Thom Yorke (12 page)

And, as always, if Thom believed in something he was prepared to go all the way to make it work. On the day of the set, despite the band having a supporting role in their own video, they threw themselves into it with abandon.

“Everyone talks about the man and what he says, or doesn’t say, in this video,” says Jamie. “Very few people actually discuss how great a performance it was from the band and Thom in particular. Radiohead performed the complete track a 100 times over but they always kept it fresh and exciting each time. The band had all agreed that they were really going to go for it. Thom had just started doing his twitchy psycho thing at a few live gigs, they wanted to commit it to celluloid, it was mesmerising to watch. It was a 360º set; there was only room for the cameraman, grip and focus puller so I tended to watch everything on a monitor outside the room. Every time the song ended, no one said anything for a second or two, it rendered everyone speechless. When I walked into the set, I remember there would be this strange kind of charge in the air and there’d be Thom still twitching.”

This may have been part of his problem with the whole concept of music videos. He resented putting so much effort and energy into what he saw as essentially another branch of a sales job. But Radiohead’s best videos were works of art in their own right. Jamie still won’t reveal what the man said and apparently Radiohead have
agreed to keep the secret, too. All he will say is that “lip reading won’t help you.”

Gradually, bit by bit, Radiohead were becoming as big as they were at the peak of ‘Creep’s success.
The Bends
ultimately went gold worldwide and, just as they had with ‘Creep’, the band found themselves in the bizarre situation of being invited, albeit cautiously, into the mainstream. One particularly strange experience was being asked to play teen pop magazine
Smash Hits
’ ‘Poll Winners Party’. Naturally, with an audience of young children and their anxiously watching parents, they chose to play the raucous, disturbing ‘My Iron Lung’. “Little children were crying,” said Thom, “and you should have seen some of the parents, it was wicked! It was great. I was really proud we did it.”

A year after
The Bends
came out, it went back into the Top Ten in the UK for no obvious reason. It was the definitive word-of-mouth success. But one problem with Radiohead’s slow, gradual progress was that it meant they kept touring. There were always new fans who wanted to see them. During the last months of the tour, they desperately wanted to go home but as soon as they did they found it difficult to adjust. It was difficult to return to reality when Thom got home.

“A lot of it’s down to the fact that towards the end of a tour, it’s just drink yourself stupid all the time,” he said to
Select
magazine. “And then you go home and carry on. ‘Wahey! The end of the tour’s coming up. Wahey! The tour’s finished!’ It just carries on, and you don’t really know what to do afterwards.”

He occasionally regretted the fact that, early on in their career, they’d played up to the middle-class, tea drinking image. He knew it wasn’t an accurate representation of what they were like. Most of the lyrics of
The Bends
, Thom said later, were written when he was drunk at the back of the tour bus during the long, post-
Pablo Honey
tour when nothing seemed to make sense.

“The reality is that we were probably doing as many drugs as everybody else,” he said in an interview with
Vox
. “I wouldn’t go on a chat show and talk about it, because it’s purely recreational. I love getting stoned, it’s the best thing in the fucking world.”

They would sometimes record while stoned, which could be helpful, but which also, perhaps, contributed to their painfully slow progress and occasional outbreaks of paranoia. When they came to
record their next album, the revered classic
OK Computer
, any additional source of paranoia was the last thing they needed.

In 1996, when they started working on their third album,
OK Computer
, Thom had been doing Radiohead as a ‘full-time job’ for five years. It sometimes made him feel like he was losing touch with the real world. For large chunks of the year he found himself in an environment, on tour or while carrying out promotional duties, where he felt like a salesman or a politician. Even when he got home, he sometimes had to remind his friends that he was the same person. And, sometimes, they had to remind him. These were the experiences, combined with the 20
^th
Century’s background drone of computers, TV and radio – what he called “fridge buzz” – that would help shape the next album.

Radiohead started by promising themselves that, whatever else happened, they would do things differently this time. There would be no long, sterile sessions stuck in a recording studio glaring at each other. They wouldn’t go running to the producer every time they ran out of ideas. John Leckie had taught them that a producer wasn’t there to tell them what they should or should not do. They had to work things out for themselves.

“One of the things I’m eternally grateful for,” said Thom in a TV interview, “is that he made it so the studio no longer seemed like some kind of science lab. John took all the mystery out of recording and made it something you could enjoy, just like playing.”

What they needed, they thought, was somebody who knew how to press the right buttons. In Nigel Godrich, the engineer from
The Bends
sessions, they’d found just the right person. He’d become a friend during the long, fraught time at RAK and The Manor. He was the same age as them so they didn’t see him as an authority figure. Having him around would remove the temptation to ask somebody else what they should do. Also, their most enjoyable experiences during
The Bends
sessions had come when the pressure was off and they were recording B-sides. One of those tracks, ‘Black Star’, was so good that it made the final cut of
The Bends
.

Nigel Godrich also shared Radiohead’s antipathy towards studios. “I hate studios myself,” he said in an interview on his website (www.nigelgodrich.com). “The idea of going somewhere where you know 200 million people have done the same thing – it’s like using a public toilet. You don’t feel like it’s your space.”

They really thought that if they just avoided the elementary mistakes that they’d made with
Pablo Honey
and
The Bends
, then the next album could be a much less painful experience. They’d already had a taste of how simple recording could be when they came to do ‘Lucky’ for the Bosnian War Child charity record
Help
.

They’d been playing it for months on tour and, when they were asked to contribute a song, Jonny suggested it. Thom wasn’t sure. He wasn’t a fan of many of the other bands on the
Help
album and he didn’t like the back-patting element that’s always present with charity records.

“We did it because we were asked to do it and because Ed studied the Balkans,” he said. “We just felt it was a good idea to just make the gesture. We realised that there would be a lot of back-patting but we knew it wasn’t going to end up like
Live Aid
. To be honest, we were really itching to record the song anyway and we just didn’t see why we shouldn’t put it on this record.”

When they went into the studio with Nigel, they were conscious that they didn’t have long. The idea of the charity album was that every song would be recorded and mixed in one day. It didn’t seem like a massive task. When they were on a roll, as the song ‘Lucky’ put it, they were perfectly capable of blasting songs out. But when they got there, they found that the first part of the day was taken up with talking to press and TV. Thom kept looking at his watch, thinking anxiously to himself,
Erm, shouldn’t we be making this song at some point?

But, when they came to do it, it was almost effortless. The song was what you might call one of Thom’s many “crash ballads”, the story of somebody crawling out of the wreckage of an aeroplane, and it just came pouring out. “It just happened,” he said, “writing and recording it, there was no time, no conscious effort.”

To be able to record a song like that, without the stress of constant revision and critical analysis, was a rare joy for Radiohead. By this point, Thom was looking back to their earliest days of recording, just him and Jonny and a four-track, as some of his happiest moments.
Although in those days he’d dreamt about being given the keys to a professional studio, he hadn’t realised how debilitating they could be.

“We didn’t want to be in the studio with A&R men coming around, nice air-conditioning, staring at the same walls and the same microphones. That was madness,” he said to the
Launch
website. “We wanted to get to another state of mind – one that we understood.”

Their trust in Nigel Godrich was such that they handed him $140,000 of EMI’s money in order to buy them a state of the art mobile studio. Nigel had the rich-kid-at-Christmas role of going out and buying whatever he thought they would need. It was an approach that had been pioneered by Thom’s early heroes U2 on their
The Unforgettable Fire
album. It meant that they could record in different locations without having to start again with new technology every time.

Initially it even seemed like the whole of their next album would be almost as simple and easy as ‘Lucky’. In an interview with a Canadian radio station in early 1996 Jonny thought the album was almost finished already.

“We were aiming to be kind of self-indulgent and spend a year recording,” he said, “but we did four days in a studio and we’ve already got three songs so I think it’s going to be horribly quick again.”

“I remember going to early sessions for
OK Computer
, which they did up at the Fruit Farm near where I live,” says Nigel Powell, “and in the first weeks I heard versions of ‘Paranoid Android’ and ‘No Surprises’ and I thought, ‘This is going to be easy, they’ve got half of it already.’ Then nine months later, they’d recorded four other versions of ‘No Surprises’ and somebody had gone, ‘Shall we listen to that first one again?’ and they listened to it and went, ‘Actually that’s really good isn’t it?’ That’s the way they seemed to approach things.”

While at their rehearsal space, an old apple storage barn at the fruit farm called Canned Applause, they spent much of their time playing with tape loops, perfecting the background buzz that would form such a major part of the eventual album. For the first four months they mostly just rehearsed, practising until they got things right. They could have just used samplers but they preferred the
more organic, analogue sounds of the tape spinning. Then, with four songs almost finished, they decided to do the same thing they’d done during
The Bends
sessions – perfect the tracks on tour. This time they played the European festival circuit and then went out as support act to Alanis Morissette. It was an odd choice of tour, although highly lucrative given how successful she was at the time. With the enormous sales of her debut album,
Jagged Little Pill
, she was either a warning or an example of what Radiohead could become if they wanted it badly enough. Thom wasn’t sure if he did.

Nevertheless, they were starting to warm to the idea of being a stadium band. Playing the new songs in vast, sterile concrete boxes gave them a new sense of direction. “A lot of the songs needed to sound quite big and messy, like they were bouncing off the walls,” Thom told
Jam Showbiz
. “When we went back into the studio, we were actually trying to recreate the sound of a shed soundcheck, or a baseball stadium thing, without sounding like bloody Def Leppard or something. That was really important to the songs.”

When they got back they moved into a mansion called St Catherine’s Court in a secluded valley just north of Bath. Completed in the 16
^th
Century it was an extremely imposing building, grey and gothic with ivy hanging beneath the windows. It was owned by actress Jane Seymour who’d bought it for £300,000 in 1984 and then spent £3,000,000 doing it up. In the last few years it had mostly been rented out for grand weddings and corporate events but in 1996 The Cure had hired it to make their
Wild Mood
Swings
album. When Radiohead got there, with all of the shiny new equipment that Nigel Godrich had bought, they immediately felt much happier than they had done in any professional studio. “You don’t feel like lab rats, like you’re being experimented on all the time, which you normally do in studios,” Thom said in a TV interview.

The house had large stone rooms and beautiful wood panelling. The acoustics and the atmosphere were very different to any other studio they’d ever been in. Among other things, they were amused to find pictures of the proprietor in her underwear in the bathroom. The Cure had used the dining room as the control room but there was also a vast wood-panelled ballroom and an entirely stone-clad room that gave a completely different feel to the acoustics. Phil set up his drum-kit in the children’s playroom, surrounded by soft toys. The sessions there were instantly much more laidback than on
The
Bends
. Almost too laid back. The Cure had ended up spending sixteen months at St Catherine’s Court, making an album that was far from their best. It seemed quite possible that Radiohead might do the same. “We had as much time as we wanted to do it and that kind of got out of hand,” Thom said.

After the trauma of trying to record
The Bends
, they wanted to make a simpler, more stripped-down record this time. There wasn’t to be the endless analysis and self-criticism. There wasn’t to be the darkness of
The Bends
.

“You know, the big thing for me is that we could really fall back on just doing another moribund, miserable, morbid and negative record, like, lyrically,” Thom enthused to
NME
before they started recording. “But I really don’t want to, at all. And I am deliberately just writing down all the positive things that I hear or see. But I’m not able to put them into music yet. I don’t want to force it because then all I’m doing is just addressing all the issues where people are saying that we’re mope rock.”

But as the sessions started, Thom realised that the record wasn’t turning out quite how he’d expected. It was as if it had a life of its own. They just had to follow wherever it wanted to go. It became a running joke in the studio, when things got too complicated, Thom or Jonny would say “Didn’t we say we were going to make an album like
77
(Talking Heads’ stripped-down debut album).

That was never going to happen. Thom wasn’t listening to that kind of music. He was obsessed by Miles Davis’s
Bitches Brew
album. At the time, none of the band were listening to pop or rock. Jonny had got into dark, atonal classical composer Penderecki, best known for the use of his music in films like
The Exorcist
and
The Shining
and for his incredibly harsh and harrowing,
Threnody For
The Victims Of Hiroshima
. The idea that they were going to come up with something light and accessible was, looking back, absurd.

The songs Thom had written depicted the weird, depersonalised world of airport lounges, hotel rooms and bars. They had been his home for much of the last three years. It was a world where people alternately worshipped and preyed on celebrity and where constant travel by car and by plane meant, for Thom, a constant low-level fear of death. It was, he said later, “everything I never thought I’d write an album about.”

Some of the most violent imagery on the record came directly out
of an experience Thom had one night in LA in 1996. He went to a bar and was immediately surrounded by a group of coked-up, hysterical and over-ambitious wannabes in expensive, designer clothes. One woman had a drink spilled over her and Thom was astonished and shocked by her transformation from glamorous clothes-horse into howling harpy.

“There was a look in this woman’s eyes that I’d never seen before anywhere,” he said. “Whether that was down to me being exhausted and hallucinating … no, I know what I saw in her face. [I] couldn’t sleep that night because of it.” She would later be immortalised by Thom as a so-called Gucci little piggy. Other hangers-on were skewered with ‘Karma Police’ – the woman with the Hitler haircut and the man who buzzes like a fridge.

But if the subject matter was vicious and unpleasant, the experience of recording ‘Paranoid Android’ was anything but. It was everything they loved about being in a band. The way Thom has described it at times is reminiscent of the way an inventor might describe the process of creating a miraculous new product. As well as the sheer joy of artistic expression there was an element of solving a technical problem, finding the perfect balance between harmony and chaos. As ‘My Iron Lung’ had done, the song started with a beautiful melody, before taking an abrupt left turn, and then another one and then another one, until it finishes by thrashing around like a fish on dry land.

In some respects,
OK Computer
was a continuation of the themes of
The Bends
. Travel was still a major preoccupation, with tracks like ‘Airbag’ and ‘Lucky’. It was an album that could only have been made by people who’d spent an awful lot of time in the last few years getting in and out of cars, buses and planes. There was also a major supernatural or alien presence with tracks like ‘Subterranean Homesick Alien’.

“I’m like most people; I’d love to be abducted,” Thom said to the
Yahoo
website. “It’s the ultimate madness. So many people go loopy when they’re abducted, whether you believe it or not. But if you take away the word ‘alien’ and replace it with the word ‘ghost’, it becomes less hysterical. Everyone believes in ghosts. Surely that is more significant than little green men, isn’t it?”

Jonny preferred a more logical explanation of the same song. “I’m an enormous cynic,” he said to
Launch
. “That song is more about
how for every generation, it’s a different thing. Before UFOs it was the Virgin Mary, and before that it was something else. People flock to the same places with their cameras and hope to see the same things. And it’s just about hope and faith, I think, more than aliens.”