Thom Yorke (18 page)

On June 18, 1999, Thom’s commitment to political change took a far more concrete expression than it had ever done before. It was the G8 meeting in Cologne, Germany and he was there, with a delegation including Bono, Bob Geldof, Youssou N’Dour and Perry Farrell of Jane’s Addiction. The idea had been to have a photo call in front of the conference building and then hand a petition over to the German Chancellor, Gerhard Schröeder, calling for the West to cancel Third World debt by the year 2000.

But, as they were hustled down a narrow street by the German police, far away from the conference hall, Thom wondered why he’d come. “There were seventeen million signatures on that petition,” he wrote in an article for Jubilee 2000 (the international coalition seeking the eradication of such debt). “There were 50,000 people in a human chain around Cologne and yet we were patronised, trivialised and bullied by both the G8 and the media.”

Throughout the day, the authorities changed the route of the march, causing increasing frustration. Eventually they were searched for weapons and then allowed to meet the Chancellor on the steps of a museum well away from where the G8 meeting was being held. It was, Thom thought, a kind of game. The politicians were trying to give them as little as possible while making it look like they agreed with every word they said. He’d always been highly dubious about whether there was any point to this kind of PR politics and his experiences in Germany confirmed his belief that he was right.

“Thom Yorke has zero tolerance for politicians,” Bono wrote in an online diary of the protests. “That video where he looks like Johnny Rotten in a shopping basket (‘Fake Plastic Trees’) is closer to his personality than the choir of street angels that haunts your ear. He was bristling with nervous energy and I wonder if that was a rocket launcher in his bag.”

“Politicians nod and say ‘yes’, but that’s what’s dangerous about
this particular moment in time,” Thom said to the
BBC
, “because what’s predicted at the end of the G8 summit this weekend, after we’ve handed in the petition, is they’ll announce that they’ve come up with a package which is basically what we asked for, which is actually not true at all – it’s a complete fabrication.”

Before getting to Cologne, he’d spent hours poring over facts and figures about debt, ready for any question that was put to him. Instead he found that journalists were confusing the Jubilee 2000 Campaign with the Reclaim The Streets riots back in London. There was little interest in the substance behind the protests. He saw how skilful the politicians were at taking credit for the movement towards dropping the debt, without actually promising to do anything. Tony Blair, in particular, was a target for Thom’s ire.

“You have Blair standing there smiling saying, ‘It’ll all be fine, we’ll cancel all these debts now,’ he said to Ireland’s
Hot Press
. “He was scoring all these celebrity points with Bono and Bob Geldof, and Alastair Campbell running around, you know, making sure he got the coverage he wanted, even though they actually hadn’t delivered anything at all. And, you know, I kinda saw the light in a certain way, but in another way it was incredibly disillusioning.”

But then he came from the generation that had seen Bono at Live Aid and seen that charity on its own wasn’t enough, so it wasn’t as if he was an innocent before Jubilee 2000. It seemed like every other month since then there had been another charity concert, they even played one, ‘Free Tibet’ in 1997, and yet the root causes of the problems remained. Since Live Aid, the West had taken vastly more money from the developing world in interest payments on debt than it had given back with charity. Thom likened the West to a loan shark and called the approach “basically extortion”.

Thom had been willing to try the new approach to politics of Bono and Bob Geldof in the late 1990s. It involved, essentially, treating politicians as compassionate people who were open to persuasion. Instead of spitting at world leaders from the outside, they were now trying to change things from the inside. But when it didn’t seem to work, Thom was angrier than ever. This came across in the songs like ‘You And Whose Army?’ on
Amnesiac
, which was none-too-subtly aimed at Blair and his supposed ‘cronies’. If he thought things were bad in 1999, though, they took a distinct turn for the worst in 2000 with the election of George W Bush in America. As a highly
prescient headline in satirical newspaper
The Onion
said about America that year, ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’.

 That year, Thom had a sense of hopelessness that was only occasionally blasted away by righteous indignation. He could easily have given up on politicking but there was another issue that seemed even more important than Jubilee 2000. The special edition of
Kid A
included what, at the time, seemed a bit of a curio, a chart giving details of the melt-rates of glaciers around the world. Even then there were still many people who disagreed with the science of man-made global warming but, as it became harder to deny that it was happening, Thom couldn’t understand why nothing was being done.

“Like many of my friends and anyone who has kids, it’s a difficult thing,” he said later, in an interview to promote Friends Of The Earth. “You wake up in the middle of the night thinking about it. You look into the eyes of your children and hope that they don’t grow up in a future that has riots for fuel or constant floods and infrastructure collapse.”

Part of his despair between
OK Computer
and
Kid A
came from a feeling of helplessness. Every new scientific study was producing more evidence to suggest that global warming was a massive threat to the state of the planet and yet it didn’t seem like there was anything he or anybody else could do. It would be several years before he would feel that there was any possibility of change. Despite this, he’d always gone through cycles of despair and enthusiasm. Even at university he was heavily involved in politics.

“He’s always had a real conscience and been involved in politics, campaigning and standing up for his beliefs,” Exeter University student Eileen Doran told the author for this book. “A lot of us got involved in that. It was the time of fighting against student loans and all that. He’s always been somebody who cares about what’s happening in the world. Pretty much how he is now really. He’s not really all that different now as far as I can tell.”

Thom’s politics have only rarely touched directly on his music. The cynicism of ‘Electioneering’ and the menace of ‘You And Whose Army?’ were exceptions but generally he liked things to be more oblique. An example was a new track that appeared at the end of 2001 on the
I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings
album. ‘True Love Waits’ was a treat for fans who wished the band would abandon
all the electronic stuff and go back to something more ‘traditional’. It was a delicate, acoustic track partly inspired by a story Thom read about a child who was left behind by his parents when they went on holiday, living on a diet of lollipops and crisps. That was Thom’s territory. With the next album, though, they would choose a title that put politics right back at the centre of their stage.

“When we finished
Kid A
and
Amnesiac
, we were thinking,
So, what kind of lurch in another direction are we gonna take now?
” Thom said to
The Daily Telegraph
after the release of the band’s sixth album,
Hail To The Thief
. He knew by now that some kind of a “lurch” was exactly what the public and the press were expecting. It was a new and bizarre form of pressure. The pressure to do absolutely anything they wanted, as long as it was completely different to anything they’d done before. He spent six months doing nothing except being a father until, he says, Rachel suggested: “‘Why don’t you just do a record where you let it happen? No agenda, nothing.’ And that sort of made things click.” Ed O’Brien said, “The whole thing was to do it quickly and not think about it too much, which was new for us, obviously.” They’d vaguely thought about knocking out an album quickly before, but this time they meant it. They couldn’t take another three years like the ones leading up to the release of
Kid A
and
Amnesiac
. They went back into their rehearsal space and tried out the new songs for three months as they had prior to
OK Computer
, recording the results every day and listening to the tapes every evening. But this time Thom refused to obsess over them as he had before. Instead, he let Jonny scrutinise the details. He wanted this record to be done without the endless over-analysis of previous albums. When word started filtering out about these sessions, it provided further encouragement for fans of their early stuff.

“It’s all loud and it’s all guitars,” Jonny said. “It’s exciting to make loud music again. It’s sounding good and fresh.” He even said in one interview that they’d been covering Neil Young’s ‘Cinnamon Girl’, rediscovering the joys of guitar chords. “In two days of rehearsal, we’ve played it between ten and fifteen times,” he enthused. “Loud minor chords. Distortion. Fantastic!”

Then, as they had so many times before, they took the new songs out on the road, playing them during a tour of Portugal and Spain.
Thom wrote and rewrote them as they went, never quite sure whether what they would play on any given night would be the finished version or not.

“We booked this little tour where we actually didn’t decide what we were going to play,” he said to
Launch
, “because that was the only way that we were able to get it together fast enough. Certainly with me, I was writing stuff that I wouldn’t normally write lyrically, ’cause I really didn’t have time to think about it. Whatever I had, that was it, too late, tough.” Then, when they had the songs ready, they prepared to go back into the studio in, of all places, LA, the home of the vampires who’d populated ‘Paranoid Android’. It was the home of Hollywood, plastic surgery, cock-rock and hair metal. Not a very Radiohead place at all, then. Nevertheless, Thom was perfectly happy. Nigel Godrich had suggested that they record in the famous Ocean Way studio in Hollywood. It was where Brian Wilson had driven himself half-mad trying to finish The Beach Boys’ ‘Good Vibrations’, so it was very suited to Radiohead’s similarly painstaking approach. Although Thom had often spoken about his distaste for professional studios, the chance to go and record somewhere like that couldn’t be passed up. Also, they had bad memories of the decision to start the previous records in Copenhagen in the middle of winter. The Californian sunshine seemed more appealing. They were family men now and it simply wasn’t feasible for them to take years making another record. After a long time out of the studio, Thom was itching to get back in.

“When I go to the studio now,” he said to
Launch
, “whether it’s our own studio or somewhere else, it’s something I’ve been looking forward to for months. So I don’t resent it in any way. I’m like, ‘Yes, yes, at last!’” They even took a little dip into the celebrity pool, going to a film premier and the party afterwards. “We went to LA for the sunshine and the glamour,” Thom joked.

Unlike for most bands, however, LA didn’t provide a lot of distraction. Essentially they treated it almost like a day job. They went to the studio for two weeks and recorded a song a day. It was that simple. It was, in fact, much like various other periods of recording they’d had on previous albums. The difference was that it was neither preceded by months of anguish nor followed by months of painfully picking the songs they’d recorded apart. They didn’t give themselves the chance.

There was no agenda and no rules about what instruments they could and could not use. If they felt a song needed a guitar, they would use a guitar and if it needed something generated on the computer, they would use that. The only agenda they had was that everything needed to be done quickly, without the over-analysis of the last three albums. Thom wanted the songs to be shorter, too. Out with any prog-rock comparisons.

“After doing a take, I’d run into the control room and go to the sound engineer [Darrell Thorpe], ‘How long is that Darrell?’” he said in a TV interview, “and he’d go, ‘Five minutes thirty’, and I’d go, ‘OK, let’s cut two minutes off.’

It struck Thom that The Beatles had managed to make experimental tunes in multi-parts, like ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’, that came in under three-and-a-half minutes, so why couldn’t Radiohead? To him, six-minute songs seemed rather self-indulgent at this point.

The result wasn’t quite the guitar-fest that they’d promised or the
OK Computer II
that some people had hoped for. On
Hail To The Thief
, Thom’s piano was much in evidence again while the guitars mostly provided texture and roughage. There were tracks like ‘Where I End And You Begin’ that indisputably rocked, or ‘Go To Sleep’ which was almost blues, but there was also plenty of the uneasy electronica that had marked
Kid A
and
Amnesiac
. Contrary to almost everybody else who heard it, though, Thom thought that it was their big, shiny pop album.

“I think,” he said in an interview with
Blender
magazine, “that if you managed to persuade the record company to put any of the tracks on the radio, it would sound like pop. But everyone thinks of us as an ‘album band’ and listens to the record all in one go. People scrutinise it so closely. I have so had enough of this! No one gives that much of a shit.”

This is an extraordinary thing for the front man of supposedly the most “serious” rock band in the world to say, ‘Stop listening to my records so closely!’ But he had a point.
Hail To The Thief
is not an easy album to listen to in one gulp. It’s rough and edgy; most of the songs are packed tight with sonic glitch. But listen to them in isolation and they have an energy that’s very different to the songs on other, more polished, albums. Tracks like ‘There There’, ‘The Gloaming’, ‘Myxomatosis’ and ‘A Wolf At The Door’ were every bit
as good as anything they’d done in the past. The latter, particularly, is brilliant. It’s a bleary-eyed fairytale, menacing and hilarious at the same time. Thom’s vocal is fantastically deadpan. To start with, he sounds like he’s reading the vocals off an autocue and getting increasingly freaked out by the words he’s being forced to say. This effect is enhanced by a chorus that, perhaps because it’s surrounded by so much clatter and angst, is gloriously ‘chocolate boxy’, like something out of a Disney film. It’s the last track on the album and it stands alongside ‘Street Spirit’ as one of the best album closers Radiohead have ever recorded.

One review in
The Guardian
newspaper criticised
Hail To The Thief
for its tone of vague anxiousness. It was, Thom might have responded, exactly how he was feeling after the birth of his son. He even wrote a song for Noah – ‘Sail To The Moon’ – one of the most personal things he’d ever written, although the lyrics were dream-like, woozy and hard to make out. You couldn’t call any of Radiohead’s records direct exactly, but this one was particularly oblique. It was odd then, that they took the decision to call it
Hail To The Thief
, seemingly a direct comment on the controversial election of George W Bush in America.

“The reason we called it
Hail To The Thief
”, he said in a German TV interview, “is stating the bleeding obvious. The most powerful country in the world is run by someone who stole an election. Now that’s bad. That’s bad for everybody. Especially as he was bought the election by extremely powerful companies with lots of money.”

Yet in other interviews Thom always desperately shied away from this, the most obvious interpretation of the name. It was partly because the idea of making anything as glib and one-dimensional as a ‘protest record’ appalled him. More seriously, he was also worried about his own safety and that of his family.

“I was unhappy,” he said, “about the potential consequences of calling it
Hail To The Thief
. Personal attacks, threats … people can get quite upset. So I wasn’t wild about that.” He much preferred a more surreal explanation. In another TV interview he claimed that the title referred to thieves of souls. “There is an idea Dante had,” he explained. “Certain people have done things that are so bad that they’re still here but their souls have gone. I don’t know about you but I’ve met people like that. It’s much more about that than the Bush thing.”

It seemed like he’d had second thoughts about the album title pretty much as soon as they’d thought of it. “It will annoy me if people say it’s a direct protest,” he said, “because I feel really strongly that we didn’t write a protest record.” At the time this sounded slightly ridiculous. The phrase ‘Hail To The Thief’ originally came from a jibe at 19
^th
Century US President John Quincy Adams, who was widely believed to have stolen an election. It was a play on words on the song ‘Hail To The Chief’, played at Presidential inaugurations. When George W Bush won the election in 2001, many protesters sang ‘Hail To The Thief’ in response. It was perhaps perverse to borrow the phrase for an album and then get annoyed that people assumed it might have something to do with Bush. It seems like Thom wanted people to take its topicality on board in a subliminal way, without thinking that Radiohead were making a direct statement. “Someone has given us money to stick the phrase ‘hail to the thief’ on walls all around the world,” he said to
Blender
. “That made me chuckle for ages.”

The alternative title was
The Gloaming
but Thom hadn’t been sure about that either. He thought it sounded much too dark to represent the whole album. “The record definitely enters a dark place in the middle,” he said, “but it isn’t the whole thing.”

At that point, Thom could look back and say that the anxiety and fear he’d expressed with
OK Computer
and
Kid A
had been pretty justified. The events of September 11 and the subsequent war in Afghanistan and build-up to conflict in Iraq had destroyed the optimism and complacency of the 1990s. Rather than the vague
fin de siécle
unease that songs like ‘Lucky’ had expressed, he was now being inspired by real events in the world, even if he still wasn’t writing about them directly.

“When we were doing
Kid A
and
Amnesiac
, I had this thing that we were entering a very dark phase,” he said to Andrew Mueller. “But it did strike me that things were going to kick off one way or another.”

But, for Radiohead,
Hail To The Thief
represented a kind of full-stop. It was the last record of the six-album deal that they’d signed with Parlophone back in 1991. Unlike the vast majority of other bands, they’d completed the deal without having to stick out a filler album or a
Greatest Hits
and they’d easily paid back their advance and come out in profit.
Hail To The Thief
would be their farewell to
the traditional record label ‘business model’. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, not before they reversed all the decisions they’d made about promotion on the last two albums. They made videos for the three singles ‘There There’, ‘Go To Sleep’ and ‘2+2=5’ including a particularly excellent one for ‘There There’, which featured a cartoon-like Thom in a dark fairytale wood. They even went back on the publicity trail with apparent enthusiasm. This reached its bizarre apogee when they laughed and joked on the show
Friday Night With
Jonathan Ross
, while the BBC interviewer struggled to suppress his astonishment that they’d agreed to come on his programme at all. It seemed like a calculated attempt to turn around the popular perception that they were gloom-rockers. Thom even agreed to Ross’s suggestion that they should write Britain’s next Eurovision entry. “We were trying to persuade the record company that to promote
Kid A
, we’re not going to do any TV, but we’ll do Eurovision,” he joked.

Thom said to
Pitchfork
afterwards that
Hail To The Thief
had been an attempt to “engage with the monster again” (the music industry as a whole, not Jonathan Ross) and that “it wasn’t very pleasant.” True to form, they regretted the decisions they’d made around
Hail
To The Thief
and as always they vowed never to do things the same again. They thought they’d recorded it too quickly. Thom wished he could go back and fix the songs. He didn’t feel it was their best work and he didn’t feel like they’d moved forward in the same way that they’d done on their previous records. This was true but
Hail To The Thief
nevertheless, was another great album. It might be somewhat overshadowed by
Kid A
and the later
In Rainbows
but it has songs that are every bit as good. The problem was that Thom and Radiohead had, for the first time, started repeating themselves. The jerky, cut-up electronica, which had been so startling on
Kid A
and
Amnesiac
was now, as they said themselves, just another tool that they used like a guitar.

“What was great about
Kid A
was that it heralded a new period and it meant we went off in some cool new places,” Ed O’Brien said to
Associated Press
writer Jake Coyle afterwards. “But the downside was that in the whole period up until the end of
Hail to the Thief
, we picked up some nasty habits.”