Thom Yorke (11 page)

“There was one press junket they did when ‘Iron Lung’ came out, [and] Thom and Jonny flew out to the US do a live show,” says Paul Kolderie. “I was in the truck with them because I was friends with the DJ and the woman said, before we went on, ‘Is there anything you want to talk about or not talk about,’ and Thom said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t talk about ‘Creep’, I don’t want to play it tonight, I want to play our new stuff.’ So she goes ‘OK’. Then the interview starts and the first thing she does is say to the crowd watching us outside, ‘Hey, they say they’re not going to play ‘Creep’ tonight! What’s up with that, people?’ So of course everybody goes ‘Boooo! Fuck you!’ Thom just went completely white. First he turned red then he turned white. Then he goes, ‘I’ve got to get out of here!’ So he jumped up and ran out of the interview. Me and Jonny finished the interview but it was one of the things where you go, ‘We just talked about this! What, you think that’s a scoop or something?’ He was completely pissed but he ended up giving a really good show. It sort of energised him in a strange way. I don’t blame him. Different people might have dealt with it in a different way but it was Thom’s way to just run out and go, ‘Agghhhhh’. But it worked for him.”

“The main thing that we wanted to do was not repeat ourselves,” Thom said in a TV interview. “It would have made certain people very happy if we’d done twelve versions of ‘that song’ but by that point we’d really had enough. Even if we’d wanted to, we can’t repeat ourselves.”

This was the point when many ‘Creep’ fans started to disappear but a new breed of Radiohead fan was slowly replacing them. Despite muted radio support, sales of the
My Iron Lung
EP were better than the worried record label had expected and it became clear that, even without the backing of the radio or much of the press, they had a loyal fan base. It was an important boost after an extraordinary,
confusing couple of years and it helped fire them up for the release of
The Bends
.

Radiohead’s second album bears none of the signs of being recorded over such a long period of time. It’s as taut and powerful as a clenched fist. Despite its recurring themes of sickness and physical decay, it exudes all the energy of the great live band they’d become.

“The whole concept of
The Bends
goes back to ‘My Iron Lung’ and that weird breathing thing,” says Paul. “I don’t think he meant to do a concept album but in a way he kind of did. It’s about claustrophobia and feeling hemmed in and unable to breathe.”

Songs such as ‘The Bends’, ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, ‘Bones’, ‘High And Dry’ and ‘My Iron Lung’ could be seen as throwbacks to Thom’s childhood hatred of hospitals, but he would always angrily deny that the record was autobiographical.

“It’s not my fucking day-to-day,” he said in a
Melody Maker
interview. “It’s not my life. These lyrics aren’t self-fulfilling.
The Bends
isn’t my confessional. And I don’t want it used as an aid to stupidity and fucking wittery. It’s not an excuse to wallow. I don’t want to know about your depression – if you write to me, I will write back angrily telling you not to give into all that shit.”

He’s always insisted that many of his lyrics are written in a spirit of sarcasm or outright humour. “The biggest battle I have at the moment,” he said in a late 1990s TV interview, “is to persuade people that a lot of the lyrics I write are very funny.”

At the time, many people might have gone along with Colin’s wry response to this: “Funny peculiar – not funny ha ha”. But undoubtedly there is humour in many of Thom’s best lyrics on the record. Even ‘My Iron Lung’ is obviously blackly comic. Not many people would have the brazen ingratitude to slag off their biggest hit in such a way. Thom has the ability of many creative people to simultaneously feel an emotion and to mock it.

This was an ability he shared with his old college friend Dan Rickwood. Dan’s art, too, often dealt with serious subjects by making them absurd. At university he was regarded as “a good
laugh” by friends and his artwork had a similarly spiky sense of humour. Thom hadn’t been happy with EMI’s early decisions on their record sleeves and therefore when they came to do the
My Iron Lung
EP, he gave Dan a call.

“Radiohead were unhappy with the amount of money they’d had to pay for design,” says John Matthias. “[Before now] it was music industry people trying to be grungey. It was only really with the ‘My Iron Lung’ EP that they started becoming much more autonomous. I think when they first got signed they did what they were told and it was a bit like being at school. They gradually realised that EMI didn’t know everything; they didn’t know what Radiohead wanted to do. It was a very gradual movement away from them in a sense. The realisation that they were actually in control of their own stuff.”

This was when they started to make decisions about more than just the music. They’d been disappointed with the artwork and the videos as well as the way they were promoted generally. The cover of
The Bends
then, was the first album that came under a broader aesthetic of which Dan – now working under the name Stanley Donwood – was very much a part. It featured a doll that Oxford hospital The John Radcliffe used for resuscitation practice. Thom and Dan liked the way its mouth lolled open. It was hard to tell whether it was in ecstasy or in agony, the perfect Radiohead image.

From then on the artwork and the music would be tied together as closely as possible. Often Dan would join the band in the recording studio, coming up with ideas as he listened to them play. “He’s either in a little room adjacent or above us in the mezzanine, or in the shed at the bottom of the gully,” said Ed O’Brien to
AV
Club
. “He’s always with us, and we need him in that creative process. Not just for his artwork, but because he’ll say, ‘I know nothing about music, but that was fucking brilliant!’”

When
The Bends
was released, most critics thought it was brilliant, too. It received rave reviews in the two main music papers,
NME
and
Melody Maker
, and later on appeared in numerous ‘Album Of The Year’ lists. Despite this, in 1995, Thom’s relationship with the press, never exactly warm, hit a new low. The first bruising encounter had come in 1992 with an early live review in
NME
. Writer Keith Cameron famously described them as a, “a lily-livered excuse for a rock band.” This was just his opinion but the knife was twisted by a montage of unflattering pictures of Thom captioned:
“Uglee – Oh yeah!”

They could cope with that. They even took the “lily-livered excuse for a rock band” moniker on board as a kind of ironic mission statement. Then, in March 1995, Thom – who’d always been a vociferous reader of the music press – was shocked to see a
Melody Maker
feature that asked its readers whether he was likely to be the next great rock casualty after Kurt Cobain and Richey Manic (then missing for just a month).

“I stopped reading the press when they printed I was going to top myself,” Thom said to
NME
at the end of that year. “And my girlfriend rings me up, really, really upset, saying, ‘What’s all this, what have you been saying?’ You know, that’s when I stopped reading it. That was enough for me.”

In reality, writers The Stud Brothers didn’t say that he was going to top himself. Buried in the text was the line, “Thom Yorke, 26, is already marked for destruction. But Thom doesn’t see it like that. And frankly, neither do we.” Their piece was a deliberately provocative attempt to look at the unfortunate obsession of rock fans and the media with martyrs like Richey and Kurt. Unfortunately any subtlety that the piece might have had was overshadowed by the line below the heading which described Thom as, “a man who will soon know the price of fame, and who already knows the cost of being born ugly.”

The music press’s obsession with Thom’s supposed “ugliness” was always rather vicious. By “ugly” they just meant that one of his eyes didn’t open properly. That kind of gratuitous abuse was the real “price of fame.”

In fact
The Bends
came out at a time when the music scene was moving away from the darkness of albums like
In Utero
or the Manic Street Preachers’ bleak classic
The
Holy Bible
. The big albums of the era were Blur’s
Parklife
and Oasis’s
Definitely Maybe
. They had an upbeat, optimistic sound, which was far removed from
The Bends
. Still, at least people weren’t talking about the fact that they didn’t always play ‘Creep’ anymore. Their decision to – temporarily at least – drop it from their live sets, no longer seemed like the act of precious prima donnas.

“It might have seemed [like that] at the time,” says Paul, “but then you realise later on that it’s just having the courage of your convictions. It was like, ‘We’ve got to get past this!’”

And get past it they did. And they were still as ambitious as ever. Following the release of
The Bends
, they headed back to America for an astonishing
five
tours. When asked why they did it, Thom said, “Don’t fucking ask me, it wasn’t my idea!” In the USA,
The Bends
was a definite flop in comparison with
Pablo Honey
for the first couple of months, yet they were determined to prove themselves all over again. In the summer of 1995, they had their best chance when REM invited them on tour. It had been a running joke that the only bands they would support were U2 or REM. When they got the call from Michael Stipe’s band, Thom couldn’t believe it. Stipe had been one of his biggest heroes since he was at school.

“I was absolutely terrified of meeting him,” he said later, “because I projected so much stuff onto him when I was a kid.” But when they met it was Michael who was more effusive. “I’m really glad you could do this,” he told Thom. “I’m a very big fan.” Thom was stupefied. “I’ve never believed in hero worship,” he wrote in his tour diary, “but I have to admit to myself that I’m fighting for breath.”

REM acted like a crash course in ‘how to be a big band’ to Thom. He was astonished at how good they were at schmoozing without losing the plot. “It seems you have to be nice to people forever,” he mused. “I may as well get used to my cracked smile.”

But it didn’t take long before he realised that REM were just ordinary people. It helped him realise what other people felt when they approached him for an autograph. “Now Michael and I have quite a good relationship,” he said to Alex Ross in the
New Yorker
. “Making friends with your idol makes you realise how fucking important it is to stay on this side and never go to that side.”

It helped that REM were so supportive. Michael Stipe declared one night on tour that Radiohead were so good “it’s frightening”. On another date, Thom was mortified when a girl approached their table in a restaurant when the two bands were eating and asked for his autograph and not the REM front man’s.

He’d never liked supporting other bands as much as playing headline shows. He kept having to tell himself that he couldn’t expect the same reaction from the audience. As long as they were facing the right direction and they “had their eyes open” it was OK. But the REM tour was different. Everything seemed to be going well. After one show in Norway, he played the rest of the band a new
demo he’d written on the acoustic guitar. It was called, he said in a tour diary at the time, ‘No Surprises Please’. Colin, he reported, “went nuts.”

By then the sheer effort they were making was starting to pay off.
The Bends
eventually went Top Ten in the UK and was selling steadily, by word of mouth, around the world. It was one of those albums that many people didn’t get at first, yet it sounded better with every listen. Even Paul and Sean admit that they didn’t realise what a great album it was initially.

“When we got the tracks, they were well-recorded but it was one of those things where you’re so close to it that you don’t really get it,” says Paul. “I thought it was good. I thought it was a step forward. I didn’t realise how big a step forward it was until I saw that record go out and work its way into the culture. ‘Creep’ was a hit but it was one of those hits where the first time you hear it you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s crazy,’ but after a few times you don’t want to hear it again. I got to the point where I didn’t want to hear it again. But
The Bends
, when it came out and had worked its way into the culture for about a year, was one of the most successful records I’d ever worked on because it was just everywhere. You’d go to a party, you’d go to a club, you’d go to a restaurant, every party you’d go to it’d be playing because it was the record that everybody could agree was good.”

When
The Bends
came out, a small hardcore of fans rushed out and bought it straight away. Radiohead already had a fan base for whom it didn’t matter whether their songs got played on the radio, or their videos appeared on TV. They would search out and buy everything that the band put out. “The album came out and within two days everyone knew all the words of all the songs,” said Thom in a 1995 TV interview. “That’s why we do it, it’s wonderful.”

A year later, that hardcore was much, much bigger. The bedrock of support they now had made it possible for them to go on and be the experimental band that they were for the next ten years and more, without having to worry about what the industry or the media would think.

But towards the end of the last tour following the album, they all just wanted to go home. They were enjoying the live shows again but were finding the promotional treadmill draining. Some interviewers still knew little about them except that they were “that ‘Creep’ band”.

Luckily there was a much easier way of promoting their music. They’d always been highly ambivalent about music videos. Thom didn’t like the fact that they were blatantly just adverts. On MTV, ‘High And Dry’ would be followed by Coca Cola and Nike and there seemed little difference between them. But one great video could easily do the work of a year-long tour in terms of promoting the record. When they came to promote
The Bends
, they seemed to accept this. Arguably the first in a long list of great Radiohead videos was ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, a surreal vision set in a supermarket where Thom and the rest of the band were pushed around in shopping trolleys. It was the first single to be released in the States (the second in the UK where ‘High And Dry’ appeared first) and the video had a big impact on MTV. But it was the video for the third single, ‘Just’ that gave
The Bends
a massive boost when it appeared.

It was filmed outside Liverpool Street Station first thing in the morning and featured an apparently distressed commuter giving up, lying down in the street and refusing to move. To the consternation of passers-by, he refuses to tell them what’s wrong. When he finally gives in at the end of the video and tells them, they all lie down with him. It was shocking, clever and funny. Everything that Radiohead was about.

“The idea for the video was originally going to be for my next short film,” the video’s director Jamie Thraves explained to this author. “As I was listening to the song over and over, trying to come up with an idea, I was also thinking about my latest short, I was definitely treating the two things as separate entities but the song started to creep into my film and vice versa, then suddenly they fused together, it was a very exciting moment. Radiohead were brilliant and very supportive, they took a risk with me, they gave me complete freedom to make the video I wanted.”

This was the way Radiohead always worked. They treated other artists as creative equals. For Jamie Thraves it was a fantastic experience but, in some ways, the success of his video was a mixed blessing. It made his reputation but it also meant that, for years afterwards, he would be asked what the man says at the end of the song. Many people have suggested that the video doesn’t have any kind of ‘meaning’ as such but Jamie denies this.

“The truth is I actually do have something the man said,” he says. “I don’t think the video would work without there being something.
I’ve never told anyone, not even my wife. From the get-go the idea always included the subtraction of the man’s last words creating a conundrum, some characters are undone because of their desire to know the unknown and anyone who watches the video is taunted by that same desire. I did not imagine the video generating the speculation it has though. The funny thing is, I’m actually quite bad at keeping secrets; I usually blurt things out without meaning to. The truth is I’d like to reveal the answer because I’d like to share it, it’s a burden of sorts, but I know that if I reveal the answer the video would be dust, so I have no choice, it’s almost a curse really. I feel like Patrick McGoohan in
The Prisoner
. The reaction to the video was brilliant afterwards. People continue to ask me what the man says at the end which amaze me. I went through a small phase of getting a bit annoyed but I don’t mind anymore, I quite like it, I have my rehearsed lines, ‘Don’t make me tell you, you don’t want to know, please believe me.’”