Thom Yorke (17 page)

“Everybody was completely at peace with each other I think,” says Steve. “I’ve never seen any of them shout or argue. They all seemed like good mates. They didn’t seem like the kind of people who would have rows, apart from Thom maybe, they seemed very relaxed with each other. They were very complimentary about what we were doing. Which is rare! You shouldn’t praise musicians too much or they’ll ask for too much money.”

The only disappointment was how quickly
Kid A
vanished from the charts. It didn’t have the longevity of
OK Computer
or
The Bends
. Few of the tracks were played on the radio and most of their fan base bought it in the first week. It didn’t help that they refused to release any singles or make any videos for it. They’d always had an odd, ambivalent attitude towards the art form. Despite the fact that they’d made some of the most memorable videos ever, Thom still referred to them as “commercials”. He didn’t think they represented the album as a whole.

“Music videos just make me think of [Peter Gabriel’s] ‘Sledgehammer’,” he said to
Jam
, “and that was when it was innovative. It is like tap-dancing, [that’s] what I compare it to. It had its day, really … I think miming is absurd.”

He resented the fact that they would spend hundreds of thousands of dollars making videos, as much money as they would spend on the album, just to get it on MTV next to all the other adverts. “The thing that really did my head in was going home and turning on the TV and the ads for fucking banks and cars being more like MTV videos than the MTV videos,” he said to
Juice
Magazine. “And it seemed like there was nowhere to go. Whatever the new aesthetic was would be in a fucking car advert a week later.”

This was even truer than he thought.

“I do quite a lot of music for commercials,” Steve Hamilton says. “And I’ve had quite a lot of briefs from people saying that they love that track and they want a similar sound. When I tell them that I played on it, ‘Wow! That’s mad, man!’”

Instead of videos, then, for
Kid A
Thom and Stanley Donwood came up with one minute “blip-verts”, video clips featuring excerpts from the album. “Four minutes is too long for a car advert, so it is certainly too long for a record,” Thom said.

They put far less conventional effort into promoting
Kid A
than
they had
OK Computer
, but Thom was still a bit put out that it didn’t do as well commercially. He seemed to forget that their last album was helped on its way by a massive, two-year long tour that almost broke him. “Book me on a nine-month tour and I’ll be back home doing a Liam [Gallagher] within a week,” Thom warned in a TV interview. Still, there was a part of him that thought people ought to somehow get the music anyway.

“I was a bit disappointed that, in Britain,
Kid A
didn’t stick around very long because of the likes of Robbie Williams and all that,” he said.

Still, there was always
Kid A
:
Part II
–
Amnesiac
.

In retrospect, Radiohead’s fifth studio album,
Amnesiac
, wasn’t a very good marketing move. It was the first album that Radiohead had done where they hadn’t leapt dramatically forward from the one before. Before its release, there were rumours that these were the songs where they’d gone back to the safe, familiar territory of rock guitars. Afterwards the fact that it contained great tracks like ‘Pyramid Song’ and ‘I Might Be Wrong’ was rather overlooked in the disappointment that it didn’t have another ‘Paranoid Android’ or ‘Fake Plastic Trees’. It was, some said, simply ‘Kid B’. This suspicion was bolstered by Colin’s description of the selection process, which was widely misinterpreted.

“I’m not sure they are two records,” he said to
JAM
. “We had that group of songs to make one record, and the other ones are left over. We had, say, 23 songs and we wanted to have around 47 minutes of music, so we chose the best combination out of that number (for
Kid A
), and the rest are waiting on the bench, waiting to be picked for the next team line-up.”

This, perhaps inadvertently, makes the likes of ‘Pyramid Song’ and ‘Knives Out’ sound like the little kid with glasses who’s the last to get picked for the football team. The alternative version of events that Thom and Jonny offered was more flattering – these were simply songs that wouldn’t fit alongside the ones from
Kid A
.

“
Kid A
pulled itself together very easily and really obviously. But
Amnesiac
didn’t,” Thom said. Even on
Amnesiac
, there were great songs that didn’t make the cut. Ed’s online diary had tantalised fans with repeated mentions of a track called ‘Cuttooth’ which, he kept promising, was almost finished. It was mentioned more times than any other song and it sounded like it was going to be the centrepiece of the record. The original version was over eight minutes long. In the end, it was cut down to just over five minutes and relegated to a B-side. Listening to it now, it’s an interesting glimpse of a different
kind of album that Radiohead could have made. It sounds more like
Xtrmntr
-era Primal Scream than anything they put on
Kid A
or
Amnesiac
. It’s got a rumbling, aggressive, industrial quality. The song was partly cannibalised for ‘Myxomatosis’ on the later
Hail To The Thief
album, with Thom borrowing a couple of lines of lyrics.

There was only one song that they added to the
Kid A
sessions for
Amnesiac
and that was the extraordinary, disconcerting ‘Life In A Glasshouse’. It was a seemingly autobiographical tale of somebody who feels that they’re always being watched by the press and, more specifically, the effect it has on that person’s partner. There were obvious parallels with Thom’s own life. The song was written during the period captured in
Meeting People Is Easy
and director Grant Gee thinks his continuous scrutiny might have, consciously or unconsciously, helped inspire it.

“Originally it had the line, ‘little cameras in every room/they’re watching me’, he says, “which was us because we used to go in and rig little tiny, £49 pinhole cameras in their dressing rooms whenever we could. And just record them in there so we wouldn’t have to be in the room. That was one of our innovations to overcome this problem of, ‘Hello! I’m just filming you! Pretend I’m not here.’ So we’d stick cameras with gaffa tape to the corners of the rooms.”

Thom has said that it was inspired by an interview he read with the wife of a celebrity. Her house was staked out by the press and she cut up the papers with her picture on them and pasted them over the windows so the photographers were looking in at the images they’d already taken.

When ‘Life In A Glass House’ was demoed, Jonny said that, “it could sound like a bad Cure song, it could be brilliant.” In reality, at this point in their career, there was no chance that it was going to sound like any kind of Cure song. They decided that, just like ‘The National Anthem’, it needed a jazz element but this time they went for a very different sound, enlisting the help of a pillar of the British jazz scene, Humphrey Lyttelton. Colin had once booked him to play at Cambridge University when he was Entertainments Officer, but by the year 2000 he was in his seventies. He was Eton educated, BBC through-and-through and best known for being the chairman of the whimsical Radio 4 panel show, ‘I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue’.

Despite this he did have a lot in common with them. There had always been a Radio 4 element to their aesthetic and, like them, he
combined indisputable poshness with an anarchic streak. In 1941 he fought in southern Italy and supposedly arrived at the battle of Salerno with a pistol in one hand and a trumpet in the other. His only hit, 1956’s ‘Bad Penny Blues’, was recorded with the maverick pop producer Joe Meek. When Radiohead contacted him to ask if he’d work with them, he listened to one of his grandchildren’s copies of
OK Computer
and agreed straight away. When he turned up to the recording sessions, the band were shocked to find that one of his band had only been released from hospital the day before after having open heart surgery.

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 was 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.