Thom Yorke

by Trevor Baker

  But there was one similarity with St Catherine’s Court. Thom claimed that both houses were haunted. This inspired another song that they finished there, ‘Bodysnatchers’. It came out in a period of what he described as “hyperactive mania” and it has a suitably manic feel, ending in a brilliant 1950s sci-fi horror rant from Thom. As well as Victorian ghost stories, Thom said later that it was inspired by the film The Stepford Wives and the feeling of being unable to connect with anybody else.

  After a few weeks, Thom reported that the album was coming together. Songs that they’d written years ago were falling into place. ‘Nude’, which they played for the first time on the OK Computer tour, was finished at last.

  After Tottenham Court House, they moved to another mansion, Halswell House in Taunton, then Nigel’s studios in Covent Garden and then their own studio in Oxfordshire. It was the end of another incredibly disjointed recording process but the result – to be called In Rainbows – was probably their most coherent album since OK Computer. Although songs like the gentle, ethereal ‘Nude’ and the jagged, raging ‘Bodysnatchers’ seemed to have little in common, there was a sense of dislocation and alienation in virtually every track.

  This came across in numerous different ways. ‘House Of Cards’ seems to be about wife-swapping, loneliness and, in passing, the end of civilisation. Thom said to the New York Times that much of the album was inspired by “a sudden realisation of the day-to-day, tenuous nature of life. Most of the time I was really, really trying not to judge anything that was happening. I was trying to just, not exactly knock it out, but not trying to be clever. That’s all.”

  Some of the lyrics he wrote were pretty extraordinary. ‘Videotape’, for example, was about filming happy moments in the knowledge that they’ll be watched after the person in the film is dead. It’s a very subtle, almost minimalist song and, as was so often the case with Radiohead’s simple songs, it took them months to capture on tape.

  After all their work, they finally had a record that sounded like them. It gave no indication of its long gestation period. Despite some characteristically dark lyrics, it sounded more confident and less troubled than any of the previous four albums, including The Eraser. There was a huge amount of pressure on them during the recording process but for the first time the pressure only came from them. There was no record company waiting. There were, however, numerous record companies interested, including EMI.

  The length of time In Rainbows had taken meant Chris Hufford and Bryce Edge had had plenty of time to try and think about how they should put it out. They had meetings with EMI, now taken over by a venture capital company run by a businessman called Guy Hands, but it wasn’t productive. Chris and Bryce suggested that if EMI wanted to sign them again, they needed to give them more control over Radiohead’s back-catalogue. EMI later put out a statement claiming that this was a demand for millions of dollars.

  “It fucking pissed me off,” Thom said to Andrew Collins in The Word magazine. “The idea that we were after so much money was stretching the truth to breaking point … and I’ll tell you what, it fucking ruined my Christmas.”

  The fact that their next record deal was with independent XL suggests that money was never the deciding factor. They just wanted to be in control of their own music again. And EMI was never the band’s favourite option. “I like the people at our record company,” Thom said to Time magazine in 2005, “but the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs one. And, yes, it probably would give us some perverse pleasure to say, ‘Fuck you’ to this decaying business model.”

  They’d always had an ambivalent relationship with EMI. On the one hand, they had a lot of respect for many people who worked there. They understood that without the support EMI had given them, paying for them to tour the world for two years before they became successful, they might never have left Oxford.

  Despite this, there was still some bitterness about some of the things they were made to do and the decisions that were made for them. In their early days, they trusted the record label and there was a certain amount of disillusionment when they realised that EMI didn’t always know what they were doing. There was also the knowledge that if things hadn’t worked out with ‘Creep’, they potentially could have been dropped. That was certainly the feeling they had on some of their early support tours. “In the way they’ve treated the record business recently, I see them as gaining revenge for the pressure they were put under,” Ash of early tour-mates the Frank and Walters says.

  Record labels in 2007 weren’t the same as they’d been in 1991. “The shareholders are greedy,” Thom said. “The companies themselves are poisoned and fucked up. If they go down, bye bye, good riddance.” Jonny wondered aloud whether Radiohead would have ever got anywhere under the current system. “They’re starting to rely on radio play and videos [instead of touring]. That’s horrific to us, the way that radio’s going, that they’re in charge of who breaks bands. We would never have left Oxford without funding.”

  There are countless examples of bands and musicians who have fought with their record label, from Prince to George Michael, but they’ve very rarely got anywhere. Often the music has suffered as the artist starts to think that they don’t need help anymore. But Radiohead were different. In their polite, but fiercely determined way, they fought the music industry … and won.

  22

  TEARING DOWN THE WALLS

  Radiohead’s first idea for escaping the clutches of the record industry was simply to stop making records in the traditional sense. After Kid A, they told everybody that they’d had enough of the pressure to make the ‘greatest album of all-time’. They were going to release singles, or EPs, or somehow ‘serialise’ their music on the net.

  “We’d really like to have more regular communications with people,” said Colin Greenwood, “as opposed to just having this massive dump every two-and-a-half years, and fanfares and clarion calls.” But for reasons that have never fully been explained, the “massive dumps”, as he rather unflatteringly called some of the best albums ever, have continued. Virtually every time they went into the studio they would emerge, sometimes years later, with an album. “The worst-case scenario,” Thom said to the New York Times, “would have been: sign another deal, take a load of money, and then have the machinery waiting semi-patiently for you to deliver your product, which they can add to the list of products that make up the myth, la-la-la-la.” Even the money wasn’t that attractive anymore. He felt like it would just paralyse them, that they would find new ways to spend it rather than producing anything.

  The impetus for their eventual revolutionary decision to put In Rainbows out online on a ‘pay-what-you-like’ basis came from a discussion that Chris and Bryce had. Radiohead had given them a lot of time to think during the protracted recording sessions. One night, during a philosophical conversation about the value of music, they came up with the idea of trying to find out exactly what it was worth.

  The fact that they didn’t need a record company and the fact that Radiohead’s internet connections had supplanted traditional marketing meant that they had far fewer expenses than in the past. They also had direct links with the thousands of fans who regularly accessed their website. Initially Thom took some convincing.

  “We all thought he [Chris Hufford] was barmy,” he said to David Byrne in Wired. “As we were putting up the site, we were still saying, ‘Are you sure about this?’ But it was really good. It released us from something. It wasn’t nihilistic, implying that the music’s not worth anything at all. It was the total opposite. And people took it as it was meant. Maybe that’s just people having a little faith in what we’re doing.”

  It did seem barmy. In 2007, the idea that people should have to pay for music was under threat. A whole generation of music fans had emerged who had rarely, if ever, bought a CD. They were used to downloading music as soon as it was available, often illegally and for free. For them, there was no such thing as a release date and no such thing as music
as a physical product. It was an attitude that Thom had a lot of sympathy for but, at the same time, he was aware that to provide the server and the bandwidth for people to get In Rainbows would, itself, cost them money. They couldn’t be in a position where they were actually paying for people to get their music. Nevertheless, money wasn’t an issue. As a music fan, he always appreciated the fact that most illegal bootleggers were just obsessive fans who wanted to listen to his tunes.

  “I think the reason people circulate music on the net is because they can’t get access to it anywhere else because radio is bullshit,” he said in a TV interview. “I find it quite amusing that the record industry chooses to blame the internet for its demise, whereas everyone knows damn well that it’s because they’re not flogging things that people want to buy.”

  In the past, bands and labels had been able to get away with putting ‘filler’ tracks on albums but the internet was making that harder. “All those records that had two good songs and ten rubbish ones, maybe those days are over,” said Jonny in the same interview. It probably didn’t escape Radiohead’s attention, then, that had the internet existed in 1993, they would maybe never have sold two million copies of Pablo Honey. It didn’t fit the template of, “two good songs and ten rubbish ones” but it certainly had some filler on it, as everybody involved subsequently admitted.

  With In Rainbows there was no filler. It was an album that Thom was still proud of even when it was about to come out, a new experience for him. He was even quoted as saying that it was their Transformer, Revolver, or Hunky Dory. This was slightly taken out of context. He meant that it was a concise, cohesive record like the classics by Lou Reed, The Beatles and David Bowie, not that it was in any other way comparable with them.

  Thanks to the number of different versions of their tracks circulating on the internet fans were already aware that In Rainbows could be something special but would they actually be prepared to pay for it? It helped that the innovative release of the album was, inadvertently or not, the biggest marketing stunt Radiohead had ever done. The announcement was typically simple and downbeat:

  “Hello everyone. Well, the new album is finished, and it’s coming out in 10 days; we’ve called it In Rainbows. Love from us all. Jonny.” But, with those 24 words, they were front-page news for the first time since Kid A. There were articles about them in the business press as well as the music press.

  In practice, the way it worked was very simple: buyers were able to download In Rainbows from Radiohead’s own server for nothing (apart from a small admin fee) or, if they wanted, they could pay up to £99.99. Nevertheless, it was a brave experiment, one that Chris Hufford described as “virtual busking.”

  Initially Chris and Bryce had wanted to put the album out digitally without having a physical version at all. But they were overruled by Thom and the rest of the band. They were aware that that they still had a large fan base that preferred something more solid. Not least in parts of the world where broadband internet connections were not yet ubiquitous. So they settled on a compromise. The record would come out digitally first and then as a plush box-set and then as a normal CD.

  One of the best things from Radiohead’s point of view was that, as soon as the record was finished, they were able to put it out. There weren’t the long lead times that were inevitable when you’re producing a physical product. Some people might have wondered whether anybody would bother to buy an album that they could get for nothing but Thom pointed out that this had been the case for the last few years anyway. Kid A, Amnesiac, Hail To The Thief and The Eraser had all been leaked online before they were officially available. All they were doing was ‘leaking’ it themselves.

  They can’t have been prepared for the reaction. Their American label described it as a giant “listening party” in the hope, presumably, that people would take the hint and buy the record when it came out in physical form. But it was also like a giant scientific or sociological experiment. What did people think Radiohead’s music was worth? The difference between this and normal busking, of course, was that people had to decide what they were going to pay before they heard the tunes. Some people proudly boasted that, despite making the effort to download the album, they didn’t like Radiohead and so had paid nothing. Others did careful calculations to try and decide what was a reasonable amount to pay for a record that hadn’t gone through the hands of a retailer or a manufacturer.

  Radiohead’s management never released figures as to how much people paid and there were wildly varying estimates. Online survey company comScore suggested that around three fifths of downloaders took it for free and the rest paid an average of $6. This made the average price per download $2.26. This was much better than they would have got on a normal fifteen-percent royalty deal. If these figures were correct, they made more money on the digital sales of In Rainbows than they had on the digital sales of all their other records put together. The band refused to confirm the exact figures but the experiment was clearly a success – so far. “People made their choice to actually pay money,” Chris Hufford said. “It’s people saying, ‘We want to be part of this thing.’ If it’s good enough, people will put a penny in the pot.” The only real problem was that they condemned themselves to years of people in shops saying, ‘Why don’t you just pay what you think it’s worth! Hahaha!’ It was probably funny the first time. They still had the physical release of the record to come. Nobody had a clue whether people would go out and buy an album that they’d already had the opportunity to download for free. “The record company doesn’t know,” Colin Greenwood said. “They called our office and said, ‘We’ve made this amount of records, is it enough?’ And our manager’s office said, ‘I don’t know.’”

  They released In Rainbows in physical form on January 1, 2007. It wasn’t a time of year that many big records came out and it went straight in at Number 1. People had been able to listen to it and they’d decided that they liked it enough to want the finished article with the artwork and everything else. It was the most unexpected triumph of Radiohead’s career. They’d never set out to be businessmen. It was just that Thom had, from his earliest days, found the process of getting his songs into the marketplace almost intolerable. He didn’t understand it; he didn’t think it was very efficient or effective, even by its own terms.

  The singles that emerged from In Rainbows demonstrated a further willingness to do things differently. They produced videos that were very different to anything they’d done before. The first two, ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place’ and ‘Nude’, were defiantly DIY. The first was filmed on “helmet cams” that they all wore as they played the song and the second featured shots of the whole band moving in slow motion. The third, ‘House Of Cards’, bizarrely, used a scanner rather than a camera to capture a 3-D image of Thom’s face, a party and other scenes. For the fourth, ‘Reckoner’, they simply announced a competition and declared that winner Clement Picon’s beautiful animation was the official video.

  Interestingly they also made the “stems” of ‘Reckoner’, the component instrument tracks, available for anybody who wanted to remix it. They had accepted that it was now impossible to control music once it was released. They knew that people could do whatever they wanted with it and they were happy to encourage that. The old “model” of releasing music was finished. Over.

  In Rainbows was just the latest step in a long journey that Radiohead had been on since they first started to appreciate the potential of the internet. Around the time Kid A came out, session musician Steve Hamilton was struck by the amount of time Thom spent online. “He’s quite an internet freak,” he told the author, “and he was busy answering messages on their website a lot. That was all quite new for them and he was going on and probably delighting people by answering messages personally.”

  At first it just seemed like a way that they could bypass the conventional media. Traditionally, if bands had something to say, they would talk to a press officer, who would write a press release, which would be pic
ked up and re-written by a journalist. “By the time the person who likes you reads something about you, it has gone through five people,” said Jonny.

  With their own site, Dead Air Space, they reached the point where they barely needed to give interviews. Their infrequent musings were the answer to slow news days at music magazines and websites all over the world. Thom deliberately wrote in an ungrammatical, poorly punctuated and badly spelt manner, in part, probably, to prevent too much being read into what he was saying; but it didn’t work. Whatever they wrote would immediately be examined by the world’s music press in the same way that Western diplomats used to scrutinise the cryptic messages of the Kremlin.

  Eventually they weren’t just bypassing the media. They were bypassing everything. The internet was a way of getting their music from their studio to the fans within days of it being completed. They made the music industry look completely irrelevant. It was a triumph and one that they, for once, seemed able to enjoy. Mark Cope of The Candyskins knew them well at the beginning of their career and he says that, on meeting them in autumn 2008, he was struck by how much they’ve changed. “Thom’s great. I saw him last week and he’s a lot happier now. The whole stress of being in a band has stopped, really. I think they’ve actually started to enjoy it. I think they’re enjoying each other’s company now. I heard stories that it was very tense. A lot of the road crew had been with them from the beginning and they said, ‘One day it can be really good and one day it can not.’ But Thom realises it is only a band. It’s not life and death. It’s just a question of growing up. I think at one point he took himself a bit too seriously. They’ve all got kids now and nice houses and they’re proud of what they’ve done and the fact that they haven’t compromised at all. But they probably look back on it and think, We could have had a bit more of a laugh. They’re renowned for having the worst backstage parties in the world! [However] the last ones have been really good! There used to be one bottle of beer there. They were so un-rock ’n’ roll but I think they’re starting to enjoy it now a bit more!”