Thom Yorke (19 page)

“We were going along in a certain trajectory and then suddenly with
Hail to the Thief
, it was: we can’t carry along in that way
anymore,” Thom added. “To me, the hardest thing was finding a reason to carry on.”

Thom mocked the idea that they were supposed to “lurch” in another direction with each record but it seems like, more than anybody else, he felt that they needed to do something new every time. The truth was that he still hadn’t recovered from the three years of making
Kid A
and
Amnesiac
. When the time came to make a new record, he wasn’t able to face taking that long again and so they chose, as a legitimate experiment, to do things quickly. It worked but he soon realised that he wasn’t happy to send his songs out into the world like that, without making them absolutely perfect. He was caught in a trap. If he wasn’t prepared to put in the kind of effort that he felt Radiohead albums needed, then what was the point of the band? At least they’d got through the recording sessions without wanting to kill each other, but
Hail To The Thief
didn’t seem essential in the way that the other albums had. Were they just going through the motions? For roughly the hundredth time since they’d started the band, Radiohead had another crisis of confidence but, as always, it took them completely by surprise. “One of the biggest things, not just for me but for everybody, was that at the end of the
Hail To The Thief
thing, we completely lost our confidence,” Thom said in a TV interview. “It was a weird feeling and deeply unpleasant.”

After the release of the album, Radiohead went on tour, finishing with a performance at the Coachella Festival in the US in May 2004. They flew “round the world the wrong way” Thom said afterwards – east to west – so the whole three weeks was a battle with jetlag. Just as on previous tours, Thom struggled to sleep. It was a painful reminder of why they’d moved away from this kind of thing after
OK Computer
. They felt like they were on autopilot again. The plan was that afterwards they would go back to their rehearsal rooms and start working on new material. But somehow there was nothing there. They tried things out for a few weeks before deciding that there was no point. They might as well go home. In 2004, Thom became a parent for the second time, when Rachel gave birth to their daughter, Agnes, and, once again, he was hit by the thought that there was more to life than Radiohead. In September 2004, Thom joined a protest at Fylingdales in North Yorkshire against Tony Blair’s decision to let the US use the UK in their ‘Star Wars’ anti-missile
programme without consultation. It was the start of another period when he would vigorously re-engage with politics. It was also, although he didn’t know it yet, the start of a new feeling of optimism that maybe one day change would come.

The period when Radiohead recorded and released
Hail To The Thief
was dominated by the build up to war in Iraq and the eventual invasion. The death of Ministry of Defence weapons inspector David Kelly particularly shocked Thom. At the same time the evidence that humanity was causing global warming was becoming incontrovertible. At one point, he told the
LA Times
, he was worrying about it so much that it almost caused him to “flip my lid”. As his son Noah got a little older, he wondered what kind of world they were leaving to him. “My son really loves wildlife and draws polar bears,” he said, “and every time he draws a polar bear, I want to tell him they probably won’t be there by the time he’s my age.”

The science that he was reading was so alarming that the situation almost seemed hopeless. In 2003, after the UN report on climate change was released, he was approached by environmental organisation Friends Of The Earth about supporting their ‘Big Ask’ campaign. By then, governments around the world had accepted the reality of global warming and the need to cut carbon emissions but there was no actual progress. The British government had even committed to a significant reduction in emissions by 2020. However, environmental organisations feared that, unless this pledge was made more concrete, nothing would be done. In 2020, whichever administration was in power would simply blame their predecessors for the lack of progress. ‘The Big Ask’ was for a cut in carbon emissions of 3% each year, every year.

Its simplicity and reasonableness might not have impressed Thom a few years previously. After his experiences with Jubilee 2000, he was deeply cynical about attempts to change the world through existing structures and democracy. However, by 2005 the situation seemed so desperate that anything was better than nothing. “There’s no longer a sense of powerlessness, which is what I had for so long about it all,” he said. “It seemed to be the first sane, reasoned way
out of what is an international emergency.”

Nevertheless, he was still reluctant to be the face of the campaign in the way that Friends Of The Earth wanted. He was very aware of the fact that, as the singer in a touring rock band, his carbon footprint was far larger than that of the average person, even in the energy-hungry West. They persuaded him that it didn’t matter. A certain amount of hypocrisy was unavoidable but it wasn’t an excuse for doing nothing.

“Stop pointing fingers,” he said in a TV news interview later. “I’m a hypocrite. We’re all hypocrites because we’ve all been born into a carbon life. This is what we do. The structure of our existence is based on expanding energy use. We’re all hypocrites.”

Still, for all his bravado, he did sometimes wonder whether the environmental cost of Radiohead tours could be justified. A study by an organisation called the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management (ECCM) calculated that the 545,000 fans who saw Radiohead on the
Hail To The Thief
tour generated 5,335 tonnes of CO2 during their journey to the gigs. The five band members own flights added another five tonnes.

“Some of our best ever shows have been in the US,” Thom said to
The Guardian
, “but there’s 80,000 people there and they’ve all been sitting in traffic jams for five or six hours with their engines running to get there, which is bollocks.”

In a way, his ambivalence made him a better spokesperson for Friends Of The Earth. The fact that he owned up to the essential problem with his position made it easier to deal with the inevitable accusations of hypocrisy. In one interview with
Channel 4 News
presenter Jon Snow, he was asked what he was doing to help. “Not enough,” he replied.

“You’re not supposed to say that,” he said to
The Guardian
. “You’re supposed to say, ‘I’m doing this and this and this. I’m planting trees, somewhere, probably.’ I’m not! I’m not doing enough! None of us are.”

The ECCM calculated that 50,000 trees would need to be planted and maintained for 100 years in order to offset the amount of CO2 produced by the
Hail to the Thief
tour. In any case, Thom was highly dubious about “carbon off-setting” as a way of dealing with carbon emissions. The only useful tool that he did have was celebrity. He’d long had an instinctive antipathy to the idea that celebrities were on
a higher plane than everybody else, able to tell people how to live; at the same time, he’d seen the disproportionate power celebrity could have.

“You’re not in any way qualified to do it,” he said of the phenomenon of celebrity-as-spokesperson, “but I was so sick of hearing so many unqualified people say that global warming doesn’t exist, I thought, ‘Well, I’m no less qualified than they are’, so I can deal with doing it.”

Between 2003 and 2006 he was heavily involved in the Big Ask campaign. His website bore the message: “If you are concerned about climate change, if it scares you speechless and wakes you in the night, if you are bothered about the flooding you keep seeing, or those high winds, or that there is something not quite right about the fact you’re still walking round in a T-shirt in October, please find out about the Big Ask campaign.”

But, despite trying to take the sting out of the accusations of hypocrisy by being the first to confess, Radiohead were still criticised. Blur singer Damon Albarn supposedly told
The Sun
newspaper: “Radiohead – I’m not gonna get into anyone, but bands who care about certain things and then go on one-and-a-half year stadium tours are just total hypocrites … In one sense you’ve got this developing humanist thing … Then you’re creating these massive impersonal events where you’re set up as the subject of thousands of people’s adoration. Where is the humanity in that? That’s just idolatry.”

Thom’s response to that was a sarcastic. “You’re right Damon, I should probably just give up.” But perhaps there was a part of him that evidently wondered if maybe he should. “We always go into a tour saying, ‘This time, we’re not going to spend the money. This time we’re going to do it stripped down,” he said in a joint interview with David Byrne of Talking Heads in
Wired
magazine. “And then it’s, ‘Oh, but we do need this keyboard. And these lights.’ But at the moment we make money principally from touring. Which is hard for me to reconcile because I don’t like all the energy consumption, the travel. It’s an ecological disaster, travelling, touring.”

Not that he particularly wanted to tour at that point anyway. In 2005 Radiohead had very little to do with each other and they genuinely weren’t even sure if they’d ever make another album. The summer of 2005 was the twentieth anniversary of Live Aid and, in
response, Bob Geldof and others organised a sequel – Live 8. A few years previously, Thom would have been first on the list to participate. It was a bigger version of Jubilee 2000, a cause he’d once been heavily involved with. But he was more cynical now. Also it wasn’t clear that Radiohead were actually a functioning band at that point. “We couldn’t work out whether we should be carrying on or not,” he admitted. “We couldn’t really get it together.”

He was also highly dubious about whether Live 8 was the best answer to global poverty. “It was a form of distraction,” he said to Craig McLean in
The Observer
. “Holding a big rock concert and reducing the issues to bare essential levels, I think, ultimately, was to the detriment of the [‘Make Poverty History’] campaign.”

Despite his willingness to get involved in the democratic process, he was still extremely wary about being co-opted by politicians. In 2006 he was asked to meet Tony Blair to discuss environmental issues. It was an awkward moment. It was the kind of access that Friends Of The Earth worked hard to get but he wasn’t sure if there was any point.

“i have no intention of being used by spider spin doctors to make it look like we make progress when it is just words,” he posted on the Radiohead website. “i dont have powers of persuasion, i just have temper and an acid tongue.”

It was the kind of situation where he knew he’d feel guilty if he did meet the Prime Minister and guilty if he didn’t. He also knew he’d be criticised if he did meet him and criticised if he didn’t. In the end he refused. He didn’t want to be Bono.

“The difference between me and Bono,” he told Brian Draper of
The Third Way
magazine, “is that he’s quite happy to go and flatter people to get what he wants and he’s very good at it, but I just can’t do it. I’d probably end up punching them in the face rather than shaking their hand, so it’s best that I stay out of their way.”

Tony Blair’s people were equally wary of Thom. They wanted to meet him but only on their terms. “They wanted to know that I was on-side,” he said to Craig McLean. “Also, I was being manoeuvred into a position where if I said the wrong thing post-the-meeting, Friends Of The Earth would lose their access. Which normally would be called blackmail.”

In 2006, he and Jonny performed an acoustic set at a benefit for The Big Ask at London’s Koko venue. It was a gig that attracted a
lot of attention. By then, Radiohead hadn’t released a record for three years and there was speculation as to what their new songs would sound like. In his role as an ambassador for Friends Of The Earth, Thom wrote to the leaders of all three main political parties asking them if they wanted to attend. Except he didn’t invite Tony Blair, he invited chancellor Gordon Brown instead.

Gordon didn’t turn up, he sent young minister David Miliband, but new Tory leader David Cameron did. At the time he was eagerly espousing his green credentials not to mention his youthful indie credentials as a fan of The Smiths and a lover of ‘Fake Plastic Trees’.

“I sent this rather sad letter saying I’d love to come to the concert, thank you for asking,’ Cameron told Sue Lawley on
Desert Island Discs
four weeks after The Big Ask Live. ‘PS: please play this, my favourite song, and he did.’

After the gig, Thom met the politicians and had the disconcerting realisation that they were not much older than he was. They’d grown up listening to similar music and the wives of both David Miliband and David Cameron claimed to be fans of Radiohead. It was all too easy to see how the likes of Bono could find themselves getting sucked into that circle, holding their tongue where necessary, in the interests of having more influence in the long run.

But Thom wasn’t like that. He didn’t think there was any mileage in cosying up to the people whom he regarded as the problem. After George W Bush got back into power in 2004, his response was that it was no bad thing, it would radicalise people and force them to get involved.

And, if there was any doubt, his next album – the debut solo work,
The Eraser
– made it very clear that his views hadn’t mellowed at all.

“There are no budding solo artists in this band,” Jonny Greenwood said emphatically in 1997. Although Thom had always been the driving force of the band, they were very much a
collective
. They took his ideas and gave them a shape. When he was asked in 2000 if he’d have tried to make
Kid A
as a solo record if the rest of them had wanted no part in it he said, “No, I wouldn’t have had the confidence.”

However, in 2005, the confidence that Radiohead had given him was gone. Instead he had a pile of songs that didn’t seem to call for any contribution from Jonny, Phil, Colin or Ed at all. “There was no point in going to the others and saying, ‘Phil, do you want to try a beat on this?’ Or, ‘Colin, do you want to play some bass?’ Because the sounds and ideas were not from that sort of vibe,” he said to
Rolling Stone
.

It was time to live out his dream of having complete control in the way that the Aphex Twin or Squarepusher did. The hardest thing was having to tell the band that. It was the most concrete expression of what they all felt, that Radiohead had been running on empty for a while. “I formally asked everyone if it was cool, not really expecting it to go anywhere,” he said in a TV interview. “I just wanted to know what it felt like to take responsibility for the music. Also, we’d just had enough of being Radiohead. To this day I’m not really sure why. None of us were in the right head space.”

By then, they’d been Radiohead as a professional concern for fourteen years. They’d known each other and made music together much longer than that. It’s no surprise that they needed a break. “We stopped about two and a half years ago, the band that I’m in, Radiohead,” he said in a TV interview to promote
The Eraser
, “Why did we stop? It just got a bit weird and boring and self-perpetuating. It felt like everyone was under [an] obligation to do it rather than because we wanted to do it.”

When he talked to the rest of the band they were only too pleased to let him go off and do his own thing for a bit. It seemed like the best way, in the long run, of keeping Radiohead together. Having been in the band for so long and done so much together, going it alone was his last real challenge. He knew that he could write great songs without them. He’d written many Radiohead demos on his own. But he’d never finished them off. He’d always been able to rely on the band to put his ideas into some kind of framework and tell him when the song was finally finished. Not having that safety net gave him the same kind of excitement that he’d rediscovered during
Kid A
when he put his guitar away for a while. He found it impossible to work when things were too easy.

“I wanted to work on my own,” he said to David Fricke of
Rolling Stone
. “It wasn’t casting aspersions on anybody. I just wanted to see what it would be like. Luckily, I happen to be in a band where nobody has a problem with that. In fact, I think there was some sense of relief that finally I was going to do it. Rather than saying it and chickening out.”

Initially he wasn’t even sure that it was an album he was making. He went into Radiohead’s studio in Oxfordshire with Nigel Godrich to try out a few songs and, slowly, through further sessions at Thom’s second home by the sea and at Nigel’s Covent Garden studio, it began to emerge as a whole. Initially all he had was a collection of breaks and beats, broken rhythms that he would play with on his laptop every time he got a spare moment on tour or at home. In the studio he listened to them again, forced, for the first time, to make his own decisions about what worked and what didn’t.

One track ‘Black Swan’, had a sample of Ed and Phil playing in the studio in 2000, another ‘The Eraser’ included piano chords played by Jonny that Thom had recorded on his Dictaphone. By the time Thom had finished with them, though, they were unrecognisable. The tunes were even more jittery, skittish and hyperactive than on the last Radiohead albums. One difference, though, was that Nigel Godrich saw an opportunity to make Thom put his voice high up in the mix for the first time since
OK Computer
, without hiding it behind effects or distortion.

“I kept begging Nigel to put more reverb on it,” he said to David Fricke. “‘No, I’m not doing reverb on this record.’ ‘Please hide my voice’. ‘No!’”

Curiously, for all its hyper-modern, electronic sound, in some ways
The Eraser
harked back to Thom’s earliest recordings, alone with a four-track. The technology might have moved on since ‘Rattlesnake’ but the impetus hadn’t. One track, ‘Analyse’, seemed to go back even further. It was written after he came home to his central Oxford house and found that there had been a power-cut. The street was dark, with candles in the windows, just as it would have been when the houses were built in early Victorian times. Or as perhaps they might be in a post-fossil fuels future. Either way, it’s a beautiful image in a song that was otherwise as restless and nervous as everything else on the album.

Another track, ‘Atoms For Peace’, saw him, once again, battling with his own lack of confidence. “Being a rock star, you’re supposed to have super-über-confidence all the time,” he said to David Fricke. “It was my missus telling me to get it together basically.”

As the recording process went on, Thom increased in confidence. When he’d got the bass riff for ‘And It Rained All Night’, he phoned up a friend, excitedly saying, “Listen to this!” There were moments when he wondered whether
The Eraser
should be a Radiohead album after all. “It made me realise how incredibly sketchy I am,” he said in a TV interview, “and that it’s usually the band who pick up the pieces and put them into a coherent form … there were weird periods when I was making the record when I thought,
Maybe I should stop this and ring everybody up and say, ‘maybe you should come down and have a listen to this and maybe we could do something
.’”

But these were only fleeting thoughts. It’s debatable whether they would have come back at that point anyway. Everybody knew that it was something he needed to get out of his system. Most of
The Eraser
does sound much more sketchy than anything on a Radiohead album. It’s the direct product of Thom’s brain. It crackles with his nervous energy. However, tracks like ‘And It Rained All Night’ and ‘Analyse’ have their own jittery power. And the single, ‘Harrowdown Hill’, was one of the most powerful songs Thom had ever recorded.

He wrote it about the death of government weapons’ inspector David Kelly and, harrowingly, it seems to be sung partly from his perspective as he goes into the woods to die. When he spoke about it later, Thom seemed surprised how quickly people picked up on the
song’s theme but, in contrast to many of his songs, it’s almost painfully direct. ‘Harrowdown Hill’ is the place in Oxfordshire where David Kelly’s body was found. He’d apparently taken painkillers and then slashed his wrists.

In the immediate aftermath there were numerous conspiracy theories. Some people said that there wasn’t enough blood by his body for it to be plausible that he’d bled to death. Thom references this in the lyrics but his real anger doesn’t just depend on the far-fetched idea that Kelly was killed by the British secret services. It’s more pertinent that he was left to be a scapegoat for the government. Kelly had supposedly told a journalist, Andrew Gilligan, that the government’s claim that Iraq could attack with chemical weapons in “fifteen minutes” was false. This was later denied but Thom felt that Kelly had been hung out to dry and that the Government knew what kind of pressure he’d be under. “It made me very sad and upset that the Ministry Of Defence, or rather the Government, thought that it was OK to use this poor man as a scapegoat for the misgivings of an entire country,” he said in a TV interview.

It’s not surprising that Thom didn’t feel he could put a song like that out under the Radiohead banner. Not everybody in the band shared his political views. It’s painfully explicit and if the song had become a conventional chart hit, Thom might have even had qualms about the effects on Kelly’s family. Nevertheless, it is undoubtedly a beautiful work of art and it’s clearly not intended to be exploitative. Just as he’d done with ‘Sulk’ years before, Thom couldn’t help but be influenced by what was going on around him. This ultra-sensitive radar was part of what made him such a great songwriter.

When he’d finished the record, Thom kept it secret from all but those who were closest to him. He played it to the rest of Radiohead and then wondered vaguely what he should do with it. There was no chance that he would give it to EMI. Nor did he want its release to inspire a wave of articles proclaiming the break-up of Radiohead. In the end, he just sat on it for a while. By the time it was finished, he’d got his hunger back. He went straight from recording
The Eraser
to working on the next album with the band.
The Eraser
could wait until the re-emergence of Radiohead made it perfectly clear to everybody that they were still together.

It took a while for the right moment to release the solo record but,
in May 2006, he issued a characteristically grumpy/shy message on his website about the new album (
www.theeraser.net
):
“I want no crap about me being a traitor or whatever splitting up blah blah… this was all done with their blessing, and I don’t wanna hear that word solo. It doesn’t sound right,”
he said.

Just as when he’d tried to tell people that
Hail To The Thief
wasn’t about George W Bush, this was slightly odd. If it wasn’t a solo album, what was it? Even he didn’t know. He toyed with the idea of calling it a “side project” but that didn’t work either. It made it sound like it was something he’d knocked off in his spare time, rather than the concentrated piece of work that it was.

He tried to justify the initial post by claiming that, “if it was a solo album, it would demand that I’ve walked away from Radiohead, which I obviously haven’t.”

In some ways, it was just a continuation of what he’d been doing with the band. The title,
The Eraser
, went back to the same themes of memory that he’d been dealing with on
Amnesiac
. One (never entirely serious) alternative title for
Hail To The Thief
had been,
Little Man Being Erased
.

“There’s a certain element that runs through the record of trying to forget about things,” he said, “trying to put things out of your mind and not being able to.”

Fortunately most people understood that
The Eraser
didn’t mean the end of Radiohead. When it was released in July 2006, it received positive reviews. Critics in both
The Guardian
and
The Times
welcomed it primarily as a sign that Thom was back making music. “Historically, solo albums have tended to grow out of cracks in dried-up bands,” said Pete Paphides in
The Times
. “In the case of Radiohead though,
The Eraser
might just constitute a lifeline.”

Alexis Petridis in
The Guardian
was less impressed by the record as a whole but he agreed that it offered encouragement for fans of Radiohead. “
The Eraser
may well be the occasionally diverting sound of Thom Yorke clearing his pipes in preparation for something remarkable,” he said.

This impression was enhanced by the way that the record was allowed to slip out with relatively little fanfare. Instead of a single, it was preceded by the appearance of ‘Analyse’ over the credits of Richard Linklater’s animated film
A Scanner Darkly
. And instead of stepping back into the promotional machine of EMI, it was released
through independent label XL. “It didn’t feel right to do it with EMI,” he told Craig McLean in
The Observer
. “It was done in a different context so it felt like it should be put out in a different context.”

Nevertheless it’s a sign of the cachet his name still had, within or without Radiohead, that on release it went straight in at Number 2 in the
Billboard
chart and Number 3 in the British charts. He’d reached the enviable point where enough people were paying attention to Radiohead’s vast internet presence, their own website and the many unofficial sites, that it scarcely mattered if the mainstream ignored what he was doing. People would still hear about it directly from him.

It helped that when he released ‘Harrowdown Hill’, he commissioned an equally extraordinary video to go with it from American stop-motion animator Chel White. Thom had seen a film of Chel’s called
Passage
and he was struck by the way it juxtaposed dream-like images of people underwater alongside images of war and atrocities. This was what he wanted for ‘Harrowdown Hill’ – something that captured the song’s mixture of rage, grief and strange beauty. As always, though, he gave the director a completely free reign to create something that was a work of art in its own right.

“It was a relief to write a treatment for a song that I really liked,” Chel told the author for this book. “It’s hard when you hear a song and it doesn’t give you any images and then you have to struggle to find them. With this one I didn’t have that problem at all. I maybe had the opposite problem that there were too many images. I talked with [commissioning editor] Dilly about doing a collage technique that was very frenetic with many images flashing but I realised, I think we both realised, that that wasn’t the way to go.”

Instead the video starts with a silhouette of an eagle flying over a landscape, which initially is the beautiful English countryside. Then, as silhouetted hands grab at the eagle’s wings, it flies along a motorway and over an industrial city before scenes from the Poll Tax Riot of 1990 are spliced in. It culminates with a scene of Thom, wearing a shirt and tie, sinking through the water of a black pool. The way it mixes politics and something much more surreal fitted the song perfectly.

“As soon as I heard the song, I knew it couldn’t be directly about the David Kelly case,” says Chel. “We’d have to work with images
that would indirectly relate to it, rather than refer to it directly. It’s looking at the larger subject of secrecy and government control in the wake of the invasion of Iraq and everything else. To me, the video is more of a call to consciousness than a call to arms. I don’t like to hit people over the head with metaphors but the eagle is partly a metaphor for David Kelly.”