Thom Yorke (5 page)

“He used to make a fortune,” Colin Greenwood once said. “And he’d blow it all on crap records!” At the same time Headless Chickens was starting to fall apart. Right from the beginning they’d known that it wasn’t going to be a long-term thing. There were too many obstacles in their way. “Thom always had On A Friday as his ‘real band’,” says Martin. “I remember there were times when we wanted to practise at the weekend and we couldn’t because he’d gone back to Oxford to see Ed and the other guys.”

At this time it also became clear that, although they never fell out, it wasn’t realistic for Shack and Thom to be in the same band. They were both natural front men in very different ways.

“Shack was a music scholar at school,” says Martin. “He was very technical. He could conduct an orchestra. Although he’s since gone on to do many years of crazy grunge and quite niche stuff, the performing side of it and the whole rock star thing was nothing like as important for him as it was for Thom.”

“We had two front men,” says John. “That was one of the problems with the band, really. They kept talking over each other all the time. Which wasn’t great in performance! They’re both quite charismatic front men, which was one of the reasons the band wasn’t going to go anywhere. They both needed their own band in a sense.”

Headless Chickens wasn’t the main thing in any of their lives, either. Shack was starting to become more interested in electronic music and, for Thom, On A Friday was always his main concern. “At university you get loads of bands but Headless Chickens was actually a really popular university band,” says Eileen. “They had something that made you think they could have gone somewhere with it but Thom kept saying, ‘No, I’ve got this band back in Oxford
and I’m really serious about them.’”

“We didn’t take it all that seriously,” says Martin. “We took it seriously in that if we were going to play a gig we’d rehearse but we never had any pretensions towards serious recording. Good bands have to be about something. It’s like any great art. You have to have an idea at the heart of it. And we didn’t. We just did it because it was fun and we enjoyed it. And people came along and it was self-perpetuating. If we’d done three gigs and nobody had come or they’d gone badly, we’d have given up on it. It wasn’t like we had a burning thing to express our teenage angst. It was just we were at university, in a band, and it was great fun. If anything, it was cool that Thom was doing this other thing as well.”

Despite this, when Shack eventually got bored with their relatively generic indie and moved on to a new electronic band, Flickernoise, Thom and John joined him. When Flickernoise started, rock music was deeply unfashionable. Bands like the Stone Roses were the cool thing in the press and, in the UK indie scene, there was an undignified scramble for guitar bands to bring in turntables, electronic beats or other dance elements. The next big thing in rock music, grunge, was still very much an underground concern and it was only just starting to filter through to the UK with Nirvana releasing their debut album
Bleach
. It was still the time of raves and ecstasy and although none of Flickernoise were exactly ravers, they were heavily influenced by the scene.

“They had a track called ‘MDMA’” remembers Shaun, “which tells you a lot about the time, the early 1990s. It was a really beautiful song. There was one song (‘Apocalypse’) where Thom did a guitar solo, which I was very impressed by. I thought, ‘Oh, he can do that as well!’ It was his singing that struck me but he was always a good guitarist as well.”

“It was an amazing guitar solo that he did,” agrees John Matthias. “Really quite astonishing.” But Thom never felt entirely comfortable in Flickernoise and he only stayed with them for a handful of gigs. He described it later as a “computer-with-dreadlocks” band. However much he might have appreciated elements of electronic music, he was still an indie kid at heart and, having already written many of the songs that would later appear on
Pablo Honey
, he knew where his destiny lay and it wasn’t with Shack.

“Shack didn’t want to play guitars anymore,” John says. “For a time we all worked together and then Thom went back to Oxford and … that was a fait accompli, really.” Despite his keenness to get back to On A Friday, Thom’s eyes had been widened by his experiences at Exeter. Although his new influences wouldn’t come out in his own music for almost ten years, with 2000’s
Kid A
, he’d already begun experimenting with new sounds.

“That was really the most influential period for all of us,” he said to
Rolling Stone’s
Mark Binelli later. “The Happy Mondays. The Stone Roses. At the end, Nirvana. It was just an interesting period of transition: lots of electronic stuff, lots of indie bands, and it was permissible for it to be all mixed up.”

He also took part in a performance called the Contemporary Music Festival, set up by John Matthias, which was an art ‘happening’ far removed from the grunge bands he was increasingly listening to. John and Shack wrote a piece of music called ‘Flickernoise’, which was based on a mathematical formula that was found in many sounds in nature. It was semi-random and Thom’s role was to sing behind a curtain, almost wailing his vocal over the top.

“It was interesting,” Shaun remembers. “John, Shack and Thom worked together to create this semi-random music. It was determined by chance. Thom did an imitation of an Islamic singer calling people to prayer. He was doing it quite convincingly, standing behind a curtain.”

In his third year at Exeter, Thom also became increasingly politicised. It was towards the end of Margaret Thatcher’s time as Prime Minister and the country was changing. In 1990 she introduced the Community Charge, better known as the Poll Tax. Thom was one of approximately 200,000 people who congregated in Trafalgar Square in London for what turned into the biggest riot the city had seen in the 20
^th
Century. What he saw shocked him. The police couldn’t disperse the crowd and they were terrified that they would attempt to force their way past the newly installed gates in front of Margaret Thatcher’s residence on Downing Street. They ended up charging the crowd on horseback and driving police vans right through the centre. Five thousand people were injured. It was unlike anything he’d ever seen before and the images stayed with him. Years later he’d use the footage in the video for his single
‘Harrowdown Hill’, using it as a symbol for on-going government oppression. Thom was also involved in the protests against student loans, which were brought in by the then Conservative Government in 1990. Thom’s time at Exeter had an enormous impact on him in numerous different ways. He’d been introduced to new art movements, he became increasingly politicised and he wrote dozens of songs on the acoustic guitar. Jonny wasn’t the only person who thought that many of them would stand up even now.

“He’s probably got about twenty other songs that he wrote that will be on the next album,” says John Matthias. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all. He’s got hundreds and hundreds of songs stored up and most of them are absolute classics. One of my favourites was ‘Stop Whispering’. He used to play that a lot but I think they ended up ruining that song in the end. Or it wasn’t as good a song as I thought it was when I was eighteen!”

He also, incidentally, passed both Art and English with reasonable ease. His early press releases with Radiohead seemed to imply that he’d failed art, perhaps to suggest he was that classic rock archetype, the “art school drop-out “. In fact he got a 2:1. For his degree show, he cleverly scanned a picture of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling into his computer and changed all the colours.

But the most important thing that happened at Exeter was his meeting with Rachel Owen. He would still be going out with her 20 years later and they would have two children. Almost every reference to her he’s made in interviews has been to the fact that she has encouraged him on the frequent occasions when he’s suffered a crisis of confidence. Intriguingly he met her at around, or not long after, the time he wrote ‘Creep’ – the second most important thing that happened during his time at Exeter. He’d written the song after a long obsession with a girl from Oxford. She used to hang around with the beautiful people who frequented the town’s fashionable Clarendon Street quarter of Oxford.

“When I wrote it,” he said to John Harris of
NME
later, “I was in the middle of a really, really serious obsession that got completely out of hand. It lasted about eight months. And it was unsuccessful, which made it even worse. She knows who she is.”

He felt simultaneously attracted and repulsed by her, by her life and by her friends. “I feel tremendous guilt for any sexual feelings I have,” he said to
Rolling Stone
, “so I end up spending my entire life 
feeling sorry for fancying somebody. Even in school I thought girls were so wonderful that I was scared to death of them. I masturbate a lot. That’s how I deal with it!”

“I don’t think he would have thought of himself as a creep then,” says John Matthias. “But I think he could access a part of himself that could be a creep to write that song. I don’t think it was a kind of: ‘I’m a loser, so why don’t you fucking kill me’ kind of thing.”

One legend has it that the song was written in a toilet cubicle at the Lemon Grove. This may or may not be true. Shaun definitely remembers him working on it at their shared house in Exeter. “He was singing at the top of his voice way down in the basement and I was on the top floor,” he says. “I went down and asked him, ‘Can you be a bit quieter? I’m trying to read up here!’”

Wherever and exactly whenever ‘Creep’ was written, it does seem like the song’s genesis laid to rest the feelings of inadequacy that Thom had had since Abingdon. By his last year at Exeter, he was a successful DJ, had a girlfriend he’d be with for decades and his musical talent had reached new heights. He said later that admitting ‘Creep’ was about a real person got him in “a lot of trouble.” By the time the song was finished, the ‘obsession’ was already history.

Yet that one song would soon blast Thom and his band into the stratosphere.

Radiohead once said that their debut album,
Pablo Honey
, was a ‘Greatest Hits’ of their unsigned years. Throughout the period when they were at university and despite the distance between the band members, they’d continued to add to their stockpile of new songs. But, with so few opportunities to play live, the band weren’t likely to go anywhere. Nevertheless, in the summer of 1990 they made one of their most important decisions when Jonny moved from keyboard to guitar. That was when they started playing songs for the first time that would, eventually, appear on Radiohead records.

“Phil was away for that summer and I was filling in and drumming for the band,” says Nigel. “They did ‘How Can You Be Sure?’ which ended up as a B-Side for
The Bends
. The whole band was driving ahead and not wanting to look back so they did tend to kill off old material as new material arrived. It was that summer that they actually started sounding like Radiohead. At that point Jonny said, ‘I play guitar as well, so maybe we could have three guitarists?’ So they did and started coming up with this wall of sound thing.”

“The early incarnations of On A Friday sounded like Haircut 100 or something,” says Shaun McCrindle. “I remember Thom played me one of the On A Friday demos called ‘What Is That You Say?’ which I’ve seen listed as ‘What Is That You See’ and I think it was one of the first tracks that Jonny played guitar on. It had all this feedback guitar. That was massively different from the funky guitar, Haircut 100 thing they’d had before.”

A tape of fourteen songs from that period, labelled On A Friday/Shindig demos shows the variation in their sound. The first track ‘Climbing Up A Bloody Great Hill’ is highly accomplished but rather cheesy funk-rock with a chirpy brass sound, a slick 1980s bass line and an incongruously louche vocal from Thom. If it had been a song like that which had propelled them to global stardom, Thom would never have had to worry about being seen as a moping miserabilist! Although it was recorded at Clifton Hampden Village
Hall in Oxfordshire, and despite some gloomy lyrics, it sounds like Thom had a Santa Monica beach on his mind.

The rest of the tape leaps around wildly: the highlights of ‘The Greatest Shindig In The World’ and ‘How Can You Be Sure?’ were later recorded as B-sides for
The Bends
singles (the former re-titled ‘Maquiladora’). They were both songs that were recognisably Radiohead. Other songs, like ‘Something’ and ‘Life With The Big F’ sound like Headless Chickens. They have that same jaunty, Wonder Stuff-inspired late 1980s indie vibe.

Elsewhere, though, there are tracks like ‘Rattlesnake In The Big City’ and ‘Everyone Needs Someone To Hate’ that contain cheap, Casio beats and a kind of rap from Thom. Neither of them sounds particularly serious. One track ‘Tell Me Bitch’ is speeded-up ska with a chipmunk vocal that anticipates another Oxford band Supergrass’s ‘We’re Not Supposed To’. These tracks show imagination but not much else.

Part of the change in their sound is explained by their decision to tell the horn section that their services were no longer required. It wasn’t easy for Colin. “It was up to me to fire them since they were my friends – we’re still friends, they still talk to me because they respected my honesty,” he said later. “When things started to happen, it wasn’t really practical to have three alto saxes.”

“There were just too many people on stage,” a friend of the band, Oxford act The Candyskins’ Mark Cope told me. “What they were doing was more like guitar music anyway. They realised you could make all these different sounds with guitar and effects.”

It must have been frustrating to have so many songs but so little opportunity to play them or work on them. Nevertheless, at the end of 1990 they started sending tapes out to labels and one of them ended up in the hands of Chris Hufford and Bryce Edge. The two of them had been in a band themselves in the 1980s, Aerial FX, but at the start of the 1990s they ran a recording studio in Oxfordshire called Courtyard. They’d twice had their fingers burnt by the music industry. Once when they signed a record deal and saw things fall apart after just one album and again when Courtyard started to struggle. They’d opened it in 1987 in the Oxfordshire village of Sutton Courtenay but, like many studios, it had been a battle to survive. Although there were many talented young bands in Oxfordshire in the late 1980s, few of them went on to enjoy
commercial success. Ultimately they sold the business, rented Courtyard back off the new owners and set up their own production and management company. In 1990, when they first heard On A Friday, they were on the look out for a good band that they could help steer clear of the same obstacles.

Their first impressions weren’t that positive. Fourteen songs was far more than most bands would put on a demo, and none of them stood out. Thom had been writing furiously but they realised that he still hadn’t found a voice of his own. “There were some good tunes but it was all obviously ripped off mercilessly,” said Chris in a
Q
interview.

When they got a chance to record another demo, Thom decided they needed to be more selective and get a proper recording done. During the Easter holidays in 1991, shortly before he graduated, they booked a session with local producer Richard Haines at Dungeon Studios near Oxford. The studio was built into a hill and the control room looked out over the rolling Oxfordshire countryside. By the standards of the places they would record at in the future, it was very basic but for On A Friday this was a major step up. Between them they’d saved £300, which was enough for three days and they had three songs ready to record: ‘What Is That You Say?’, ‘Give It Up’ and ‘Stop Whispering’.

“Two of the songs were fairly unremarkable if not average 1980s rock,” Richard Haines recalled for this book, “but ‘Stop Whispering’ had a verse that Thom sang that was just beautiful. It was one of those shivers-down-the-spine moments. I thought, ‘Christ, that’s quite special’. The other two tracks weren’t special at all. Perfectly well done, very competent. But they were just glad to be in the studio. They were so into being in a band together. It was very harmonious. They got on really well. Thom was steering the ship, basically, which I guess he carried on doing throughout. But it wasn’t antagonistic. He didn’t have to push or pull them. They were quite cohesive and understood each other’s roles in the band. It was pretty obvious that they were a great band in the making.”

When Chris Hufford received the new tape, he still didn’t think that they were anything earth-shattering but the dramatic improvement caught his attention nonetheless and he decided to go and see them at their next gig. “He heard about us through a mutual friend and came to see us at the Jericho,” said Colin in that first
interview with
Curfew
fanzine. “Afterwards he was almost shaking. He said we were the best group he’d seen in three years.”

At the time Chris was best known for his work with Thames Valley band Slowdive. In 1991 he was producing their debut album and was used to seeing ‘Shoegazing’ bands with little or no stage presence. If there was such a thing as ‘the Oxford sound’ it was defined by bands like Ride who, while having a powerful style of their own, had no real focal point onstage. The vocal was just the crest of a wave of sound.

On A Friday were very different. Thom’s vocals were much higher in the mix. He wasn’t afraid to admit that he liked U2 more than My Bloody Valentine. In his own, highly idiosyncratic way, he was a rock star in a city that hadn’t seen a rock star in years. When On A Friday finished playing that night, Chris was stunned. They’d not managed to capture their three-guitar sound on their demos in such an electrifying way – they were a very different proposition live. As soon as he could, he invited himself backstage and said, “I’ve got to work with you.”

At this point, On A Friday were in an odd situation. They’d been together for five years and yet they were still relative unknowns on the Oxford scene. To many people in the city who saw them play the Jericho Tavern at the time, it must have seemed like they’d just emerged, fully-formed and ready. Thanks to Thom’s prolific songwriting, they already had an extensive back-catalogue. They also had an energy borne of frustration at the years of waiting for this moment.

When all but Jonny had graduated, they made a decision to move in together. Inevitably they chose Oxford. They were very different to the other bands in the city but they had a growing fan base. In the rock scene, everybody knew everybody else but, unlike in many bigger cities, other bands were highly supportive.

“Everyone went out drinking and we’d go to [music venue] the Zodiac and various pubs. Everyone went out every night, all the bands, Supergrass and that, we all hung out together,” says Mark Cope of The Candyskins. “Everybody was trying to get better and better. Everybody was trying to outdo each other and the music got better. It wasn’t competitive in a nasty way but it was really nice. I remember listening to people from London and they’d be talking about what clothes somebody was wearing. For us it was about going
round somebody’s house with a guitar. It was all about music. There was a great atmosphere and nice people in Oxford then.”

On A Friday weren’t exactly cut out to be a ‘scene’ band. At that point it was unlikely that any scene would have accepted them. They’d been changing their style constantly for the previous five years. In retrospect, it was lucky that they hadn’t been around for any of the trends that had caught on then. The bands that had leapt on to the dance rock bandwagon were seen as risible chancers while ‘Shoegazing’ had been and gone in barely a year.

“When we were off at college, Ride started up and the whole Thames Valley thing happened. By the time we got back it had all finished! That’s called impeccable timing – we completely missed the boat,” Colin quipped to
NME
. Dance music had taken over most of the charts with DJs commanding massive fees in the new, warehouse-style ‘superclubs’ and, with the success of Nirvana, rock music was back in fashion. Thom knew which way the wind was blowing.

“Thom was happy to follow fashion for a while, or try and be a little bit ahead of fashion,” says Nigel Powell. “Like a junior Madonna, he’d always be trying to see what would happen next. I think the reason
Pablo Honey
sounded the way it did was because Thom got in early in seeing that the grunge thing was going to happen. I remember him playing me the first 12-inch that Nirvana released and going, ‘These guys sound really great’ and then, not long after that, their songs started getting noisier. At that point he was very ambitious. It might not have been quite that cynical but he was trying to strike that balance between doing arty stuff and doing stuff that was commercially viable.”

John Matthias doesn’t entirely agree with this assessment. “Their tastes were always very eclectic,” he says. “A lot of the tracks that are on
Pablo Honey
he would play at parties on acoustic guitar. It wasn’t like it was a means to an end. It was definitely what they were into at the time.”

On A Friday couldn’t help but be influenced by the fact that people were now appreciating a grungier sound. Even while Thom was still at university, they were heading that way. But between them they liked a wide variety of music and this was reflected in the kind of stuff they played. Right from the start there were creative differences within the band.

In contrast to Richard Haines’ thoughts, Nigel Powell says, “I got the impression that there was a tension between the members. Ed and Colin liked stuff that’s a little more straight-ahead where as Thom and Jonny liked stuff that was a little more skew-whiff.” But they had to learn to live with their differences, particularly for the year or so they spent living together. “It was like some nightmare version of The Monkees,” Colin once said. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”

Different members of the band drifted in and out at different times and, even if they weren’t actually paying rent, they would often be found there anyway. Thom spent one summer sleeping on the floor because he was broke. He’d spent all the money he earned DJing on buying records.

“He’d blow it all on crap records,” Colin recalled. “He freely admits it. He has the worst record collection … I think he was actually going for quantity over quality. So I had him crashing on my floor!”

Most of the time it was Phil, Ed and Colin (“the sensible three” according to Colin) who shared the house but Jonny was there part of the time and Nigel remembers Phil moving out fairly quickly because, “he was too mature to muck in like that.”

As in all shared households, there were domestic tensions. Nigel’s main memory of their early days is the way they seemed able to deal with big things easily but would squabble over the most trivial things. “I just remember that things would sometimes suddenly sour and the atmosphere would get really difficult and there wouldn’t be a good reason,” he says. “It was very public school – somebody not apologising fast enough for spilling somebody’s drink or something like that. Petty things. It would just be like, ‘OK, what happened there?’ Suddenly nobody’s talking to each other.”

On one occasion, Phil came home for the first time in weeks to find that Colin had eaten all his honey and, so Colin claimed later, he was furious. It was that kind of household. The band spent much of their time ignoring each other when they weren’t rehearsing or writing songs but, despite the squalor, it proved a highly creative environment. The previous tenant had supposedly died there and they enjoyed scaring themselves with stories about what might have happened to her. One day they found a half-eaten pork pie down the back of the sofa and, “being morbid people,” said Colin in an
interview with
Select
, “we managed to convince ourselves that she’d choked on it.”

Their experiences in the house were, in some ways, useful training for the long tours later on but they also picked up some bad habits. Rather than having major arguments, one or more of them would simply remove themselves from the house if things got too tense. This might have been why Phil – despite renting a room in the house – was almost never there. Thom had a flair for the grand gesture that was slightly different to the rest of the band. It’s been said that he’s incredibly sensitive, perhaps over-sensitive, but Nigel Powell thinks this is only half-true.