Thom Yorke (3 page)

One of the first people Thom saw when he got to Exeter University was Martin Brooks, whom he’d first met at the National Youth Music Camp several years before. It was in the main hall during Freshers’ Week, or ‘Freshers’ Squash’ as they called it at Exeter. Martin was sitting at one of the stalls when he saw the unmistakable figure of Thom Yorke walking into the room.

“I used to run the University magazine,” Martin explained to me. “And I was trying to get new people to write [for it]. I saw him over the other side of the room and remembered him and went, ‘Thom!’”

Thom had a long blonde bob at the time. He was looking at the floor with his usual air of not wanting to talk to anybody and yet unmistakably wanting to be noticed. Nevertheless when he realised that there was somebody at university that he already knew, Thom was undoubtedly relieved. After his experiences at Abingdon, coming to another institution was an intimidating prospect.

“He was quite dweeby in that he’d walk into a room and be very shy about talking to anybody,” says Martin. “He’d just look into his fringe and was generally quite shy but he had this self-concept about being a rock star. When you’re at university everybody carries their guitar around all the time with that, ‘I’m gonna be someone’ thing. And often it was the ones who were like, ‘No, I really am’ who you knew absolutely never would. He wasn’t quite a joke in the, ‘I’m going to be a rock star’, sense but you didn’t need to ask him what his future was going to be because he was very clear.”

But, beneath his self-conscious ‘rock star’ persona, Martin found that Thom was still the same person he’d been at camp. “My main recollections from that time,” he says, “are that he was a very nice bloke, right from the start, very friendly and keen to be nice.” Martin was in his second year. The previous year he’d been in a band with another student, an old school friend called Simon ‘Shack’ Shackleton. They’d played covers but were planning on starting a new group to play original songs. Shack would sing and play bass
and Martin could play drums so they still needed a guitarist. Thom was the obvious choice. “I knew that he could play guitar and I knew he had some attitude and he looked good,” Martin says.

At this point, the band had the ridiculously ‘studenty’ name of ‘Git’. Despite this, Thom readily agreed to join. His university life couldn’t have had a better start. It was far removed from his experiences at school, particularly in the art department where being moody and creative was the norm. Thom quickly made far more friends than he ever had at school. He was still self-consciously “different” but at university so were lots of other people. His desire to make a statement no longer seemed unusual.

“I love that sensation when you walk into a room and everyone looks at you twice,” he admitted to Andrew Collins in
Select
magazine later. “That’s great. Pure vanity, you’re there for effect. When I went to art college it was the first time in my life that I’d ever been with people who did the same thing as me, they’d dress up for effect, get on the bus for effect.”

Thom discovered that Exeter University had everything he loved and everything he hated. He couldn’t stand the lazy complacency of so many of his fellow public school educated students but the art course offered him a huge amount of freedom. Initially it was almost too much freedom. They told him he could do whatever he wanted but, for most of the first year, nothing appealed. His sketchbooks were full of lyrics and designs for possible future record sleeves. He was heavily into Francis Bacon so, on the rare occasions he did touch a paint brush, the results were large, morbid pictures with heavy splashes of black and red. He once said the best painting he did in the first year was of “a man blowing his brains out”.

In the first year, he lived in halls and found himself part of a large scene of people who didn’t feel like they fitted into Exeter’s dominant, ‘Sloaney’ ethos. The band quickly dumped the name Git, only to choose the almost-as-bad moniker Headless Chickens; nonetheless, it provided a ready-made social life. In the first year, as well as Thom, Shack and Martin, the band included two talented violinists, John Matthias and Laura Forrest-Hay. They felt like they were part of their own, very distinct arty clique. Although Thom never took Headless Chickens entirely seriously, he appreciated how it gave him a social standing at Exeter, as well as a ready-made group of friends.

“He had a kind of awkwardness about him, that somehow he didn’t quite fit, so when people were nice to him he really appreciated it,” says Martin. “I wouldn’t say for a moment that I took him under my wing, but the fact that on the second or third day of university there was somebody who knew him and said, ‘Do you want to join a band?’ I think he appreciated it. And I used to pick him up and tell him where things were and he definitely appreciated it.”

To their surprise, Headless Chickens quickly became very successful, albeit in the tiny world of Exeter student life. Thom might not have liked everything about the university, but the fact that it was so conservative made it even easier to stand out and make a statement.

“Because Exeter was such a Sloaney university, there was an awful side to it,” Headless Chickens’ violinist Laura told the author, “which was all these very rich, upper-middle-class kids who hadn’t got into Oxbridge who’d been sent by their parents to Exeter and were definitely not clever enough to go to university. They had way too much money and lived out in farmhouses in the countryside and had gambling parties. But what that meant was, those of us coming to Exeter from less well-off backgrounds, or normal backgrounds, were a little minority and that brought us together. Anyone who wasn’t Sloane-y and who was remotely interested in the arts formed this weird little gaggle of people who weren’t into anything else. We all mixed together and it was quite intense. We went to Edinburgh, and we had these one-off Dada nights and [we had] Headless Chickens, anything not to be with the Sloanes.

“It was very easy to be alternative at Exeter because the norm was so conservative,” she continues. “It was
so
conservative it was embarrassing. There were so many very comfortable people. If you were in Headless Chickens you were the pinnacle of the alternative scene! If you were a bit unsure of yourself and knew that you didn’t fit in with the main crowd, it was great to have the kudos of being in this band.”

Despite its reputation, that era of Exeter University produced a number of people who would later be highly successful. JK Rowling was there a couple of years before Thom, while Basement Jaxx’s Felix Buxton was a contemporary, as was sculptor John Isaacs and presenter and documentary maker Toby Amies.

“Exeter was still quite a provincial place and everything had to
stop at 1a.m. in most places,” says the band’s other violinist John Matthias. “But there was a lot going on. There were six or seven really good student bands and there were clubs set up by students. There were six or seven really dynamic people around and that’s all it takes to make something happen in a small place like Exeter. The art college was full of lots of very talented people.”

“Looking back,” Laura says, “I think that generated an intense atmosphere of activity. We started up a magazine as well. It was supposed to be a little bit alternative and not about the things Exeter was supposed to be about, which was twin-set and pearls. I would say that atmosphere pushed anyone who was interested in anything alternative together. I lived with Martin, Toby Amies and John Isaacs. Felix used to come round, who was in Basement Jaxx later. There were two semi-detached houses and there was always somebody there planning something. There was always something happening.”

In his first few months Thom also wrote for the university magazine,
3
^rd
Degree
. Martin remembers he wrote an adulatory piece about U2’s album of the previous year
The Joshua Tree
. “He adored Bono for years and years,” says Martin. “I remember U2 was the number one, most important thing in his life. He was also a massive REM fan as well.” But initially Headless Chickens were much rougher and rowdier than that. They were as much about making a visual statement as they were about the music. Thom wasn’t even asked to audition. He looked right and then at their first rehearsal they all realised how talented he was.

“I remember thinking his voice was lovely even though he was doing backing vocals while I was in the band,” Laura says. “His voice was so distinctive already.”

“We were a noisy guitar band,” says violinist John Matthias. “But Thom has always had a great pop sensibility and he can’t help writing great tunes that work in a pop sense. The exciting music at the time was people like The Pixies and Fugazi. That was what we were playing in the clubs. Our band was kind of a bit like that but a bit more English and a bit more poppy.”

At the time bands like The Wonder Stuff were very big in Britain and, with two violinists, there was an element of that sound in Headless Chickens. “I think they were into that but Shack was more into heavier stuff and quite experimental stuff,” says Laura. “On one
of our videos there’s a whole ten minutes where Shack has gone over to the keyboards and is just freewheeling and Thom was putting stuff in with his guitar and nobody really knows what’s happening. There was a nod at The Wonder Stuff but with lots of heavy guitar, thrashy with lots of pedals and effects. Bit odd. A bit of an odd mixture!”

It was basically Shack’s band to start with. He was lead vocalist and Thom contributed backing vocals. Perhaps surprisingly, considering his talent, Thom made little effort to stamp his own personality on proceedings, at least at the start. He was just happy to have an outlet for his creativity while he was away from On A Friday. He made no effort to try and take over.

“It is bizarre that we didn’t let him sing to start with,” Martin says. “I used to do some of the singing, which is really bizarre, because I’ve got a crap voice and he’s got quite a good voice! But he really loved performing live and really lived for it. You could tell that when he was onstage his slightly awkward, dweeby side would disappear and out would come a pretty crazed rock persona.”

“He was never arrogant or cocky at gigs or rehearsals,” says Laura. “He didn’t try and take over musically, which I have subsequently come across in bands. Sometimes you meet somebody and there’s an arrogance that comes out in the music. They seem perfectly nice and then you realise they’ve cranked their amp up to 11 and nobody can hear anybody but them. You wouldn’t have got that with Thom. Certainly onstage he wasn’t arrogant. One of the interesting things about him in hindsight was that he was able to sit in the background on something even though he was so talented. He didn’t argue about doing the backing vocals and that’s quite a testament to his character I’d say. But then he knew he was doing it with [On A Friday] and we were a bit of fun to keep him going while he was at university.”

At that point, although he’d had a fairly serious relationship before he came to university, Thom was still shy around girls, something he often blamed on the fact that he went to an all-boys school. Laura Forrest-Hay wasn’t quite sure of what to make of him.

“I wouldn’t say he was moody but he was withdrawn,” she says, “which I suppose was shyness but coupled with his confidence it sometimes seemed like arrogance. I think I misinterpreted his shyness at the time.”

Martin thinks that Thom partly relished his reputation as an outsider and an outcast. “I think he kind of enjoyed it,” he says.
“He certainly nurtured that. Rather than walking into a room and going, ‘Hello everyone!’ He would walk in and look at the floor and be slightly mysterious.”

At the same time there was genuinely a shy and unassuming aspect to Thom’s character. He wasn’t a raconteur but at Exeter he made several close friends and, even more significantly, met his long-term girlfriend Rachel Owen. Rachel was also doing a joint course, in Fine Art and Italian.

“She really thought I was a freak,” he said to
Melody Maker
later. “She thought I was impossible to talk to, really moody, difficult, unpleasant and idiotic. And I think I was. But she bashed a lot of that crap out of me.”

Rachel was heavily into music, too, and another Exeter contemporary of Thom’s, Shaun McCrindle remembers that it was Rachel who first got him into the Pixies. “The first impression he made on me was when he came into the Hall Of Residence we were staying in at the time singing ‘Gigantic’, the Pixies’ song,” he says. “Rachel had just introduced Thom to them.”

If his initial attempts to woo her had been unsuccessful, then it must have helped that Headless Chickens were becoming increasingly successful, albeit in the tiny world of Exeter University’s alternative scene. Very soon Thom had the disconcerting realisation that his ‘fun’ band at university was much more successful and popular than his ‘real’ band back in Oxford. Martin, who now runs a successful internet advertising company, worked hard at promoting them and the band were able to draw, at times, several hundred people to their gigs.

“We did start taking it more seriously,” says Laura. “We started getting asked to play the stupid Balls they have every term at places like Exeter. We got to headline some of those gigs and they were quite big, they’d be maybe 500 people and we’d get paid for that so we’d practice properly and work out our set. Shack was very driven. He was very focused on his music and it was an outlet for that.”

“When we were there, Exeter University was about 7,000 – 8,000 people and a lot of them were Sloane Rangers who’d just rent a big house in the country and fuck off,” says Martin. “Which meant if you wanted to do something, you could get an audience because there wasn’t that much going on. Through the network of maybe fifty of your mates, you could guarantee 150 people turning up to
whatever you did. If we’d been at Manchester or London we’d never have got that. So it was a massive confidence booster to us as a band when, at our very first gig, a load of people came. We genuinely had a following who knew our songs and really liked a few of them.”