio in, of all places, LA, the home of the vampires who’d populated ‘Paranoid Android’. It was the home of Hollywood, plastic surgery, cock-rock and hair metal. Not a very Radiohead place at all, then. Nevertheless, Thom was perfectly happy. Nigel Godrich had suggested that they record in the famous Ocean Way studio in Hollywood. It was where Brian Wilson had driven himself half-mad trying to finish The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’, so it was very suited to Radiohead’s similarly painstaking approach. Although Thom had often spoken about his distaste for professional studios, the chance to go and record somewhere like that couldn’t be passed up. Also, they had bad memories of the decision to start the previous records in Copenhagen in the middle of winter. The Californian sunshine seemed more appealing. They were family men now and it simply wasn’t feasible for them to take years making another record. After a long time out of the studio, Thom was itching to get back in.

  “When I go to the studio now,” he said to Launch, “whether it’s our own studio or somewhere else, it’s something I’ve been looking forward to for months. So I don’t resent it in any way. I’m like, ‘Yes, yes, at last!’” They even took a little dip into the celebrity pool, going to a film premier and the party afterwards. “We went to LA for the sunshine and the glamour,” Thom joked.

  Unlike for most bands, however, LA didn’t provide a lot of distraction. Essentially they treated it almost like a day job. They went to the studio for two weeks and recorded a song a day. It was that simple. It was, in fact, much like various other periods of recording they’d had on previous albums. The difference was that it was neither preceded by months of anguish nor followed by months of painfully picking the songs they’d recorded apart. They didn’t give themselves the chance.

  There was no agenda and no rules about what instruments they could and could not use. If they felt a song needed a guitar, they would use a guitar and if it needed something generated on the computer, they would use that. The only agenda they had was that everything needed to be done quickly, without the over-analysis of the last three albums. Thom wanted the songs to be shorter, too. Out with any prog-rock comparisons.

  “After doing a take, I’d run into the control room and go to the sound engineer [Darrell Thorpe], ‘How long is that Darrell?’” he said in a TV interview, “and he’d go, ‘Five minutes thirty’, and I’d go, ‘OK, let’s cut two minutes off.’

  It struck Thom that The Beatles had managed to make experimental tunes in multi-parts, like ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’, that came in under three-and-a-half minutes, so why couldn’t Radiohead? To him, six-minute songs seemed rather self-indulgent at this point.

  The result wasn’t quite the guitar-fest that they’d promised or the OK Computer II that some people had hoped for. On Hail To The Thief, Thom’s piano was much in evidence again while the guitars mostly provided texture and roughage. There were tracks like ‘Where I End And You Begin’ that indisputably rocked, or ‘Go To Sleep’ which was almost blues, but there was also plenty of the uneasy electronica that had marked Kid A and Amnesiac. Contrary to almost everybody else who heard it, though, Thom thought that it was their big, shiny pop album.

  “I think,” he said in an interview with Blender magazine, “that if you managed to persuade the record company to put any of the tracks on the radio, it would sound like pop. But everyone thinks of us as an ‘album band’ and listens to the record all in one go. People scrutinise it so closely. I have so had enough of this! No one gives that much of a shit.”

  This is an extraordinary thing for the front man of supposedly the most “serious” rock band in the world to say, ‘Stop listening to my records so closely!’ But he had a point. Hail To The Thief is not an easy album to listen to in one gulp. It’s rough and edgy; most of the songs are packed tight with sonic glitch. But listen to them in isolation and they have an energy that’s very different to the songs on other, more polished, albums. Tracks like ‘There There’, ‘The Gloaming’, ‘Myxomatosis’ and ‘A Wolf At The Door’ were every bit as good as anything they’d done in the past. The latter, particularly, is brilliant. It’s a bleary-eyed fairytale, menacing and hilarious at the same time. Thom’s vocal is fantastically deadpan. To start with, he sounds like he’s reading the vocals off an autocue and getting increasingly freaked out by the words he’s being forced to say. This effect is enhanced by a chorus that, perhaps because it’s surrounded by so much clatter and angst, is gloriously ‘chocolate boxy’, like something out of a Disney film. It’s the last track on the album and it stands alongside ‘Street Spirit’ as one of the best album closers Radiohead have ever recorded.

  One review in The Guardian newspaper criticised Hail To The Thief for its tone of vague anxiousness. It was, Thom might have responded, exactly how he was feeling after the birth of his son. He even wrote a song for Noah – ‘Sail To The Moon’ – one of the most personal things he’d ever written, although the lyrics were dream-like, woozy and hard to make out. You couldn’t call any of Radiohead’s records direct exactly, but this one was particularly oblique. It was odd then, that they took the decision to call it Hail To The Thief, seemingly a direct comment on the controversial election of George W Bush in America.

  “The reason we called it Hail To The Thief”, he said in a German TV interview, “is stating the bleeding obvious. The most powerful country in the world is run by someone who stole an election. Now that’s bad. That’s bad for everybody. Especially as he was bought the election by extremely powerful companies with lots of money.”

  Yet in other interviews Thom always desperately shied away from this, the most obvious interpretation of the name. It was partly because the idea of making anything as glib and one-dimensional as a ‘protest record’ appalled him. More seriously, he was also worried about his own safety and that of his family.

  “I was unhappy,” he said, “about the potential consequences of calling it Hail To The Thief. Personal attacks, threats … people can get quite upset. So I wasn’t wild about that.” He much preferred a more surreal explanation. In another TV interview he claimed that the title referred to thieves of souls. “There is an idea Dante had,” he explained. “Certain people have done things that are so bad that they’re still here but their souls have gone. I don’t know about you but I’ve met people like that. It’s much more about that than the Bush thing.”

  It seemed like he’d had second thoughts about the album title pretty much as soon as they’d thought of it. “It will annoy me if people say it’s a direct protest,” he said, “because I feel really strongly that we didn’t write a protest record.” At the time this sounded slightly ridiculous. The phrase ‘Hail To The Thief’ originally came from a jibe at 19th Century US President John Quincy Adams, who was widely believed to have stolen an election. It was a play on words on the song ‘Hail To The Chief’, played at Presidential inaugurations. When George W Bush won the election in 2001, many protesters sang ‘Hail To The Thief’ in response. It was perhaps perverse to borrow the phrase for an album and then get annoyed that people assumed it might have something to do with Bush. It seems like Thom wanted people to take its topicality on board in a subliminal way, without thinking that Radiohead were making a direct statement. “Someone has given us money to stick the phrase ‘hail to the thief’ on walls all around the world,” he said to Bl
ender. “That made me chuckle for ages.”

  The alternative title was The Gloaming but Thom hadn’t been sure about that either. He thought it sounded much too dark to represent the whole album. “The record definitely enters a dark place in the middle,” he said, “but it isn’t the whole thing.”

  At that point, Thom could look back and say that the anxiety and fear he’d expressed with OK Computer and Kid A had been pretty justified. The events of September 11 and the subsequent war in Afghanistan and build-up to conflict in Iraq had destroyed the optimism and complacency of the 1990s. Rather than the vague fin de siécle unease that songs like ‘Lucky’ had expressed, he was now being inspired by real events in the world, even if he still wasn’t writing about them directly.

  “When we were doing Kid A and Amnesiac, I had this thing that we were entering a very dark phase,” he said to Andrew Mueller. “But it did strike me that things were going to kick off one way or another.”

  But, for Radiohead, Hail To The Thief represented a kind of full-stop. It was the last record of the six-album deal that they’d signed with Parlophone back in 1991. Unlike the vast majority of other bands, they’d completed the deal without having to stick out a filler album or a Greatest Hits and they’d easily paid back their advance and come out in profit. Hail To The Thief would be their farewell to the traditional record label ‘business model’. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, not before they reversed all the decisions they’d made about promotion on the last two albums. They made videos for the three singles ‘There There’, ‘Go To Sleep’ and ‘2+2=5’ including a particularly excellent one for ‘There There’, which featured a cartoon-like Thom in a dark fairytale wood. They even went back on the publicity trail with apparent enthusiasm. This reached its bizarre apogee when they laughed and joked on the show Friday Night With Jonathan Ross, while the BBC interviewer struggled to suppress his astonishment that they’d agreed to come on his programme at all. It seemed like a calculated attempt to turn around the popular perception that they were gloom-rockers. Thom even agreed to Ross’s suggestion that they should write Britain’s next Eurovision entry. “We were trying to persuade the record company that to promote Kid A, we’re not going to do any TV, but we’ll do Eurovision,” he joked.

  Thom said to Pitchfork afterwards that Hail To The Thief had been an attempt to “engage with the monster again” (the music industry as a whole, not Jonathan Ross) and that “it wasn’t very pleasant.” True to form, they regretted the decisions they’d made around Hail To The Thief and as always they vowed never to do things the same again. They thought they’d recorded it too quickly. Thom wished he could go back and fix the songs. He didn’t feel it was their best work and he didn’t feel like they’d moved forward in the same way that they’d done on their previous records. This was true but Hail To The Thief nevertheless, was another great album. It might be somewhat overshadowed by Kid A and the later In Rainbows but it has songs that are every bit as good. The problem was that Thom and Radiohead had, for the first time, started repeating themselves. The jerky, cut-up electronica, which had been so startling on Kid A and Amnesiac was now, as they said themselves, just another tool that they used like a guitar.

  “What was great about Kid A was that it heralded a new period and it meant we went off in some cool new places,” Ed O’Brien said to Associated Press writer Jake Coyle afterwards. “But the downside was that in the whole period up until the end of Hail to the Thief, we picked up some nasty habits.”

  “We were going along in a certain trajectory and then suddenly with Hail to the Thief, it was: we can’t carry along in that way anymore,” Thom added. “To me, the hardest thing was finding a reason to carry on.”

  Thom mocked the idea that they were supposed to “lurch” in another direction with each record but it seems like, more than anybody else, he felt that they needed to do something new every time. The truth was that he still hadn’t recovered from the three years of making Kid A and Amnesiac. When the time came to make a new record, he wasn’t able to face taking that long again and so they chose, as a legitimate experiment, to do things quickly. It worked but he soon realised that he wasn’t happy to send his songs out into the world like that, without making them absolutely perfect. He was caught in a trap. If he wasn’t prepared to put in the kind of effort that he felt Radiohead albums needed, then what was the point of the band? At least they’d got through the recording sessions without wanting to kill each other, but Hail To The Thief didn’t seem essential in the way that the other albums had. Were they just going through the motions? For roughly the hundredth time since they’d started the band, Radiohead had another crisis of confidence but, as always, it took them completely by surprise. “One of the biggest things, not just for me but for everybody, was that at the end of the Hail To The Thief thing, we completely lost our confidence,” Thom said in a TV interview. “It was a weird feeling and deeply unpleasant.”

  After the release of the album, Radiohead went on tour, finishing with a performance at the Coachella Festival in the US in May 2004. They flew “round the world the wrong way” Thom said afterwards – east to west – so the whole three weeks was a battle with jetlag. Just as on previous tours, Thom struggled to sleep. It was a painful reminder of why they’d moved away from this kind of thing after OK Computer. They felt like they were on autopilot again. The plan was that afterwards they would go back to their rehearsal rooms and start working on new material. But somehow there was nothing there. They tried things out for a few weeks before deciding that there was no point. They might as well go home. In 2004, Thom became a parent for the second time, when Rachel gave birth to their daughter, Agnes, and, once again, he was hit by the thought that there was more to life than Radiohead. In September 2004, Thom joined a protest at Fylingdales in North Yorkshire against Tony Blair’s decision to let the US use the UK in their ‘Star Wars’ anti-missile programme without consultation. It was the start of another period when he would vigorously re-engage with politics. It was also, although he didn’t know it yet, the start of a new feeling of optimism that maybe one day change would come.

  19

  THE BIG ASK

  The period when Radiohead recorded and released Hail To The Thief was dominated by the build up to war in Iraq and the eventual invasion. The death of Ministry of Defence weapons inspector David Kelly particularly shocked Thom. At the same time the evidence that humanity was causing global warming was becoming incontrovertible. At one point, he told the LA Times, he was worrying about it so much that it almost caused him to “flip my lid”. As his son Noah got a little older, he wondered what kind of world they were leaving to him. “My son really loves wildlife and draws polar bears,” he said, “and every time he draws a polar bear, I want to tell him they probably won’t be there by the time he’s my age.”

  The science that he was reading was so alarming that the situation almost seemed hopeless. In 2003, after the UN report on climate change was released, he was approached by environmental organisation Friends Of The Earth about supporting their ‘Big Ask’ campaign. By then, governments around the world had accepted the reality of global warming and the need to cut carbon emissions but there was no actual progress. The British government had even committed to a significant reduction in emissions by 2020. However, environmental organisations feared that, unless this pledge was made more concrete, nothing would be done. In 2020, whichever administration was in power would simply blame their predecessors for the lack of progress. ‘The Big Ask’ was for a cut in carbon emissions of 3% each year, every year.

  Its simplicity and reasonableness might not have impressed Thom a few years previously. After his experiences with Jubilee 2000, he was deeply cynical about attempts to change the world through existing structures and democracy. However, by 2005 the situation seemed so desperate that anything was better than nothing. “There’s no longer a sense of powerlessness, which is what I had for so long about it all,” he said. “It seemed to be the first sane, reasoned wa
y out of what is an international emergency.”

  Nevertheless, he was still reluctant to be the face of the campaign in the way that Friends Of The Earth wanted. He was very aware of the fact that, as the singer in a touring rock band, his carbon footprint was far larger than that of the average person, even in the energy-hungry West. They persuaded him that it didn’t matter. A certain amount of hypocrisy was unavoidable but it wasn’t an excuse for doing nothing.

  “Stop pointing fingers,” he said in a TV news interview later. “I’m a hypocrite. We’re all hypocrites because we’ve all been born into a carbon life. This is what we do. The structure of our existence is based on expanding energy use. We’re all hypocrites.”

  Still, for all his bravado, he did sometimes wonder whether the environmental cost of Radiohead tours could be justified. A study by an organisation called the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management (ECCM) calculated that the 545,000 fans who saw Radiohead on the Hail To The Thief tour generated 5,335 tonnes of CO2 during their journey to the gigs. The five band members own flights added another five tonnes.

  “Some of our best ever shows have been in the US,” Thom said to The Guardian, “but there’s 80,000 people there and they’ve all been sitting in traffic jams for five or six hours with their engines running to get there, which is bollocks.”

  In a way, his ambivalence made him a better spokesperson for Friends Of The Earth. The fact that he owned up to the essential problem with his position made it easier to deal with the inevitable accusations of hypocrisy. In one interview with Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow, he was asked what he was doing to help. “Not enough,” he replied.