Thom Yorke

The author would like to thank the following people for the original and exclusive interviews conducted for this book:

Martin Brooks (band-mate in the Headless Chickens)

Andy Bush (session musician on ‘The National Anthem’)

Mark Cope (a friend from the Oxford music scene)

Eileen Doran (University contemporary)

Laura Forrest-Hay (band-mate in the Headless Chickens)

Grant Gee (director,
Meeting People Is Easy
and ‘No Surprises’)

Dave Goodchild (boss of Headless Chickens’ record label)

Richard Haines (engineer on early Radiohead demo)

Steve Hamilton (session musician on ‘The National Anthem’)

Stan Harrison (session musician on ‘The National Anthem’)

Ashley Keating (drummer in The Frank And Walters)

Paul Q Kolderie (co-producer of
Pablo Honey
)

John Matthias (band-mate in Headless Chickens)

Shaun McCrindle (Exeter University housemate)

Sophie Muller (director of ‘I Might Be Wrong’ video)

Nigel Powell (school friend, drummer and lighting man)

Sean Slade (co-producer on
Pablo Honey
)

Jamie Thraves (director of ‘Just’ video)

Chel White (director of ‘Harrowdown Hill’ video)

Many famous singers have a story about telling a teacher they were going to be a star, only to be told, politely or not, that they should think again. If it’s true that the best way to make God laugh is to tell him your plans, then the same joke works even better with career advisers. For Thom Yorke, this moment first happened when he was only seven. He’d just heard Queen’s Brian May playing the guitar and he confidently informed his music teacher that he was going to be a “rock star”

Predictably she snorted with laughter and said, “Of course you are, dear.” She probably said the same thing to the kids who told her that they were going to be Batman or Superman. Still, Thom wasn’t discouraged. He was angry and indignant that she didn’t take him seriously. Eleven years later when he arrived at Exeter University, a shy teenager who could barely look anyone in the eye, he would still mutter, with his own steely inner confidence, that he was going to be a rock star.

A rock star. Not an artist. Not a musician. That’s what everybody who met him at the time remembers. It’s like finding out that JD Salinger wrote
Catcher In The Rye
because someone told him that it would make him famous and popular with girls.

Because, of all the great rock stars of the last thirty years, there are few who seem to have enjoyed it less (and lived to tell the tale) than Thom Yorke. He has greeted gigantic, life-changing success like somebody sneezing in his face.

The problem might have been that success arrived with a song, ‘Creep’, that cast him as a kind of pantomime loser. It turned him into a weird, hall-of-mirrors caricature of his own personality. The worst thing was that he knew he should be grateful to ‘Creep’. The song gave him everything he wanted – it made it possible for his stuttering, spluttering band to carry on when their other singles flopped and their very existence was threatened.

From then on, Radiohead leapt forwards and sideways, leaving many of their fans and most of the press to catch up months after
each album release. Not since The Beatles had a major band been so determined to reinvent themselves with every album. With
OK
Computer
they became the most critically acclaimed band in the world and seemed to have positioned themselves on the launching pad to become the biggest band in the world. It was a complete vindication of everything that Thom had believed.

“Being in a band is about wreaking revenge on the world,” he said to
The Times
early in his career. “It’s like when you get chucked by your first girlfriend. You just say to yourself:
I’m going to be famous one day, and she’ll regret that …”

She might have regretted it when Radiohead became the most celebrated act in the world, but clearly not as much as he did. Thom had been offered the opportunity that he’d desperately wanted when he was sixteen: to be a huge, acclaimed Rock Star in capital letters. To be the new Bono.

He turned it down. He turned his back on ‘rock’ as a genre, an attitude and even a sound. He suffered emotionally crippling writer’s block and the side-effects of ‘Rock Stardom’ became even harder to take. Recordings did not get any easier. Thom had other ideas. He had the absurd task of telling a band with no fewer than three guitarists that he didn’t really like the sound of the guitar anymore. Even more ridiculously, the gamble –
Kid A
– debuted at Number 1 in the USA and made them even bigger.

Since then, Radiohead have done what seemed impossible and reinvented what being a rock band means. Most bands, whether or not they actually wear leather jackets, seem to have leather jackets under their skin. Radiohead’s whole career has been a battle against Thom’s original concept of rock stardom, or at least a battle to save the original essence of rock stardom and cut all the chaff away.

In the eighteen-year history of the full-time band, it’s as if Thom tried, with every album, to rethink every part of the rock process. Most recently this has meant trying to find a new way to get the music from the studio to the fans without having to go through an emotionally, creatively and almost literally bankrupt music industry. The reason Radiohead have managed this is because the bond formed in the years before they became successful has proved stronger than the obstacles they’ve encountered since.

But only just.

This book starts with a pre-school Thom Yorke struggling to deal
with a series of operations on his eye, and nothing he’s achieved since has come without a huge struggle. The result has been a band who have, since the disappointment of their first album, never settled for second best because Thom, beneath manifest uncertainties, has always remained certain of one thing. Absolutely nothing but the best would ever be enough.

Sometimes it seems like Thom Yorke’s story begins with his eye. The ‘lazy’ one that, according to music magazine folklore, snaps to attention whenever he’s feeling particularly riled or passionate about something. It’s been used as the symbol of his strangeness, his ‘creepiness’ even at one point, but also, maybe, of his ability to see things differently to other people.

Thom is not the first such example. It’s why so many villains and anti-heroes, from Shakespeare to Dickens, have some form of visible affliction; however, it’s striking that this prejudice is still so powerful today. It’s perhaps led some people to think that Thom Yorke is ‘weird’. It’s also meant that he’s been battling against, or sometimes revelling in, a perception of his own weirdness for most of his life.

When he was born in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire on October 7, 1968, his left eye was completely paralysed. Initially, doctors told his parents that he’d never be able to see out of it. However, surgical techniques were moving on quickly and they took him to a specialist who suggested he could graft a whole new muscle on to the eyelid.

It was a highly complicated procedure and so in between his second birthday and the age of six, Thom underwent five separate operations. When he had the first one he’d just learned to talk and, as he came round from the anaesthetic, he doubled over and started crying. On later occasions he would lie there in his hospital bed hearing old men in the geriatric ward next door talking to themselves or, on one occasion, somebody vomiting violently outside. “Hospitals are fucking horrifying places,” he said later.

At first, the operations were relatively successful. They managed to open the eye and save his sight but the last operation went wrong and he was left half-blind. The doctors told him that his eye had simply grown lazy from lack of use. Their solution was that he should wear a patch. A patch on his good eye.

“The most annoying bit was bumping into things really, because it didn’t work,” Thom told
Hot Press
. “They had this theory in the late 1970s, that if you had a lazy eye, they put a patch over the other one to make this one work harder, which was actually complete bullshit as they later found out. You have a kid bumping into things for a year, being miserable.”

It didn’t help that Thom’s father had a job as a salesman and, in a six-month period after Thom started wearing the patch, the family moved twice. Each time Thom was forced to explain again to a new set of curious children just why it was he always came to school looking like a pirate. One child nicknamed him “salamander” and the thin-skinned Thom ended up getting into a fight with him. But the taunts didn’t stop.

“If you think about it, if I had a kid and he had to wear a patch on his eye for a year, I’d be worried about what he’d be like at the end of that year. You know what I mean?” Thom continued.

Despite this, he wasn’t some kind of emotional wreck. He had a girlfriend. He had his first kiss at the age of seven. Typically he still remembered the girl’s name, years later, Kate Ganson. More surprisingly, considering his later views on drivers, he also remembered that her dad had, “a great Lotus car.”

His mum described him later as a quiet, happy child who would spend all his time in a corner making things with Lego. She was the creative one in the family while his dad was an energetic hard worker and amateur boxer who tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to teach his older son to box, too.

“One of the first things he ever bought me was a pair of boxing gloves,” Thom said to
Rolling Stone’s
Jon Wiederhorn. “He used to try to teach me … but whenever he hit me, I’d fall flat on my ass.”

He picked up a guitar for the first time when he was four years old but, when he cut his fingers on the sharp strings, he threw it against the wall and broke it. The first, but not the last guitar to die that way. By the time he was seven, this indiscretion had obviously been forgotten because he was given a Spanish guitar as a present and promptly decided that he was going to be just like his new hero – Brian May of Queen. Instead, his guitar teacher had him plucking away, learning to play ‘Kumbaya’. Nevertheless he stuck with it and, when he was ten-years-old, he formed his first band. They were a duo. Thom played the guitar and his co-writer would make as much 
noise as possible, on one occasion by rewiring a TV so that it exploded. This went well with the subject matter of their songs. The first one was called ‘Mushroom Cloud’ and, Thom said later, “it was more about how they looked than how terrible they were.”

But things went downhill when the family moved again, this time to Oxfordshire. Thom’s brother Andy once said of their hometown of Abingdon that it was, “quite horrible … Abingdon swims around in this sea of cultural emptiness.”

And the public school of the same name was even worse. Although it had a highly musical ethos, which in many ways was great for Thom, it was also deeply conservative and old-fashioned. And the fact that Thom went to a fee-paying school meant that he’d decisively stepped over an invisible line in Britain’s class divide. His new schoolmates didn’t think much of him and his old friends rejected him, too.

“They blanked me out,” he said in an interview with
Blender
magazine. “I used to cycle around, and one of them once got his older brother to kick the shit out of me and throw me in the river, just because I’d gone to that school.”

By then he’d become the kind of person who constantly feels the glare of the world’s attention and finds it frightening but also gratifying. His nascent feeling that everybody was watching him was, at that point, probably justified, or else it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. He stood out. Not just because of his eye but because of his manner. When everybody else was desperate to fit in with the crowd, he seemingly did everything he could to assert his individuality. After Queen, his next musical obsession was with the band Japan and, in homage he wore make-up like singer David Sylvian, grew his hair long and dyed it blonde. Later on he dressed like an old man in long overcoats or bought the sharpest suits he could find in Oxford’s charity shops. “In terms of school stereotypes,” Abingdon contemporary, Nigel Powell, told this author, “Thom was the guy who wore long coats and scowled. That was the way he wanted to present himself.”

By then he’d found a new identity for himself as a fan of outsider bands like Magazine and Joy Division. In 1983, this wasn’t considered cool at Abingdon. Even the kids who hung around the musical department preferred classic rock, or singer-songwriters like Simon And Garfunkel. Thom found himself the subject of bullies.

“He was very noticeable at school because of the way he looked,” another Abingdon pupil Alex Keyser told me, “and he used to be picked on by the older boys. He used to get picked on really badly and have his bag thrown away and stones kicked at him and stuff.”

The one place he could escape was the soundproof booths at the back of the music room. He found an ally there in the music teacher, Terence Gilmore-James. “I was a sort of leper at the time, and he was the only one who was nice to me,” Thom told writer Alex Ross in the
New Yorker
. “School was bearable for me because the music department was separate from the rest of the school. It had pianos in tiny booths, and I used to spend a lot of time hanging around there after school, waiting for my dad to come home from work.”

In interviews since, Thom has been highly disparaging of Abingdon. He saw it as a kind of hothouse where ambitious parents sent their children to be force-fed an unhealthy desire for material success. He once said that the dominant ethos of British public schools was that “achievement is everything and if anybody gets in the way you just want to kill.” This attitude was summed up more positively by then Abingdon Head Teacher Michael St John Parker’s mission statement for the school: “Competition is promoted, achievement is applauded, and individual dynamism is encouraged.”

Nevertheless Thom’s experiences there played a massive part in forming his world-view. On the one hand, he was one of the privileged seven percent of British children who get to attend the kind of school that has pianos in soundproofed booths but, in the highly stratified social scale of the British public school system, he didn’t feel in any way ‘posh’. For pupils at minor public schools like Abingdon, there’s always the consciousness of a whole other layer of ‘posh’ above them, at schools like Eton and Harrow. And even at Abingdon, Thom regarded himself as a townie. His dad was a salesman. If it’s true that England’s classes are generally in a state of cold war, enlivened by occasional skirmishes, Thom was, to quote Magazine, “shot by both sides.”

Holidays provided a kind of respite, particularly one summer when he attended the National Youth Music Camp near Milton Keynes in Buckinghamshire. It was run by a woman called Avril Dankworth. She was the sister of famous jazz musician Johnny Dankworth and an inspirational educationalist in her own right, with a philosophy called “allmusic”. Thom would be there for a week
having intensive lessons on the guitar, trying out other instruments and regularly performing with other kids.

Sarah Shrimpton was a tutor then and is now artistic director of the camps. She told me that “schools were very classical music orientated at the time. So people came to get their fix of other sorts of music. There was no genre bias. They rubbed shoulders from musicians of all genres. It’s incredible what they achieve in a week. They have their ‘A’ session, which is on their principal instrument that they play and then ‘B’ and ‘C’ sessions, which is something they haven’t done before or [perhaps if they] want to participate in a group, like a rock band or folk group. Then they put on a production.”

The kids at the camp weren’t like the kids at school and, although Thom still didn’t exactly fit in, his ability to perform gave him a unique identity that, suddenly, wasn’t wholly a disadvantage.

One of the other campers, Martin Brooks, told this author that he stood out even then. “He wore very different clothes to everybody else,” Martin says. “Everybody else was in jeans and T-shirts and he was quite deliberate in the way he wore waistcoats. He clearly wanted to dress differently. It was kind of farmer chic, tweeds and neck-ties and stuff like that. A bit Kevin Rowland. He had a very clear un-ironic focus about who he was and that he wanted to get up onstage and perform. Even at that age he was not self-obsessed, but very deliberate about ‘This is who I am.’ He had a very strong concept of who he was and what he wanted to do.”

What Thom wanted to do was play and at the end of the week he got his chance, cranking out (“painfully”, Martin says) a version of The Police’s ‘Roxanne’. Although he might not have been very good technically (yet), he already had a confidence onstage that was missing in his normal life.

“It was the first time that I found something that I really loved and I suppose I just loved the attention,” Thom said later of his first experiences with playing live. “I wanted to be famous, I wanted the attention. What’s wrong with that?” (Typically he answered his own question: “There is also something really seriously fucking unhealthy about it.”)

At the time it wasn’t unhealthy at all. He made new friends, albeit only for a week, and he learned that there were people in the world who were as passionate about music as him. Being a fan of Joy
Division, or even Sting, didn’t necessarily mean he had to sit in his bedroom, alone with his guitar.

“It was a great way of trying new things, getting into new things and meeting lots of other kids,” Martin says. “When you go on a week’s camp, you kind of make friends with everyone and get to know them quite well. We weren’t close friends but there were about 70 kids and you remember one or two of them standing out, either for the way they look or the way they perform and stuff, and one of them was Thom. He was a very self-assured performer onstage but offstage he wasn’t self-assured at all.”

“Sometime children arrive with an attitude that they’ve obviously got in everyday life,” says tutor Mike Oliver, who taught at the camp in the 1980s, “and in the camp people find a different outlook on life. Sometimes the attitude they’ve had disappears and they find they can mix in much better.”

When Thom got back to school that autumn, he was determined to take his music further. He started recording his songs but he was taken aback when a close friend listened to some of the songs he’d been working on. “Your lyrics are crap,” she blurted. “They’re too honest, too personal, too direct and there’s nothing left to the imagination.”

“She was right,” Thom said to
Q
later. “When I first started, I wasn’t really interested in writing lyrics. Which is strange in a way because if I didn’t like the words on a record, if it wasn’t saying anything, I would never bother with it again. But at 16 your own songs are half-formed and you don’t really expect anyone to hear them, so you don’t care what the words are.”

At the time, Abingdon had one punk band, known as TNT. Their most talented member was the bass player, Colin Greenwood. Thom became the singer (because, as singers always say, “no one else would”) and, united by the fact that neither of them fitted in at Abingdon, they became friends. Colin used to wear catsuits, dressing in a way calculated to wind up the more conservative elements of the school. Thom would wear frilly shirts and the suits he’d bought in Oxford’s second-hand shops (altered by his mum). When Thom left TNT, bored of the rest of the band’s lack of ambition and originality, Colin soon followed and they started plotting to form a new, better band. Although Thom liked the kind of bands cool, outsider kids were supposed to like – Magazine and Joy
Division for example – he was also a huge fan of U2 and had recently acquired a massive passion for the then relatively obscure REM. He wanted to do something like that. Something bigger and more emotional than punk. A month later he saw Ed O’Brien walking down the street carrying a guitar that he’d just been given for his sixteenth birthday.

“He thought I looked like Morrissey,” Ed said in an interview with
The Plain Dealer
magazine. “I was a fan of Morrissey’s band, The Smiths – and Thom said I should be in a band.” “No one would let us be in their gang,” Thom said later, “so we had to form our own.”