Thom Yorke (7 page)

Back then, when they went into Chipping Norton, however, they were just delighted to be there. In some respects, with EMI looking over their shoulder, it was like being back at school, but they were still grateful to have been signed at all and they weren’t about to make a fuss. And they had the confidence of youth on their side.

“They were not intimidated by it at all,” says Paul. “Jonny’s just completely a musician and all of them were good players, so their instruments were under control and the technology they left to us.”

But, in a way, both sides were making it up as they went along. Paul and Sean came from a very indie background. They were used to making raw alt-rock records in a fast, no frills fashion and, perhaps luckily for them, that style had suddenly become the biggest thing in rock. Nevertheless, Sean says it was never explicitly suggested that Radiohead should be the “British Nirvana”.

“I never thought about it like that,” he says. “It wasn’t calculated. The main thing was that they seemed to be interested in that kind of sound. They were into Sonic Youth, the whole idea of the extremities of the noises you could get out of an electric guitar and an amplifier. We’d done Dinosaur Jr and Buffalo Tom, both of which used excruciating guitar volumes as part of their musical expression. The other thing about making that record was that, even though it was for EMI, the approach that we’d taken up until that time was to make records very quickly. We did it for a number of reasons. We were used to working on low budgets. There was a certain aesthetic to it where you went in, you played, banged out the tunes and that was your music. That was what happened. I know that Paul and I have been criticised for that approach, but that’s the way it turned out.”

But this was why EMI had hired them. That way of working was suddenly much more lucrative than it had been. There was undoubtedly a culture clash between their loose, raw style, the perfectionism of Thom and the controlling nature of EMI but ‘Creep’ proved that the partnership could work. Even when it was
still a demo, most people who heard it agreed that it was a big step up from anything they’d done before. Colin said that it was hearing Thom’s demo of the song that made him decide that he had to take the band seriously.

“I remember an acoustic version of ‘Creep’ he sent me a cassette of from Exeter University,” he said. “I listened to it and said, ‘This is what I want to do. This is my destiny: to help disseminate this music and propel it directly into contemporary popular culture, because it’s so important.’”

It’s hard to tell how serious he’s being here. He later said that the lyric of ‘Creep’ made him ‘chuckle’ but he was undoubtedly impressed. They all were. All except Jonny. He found the song too weak and simplistic. When they played it, he would get frustrated and attack his guitar, blasting out squalls of angry noise. But, by the time Paul and Sean came to hear it, the rest of the band had already decided that it actually sounded a lot better with a bit of an edge.

“When we actually did the song, we were very matter-of-fact about it like, ‘Time to do the noise!’ says Paul. “It was one of the last things we did. The first take we did was perfect and it took him, like, a hundred tries to get the second one. Nowadays, of course, we’d have just sampled it but back then you couldn’t do that.”

It was a pivotal decision in the band’s career. “If the guitar hadn’t exploded where it exploded, there’s just no way it would have got on alternative radio,” Thom told
Rolling Stone
in 1997. “And we wouldn’t be anywhere.”

Thom always had reservations about ‘Creep’. It exposed the kind of feelings that most people have every now and then but nobody likes to talk about. To put it in a song for the whole world to hear made him feel highly exposed. By now he’d been going out with Rachel for some time, too, and the spark for the song – his obsession with some girl he’d never even spoken to – seemed ridiculous and embarrassing.

“That song was where he was at, at the time,” says Paul. “It expresses a real feeling but it’s kind of an ugly thing that nobody wants to get trapped in their whole life. It’s high school, basically, or college. He wrote it at college about a girl who wouldn’t give him the time of day and you’d like to feel that you’d moved on from that. It was sort of an adolescent expression. I wouldn’t say it was tongue-in-cheek. He was torn about whether to put it out because it just
wasn’t him anymore, even at that point.”

It also expressed something very ugly. Although, on the face of it, it’s a twisted love song there’s a lot more hate than love. He almost seems to be blaming the object of his affections for making him feel like a ‘creep’. This view of the song is backed up by Thom’s famous – and famously regretted – assertion that he’d never met a beautiful woman he liked.

In an interview with
Melody Maker
, he said, “Confronted by a beautiful woman, I will leave as soon as possible or hide until they leave. It’s not just that I find them intimidating. It’s the hideous way people flock around them … Beauty is all about unearned privilege and power.”

Later, although he admitted that he’d said this, he took it back. “It’s as arrogant as you can possibly get,” he said to
Q
. “Rude. Silly. I do have a genuine, normal awe of beauty, a feeling that it’s completely unapproachable and intimidating and it’s at its most extreme in women.”

‘Creep’ expressed the same sentiment in a much more powerful way. It was about
resentment
. Fittingly, then, he would later come to bitterly resent the song itself. But before that it essentially saved Radiohead’s career and it certainly saved their debut album,
Pablo Honey
.

Pablo Honey
is now like the orphan of Radiohead’s career, almost disowned by its parents, yet it sold over two million copies and made them a genuinely big band. When second album
The Bends
came out, it was initially seen as a flop in comparison, selling far fewer copies in its first month. However, like all their records, it was a struggle to record it. The problem was that they simply didn’t have enough good songs. Thom refused to put forward many of his old On A Friday tracks. He was determined that they should move forward with the new, grungier sound.

“I’m not saying we were scraping the barrel, but we didn’t have a lot of stuff,” says Paul. “We didn’t sort through a lot of things and say, ‘This is what we’re going to choose for the record’, it was more, ‘OK, this is what we’ve got.’”

Also, the band weren’t as technically accomplished as they would become. Thom occasionally struggled to reach the vocal standards that he’d set himself and Phil wasn’t yet the drummer he would be later. “They were young. They were inexperienced,” Sean says. “Although Colin’s amazing, we had some problems getting tracks that had groove to them and that was part of their inexperience.”

“For a while [Phil] lagged behind,” says Nigel. “I do remember visiting the studio and Paul and Sean being locked away with long strips of tape dangling round their necks as they put together various drum takes. That kind of thing is pretty standard for making any record. Even if you’ve got Phil Collins behind you, you’re probably going to edit together a couple of drum takes to get the one that actually goes on the album. Phil was very sensitive about it, which made it worse. Honestly, he was a fine drummer, it [just] made him a bit nervous.”

However, Thom, too, would feel tremendously frustrated if he couldn’t get things right. “Thom’s a very emotional person and if you got him in the right frame of mind, the vocal would come very easily,” says Paul. “If he wasn’t in the right frame of mind, it would
be hard. But he’s a fantastic technical singer. He had training as a child in choirs and stuff like that. But that’s the hardest part of being a producer – getting a good vocal out of the singer. When we did ‘Creep’, it just sort of happened. It was one of those things. There was something weird going on there. It was strangely effortless. It was one of those things you look back on and think, ‘Something was going on there.’ Because the rest of the album wasn’t that easy. It was hard to finish.”

Thom admitted later that he was “unbearable” during the
Pablo Honey
recording sessions. The rest of the band knew about his perfectionism and hyper-critical approach, but it was the first time they’d had to deal with it in such an intense, confined period of time. In contrast to every other album they’d record, they were on a tight schedule. There wasn’t too much time to worry about things. They had three weeks. They just had to blast it out and if they weren’t entirely happy with something, too bad. And, partly as a result perhaps, they had a huge amount of fun on some of the tracks. They weren’t quite the straight-laced puritans of legend.

“[First track] ‘You’ was one of those instances where we were stuck,” Paul remembers. “We couldn’t quite get it off the ground. I remember a friend of theirs’ showed up with some hash and … we had the greatest time. All of a sudden, Ed’s guitar started making sense. He played this cool part that went all the way through it and all of a sudden that tune got going that day. I’m not saying drugs are a good thing but sometimes they will inspire you!”

Another time, on ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’, they decided to find out whether the sentiment was actually true. “Every single person in the studio got a track on that,” says Paul, “even the cook. Everybody we could find, the gardener, the assistant engineer. Everybody had to play a guitar part because the whole concept was that anyone can play guitar. It was funny to see what everybody’s approach was. Some people did more of a straight guitar part; Sean went for pure noise and ripped the strings off the guitar. It was kind of a Rorschach test for personality. Jonny got out a coin and used that. I think I tried to play a rhythmic thing. You can’t hear anyone particularly, it’s just a big mishmash of stuff. That was a really fun day. We weren’t really approaching it technologically. It was just an Eno-esque approach to having fun with it. We weren’t jaded old fuckheads who go, ‘Let’s fuck off to the pub, I hate this!’ We were really into it. We knew we
had a good band and we were trying to do a good job. Those guys are smart and they learned so much from that experience, being in a good studio, seeing what worked and didn’t work.”

The experience of recording
Pablo Honey
was a steep learning curve for Thom and the rest of the band. That, too, made it a frustrating experience. Thom was starting to write better songs but they were on a tight schedule and an even tighter budget and there wasn’t time to work these new tracks out and put them on the record. Some songs like ‘Prove Yourself’ had seemed like Radiohead’s best work when Paul and Sean first heard them, but they were rapidly superseded by newer, better tracks.

“I think that was one of the first songs we heard from the demo. At first it was one of the best things we’d heard but as the record went on we thought ‘It’s alright,” says Paul. They knew they were starting to get somewhere when Thom finally managed to get the high-pitched vocal on ‘Vegetable’. “We were struggling with it and one night Thom finally just got it right. That was one of the hardest ones for him to sing. I don’t know why. We had a break-through one night when we nailed that one. It was like a hump that we had to get over.”

But there were other tracks that, even at the time, nobody liked all that much. A particular bugbear was the noisy, abrasive track that appeared after ‘Creep’, called ‘How Do You?’.

“There were some songs that the band didn’t like right from the beginning,” says Nigel, “Even today, on the last couple of albums, I’ve talked to Jonny and he’d say, ‘Yeah, we’re just trying to decide what songs to put on the new album. Just playing the game of ‘Spot the ‘How Do You?’’. Nobody enjoyed that song. They realised that wasn’t their finest hour.”

“To me that song is a fun track but the British press tore us to shreds over that one with ‘fake punk’ and the like,” says Paul. “It’s just a short, little crazy song. I think we put it after ‘Creep’ to get the album moving again. It would have been better if we’d moved it away from ‘Creep’ because it was too jarring for people, I guess. I remember the press gave us enormous amounts of crap about that one. They weren’t having it.”

In a throwback to their earliest demos ‘How Do You?’ was a song with a very Oxford subject matter. Nigel says that’s why Thom decided to keep it on the record. “I think Thom liked the lyrics to that
one. It was about Kevin Maxwell, Robert Maxwell’s son (who lived in Oxford) and Thom liked the angriness of the lyrics but I don’t think the music really kept up.”

The last track they recorded was also the last track on the album, ‘Blow Out’. It was a fittingly chaotic end to what had, at times, been a chaotic process. They were adding the final touches when their friends, Oxford band The Candyskins, arrived. The studio was packed and noisy and, somehow, in the chaos the monitor speakers perched on top of the console fell on to the control board with a massive crash. A whole row of switches were completely sheared off.

“It didn’t blow up the board but it messed up a lot of the console,” says Paul. “We had to call the engineer and he was shocked. It was kind of a chaotic session because we had other people around and the board was kind of crippled. It was fun. That was I think about the last thing we did on the record!”

But although the band and producers had, mostly, got on well during the sessions, the next stage began to strain their relationship. All the way through recording, Thom had been able to cling to the belief that, if things didn’t sound quite right, they’d be able to sort it out when they came to mix it. In practice, it wasn’t quite like that. When they heard what was coming out of the mixing desk, they were all a little disillusioned.

“We weren’t having fights but there was a lot of [tight-lipped], ‘Well, we don’t really like this mix,’” says Paul. “When you make a record I don’t like to say, ‘We’ll fix it in the mix’ but there are always a lot of things where you put it off and say, ‘I know you don’t like that but we’ll fix it later’, but eventually it comes down to the point where all those things have to be done. If somebody then realises that, ‘Woah, I still don’t like it!’ sometimes there’s a limited budget for changing it. If Def Leppard and [producer] Mutt Lange want to go back and re-do a song, nobody’s going to go crazy but at that point, for us, the budget was pretty much done.”

The only thing they did go and record again was ‘Creep’. It was pointed out to them that there was absolutely no chance that it would be a hit because of its lyric. In 1993, the lead lyric’s profanity would never get played on the radio, not even with a bleep.

Sonic Youth had changed their lyrics in similar circumstances, so why not Radiohead? It was a bit of a ‘sell-out’ they admitted, but
Thom duly went back into the studio to record a radio version where he’d sing a vitriolic, “very” instead of “fucking”. Ironically the version with “very” sounds even more antagonistic towards the subject – now he was clearly just being sarcastic. The only advantage of the re-write was that it gave him a chance to go back and improve the first verse of the song, too. At the time it had a different lyric to the one that would ultimately appear.

“It was a filler lyric,” says Sean. “You know how The Beatles’ ‘Yesterday’ originally had those lyrics about scrambled eggs [before Paul McCartney came up with the finished version]? It was like that.”

“We actually had an argument,” says Paul. “I said, ‘Now’s your chance to make it better,’ and Thom said, ‘No, it’s done, it’s written, we can’t go back to that.’ But I kind of leaned on him, as much as I ever leaned on Thom. I said, ‘I think the song could be huge but I don’t think the leg of lamb is going to make it.’”

Thom wasn’t impressed. He thought he’d finished the song. He’d had enough of it. He didn’t want to go back and do it again. “He kind of got this funny look,” says Paul, “and he went away and came back with that first verse, which is much better. That’s the most producerly (sic) thing that I can remember doing.”

“I understood why Sean and Paul said, ‘Maybe we should try some different lines there’, to make it less obscure,” says Nigel. “But I think I asked Thom about it and he said it was a reference to domesticity, just thinking about being married to somebody and being in the kitchen – nice stuff!”

By the time of the mixing process, the fun part of recording was most definitely over. The band listened with increasing gloom to what they’d done and tried desperately to change things but it was too late. At one point, Thom decided he didn’t like the sound of the record. It was too much like other indie albums at the time. In a panic he instructed the producers to change course.

“It was when we were mixing ‘Blow Out’,” remembers Sean. “Thom came in that morning when we were starting to mix it and said [abruptly] ‘No reverb!’ And we said [glumly], ‘Oh, alright’. And since reverb is the body and soul of recorded music, it was kind of tough. So we did this mix that was dry as a bone and then the record company guys show up and we play it for them and they’re sitting there scowling and I’m going, ‘I don’t like it either, man.’ So I had
to talk to Keith [Wozencroft] and say, ‘This isn’t adding up’. We did the mix at this terrible, terrible studio,” he continues. “The console was terrible, the vibe was terrible, the record company showed up en-masse to criticise. The whole thing was fucked. I remember turning to Keith and saying, ‘Listen, man, I know nobody’s happy with this shit. Just let me and Paul go back to [their home studio] Fort Apache and we’ll mix the stuff and you take it from there. And that’s what
Pablo Honey
’ became.”

“It was a hard record to finish,” says Paul. “We were mixing and we had people coming up behind us and going, ‘Could we just change this? And what about my part?’ At that point ‘Creep’ was already mixed but we went back to Fort Apache without the band there and they were basically forced to accept it and they weren’t very happy about it. At that point the label had spent a good amount of money and they needed a product. The band didn’t want
Pablo Honey
to come out the way it came out, as far as I know. We never really discussed it because at that point relationships were a little strained, after that long working on the record. They didn’t want it to come out like that because they knew it wasn’t great but the record company – as record companies do – kind of stepped in and said, ‘Guys, we’ve got to get you out there, we’ve got a single, let’s get you out there and get moving on it.’ I think ultimately they were right. You only get one chance to make a first record and if they didn’t have ‘Creep’ it would have sunk like a stone but they did have it. The label knew that they had something going and it was the touring and the playing that made them mature as a band.”

The somewhat rushed nature of the
Pablo Honey
sessions comes across in the album title. It sounds very much like the first thing that came into their heads. It didn’t mean much or have anything to do with the record’s content. It was inspired by 1990s phone pranksters The Jerky Boys. One of their calls featured them impersonating an elderly Hispanic mother calling somebody she apparently thought was her son. “Pablo, honey, come home”, she begged. Radiohead had been given a tape by fellow Oxford band Chapterhouse and they’d got hooked.

“Some of it’s really sick,” Thom said to
Select
magazine. “Some of it I can’t cope with. But the notion of phoning people up cold is so 1990s. It’s just the ultimate sacrilege. Turn up in someone’s life and they can’t do anything about it.”

It’s funny, considering how imaginative and inventive Radiohead are, that they’ve always been so bad at titles. The long struggle to come up with a decent band name tells you that. You get the feeling that if they’d been listening to something else on the bus when EMI demanded they come up with a name for their debut album, then it could have been very different. But by then, perhaps, they’d had enough. It had only taken three weeks to record (nothing compared with the time they’d put in on later albums), but they were a little disillusioned. Only the thought that they’d soon be able to record a vastly better follow-up album kept them going.