Authors: Trevor Baker
In fact, Ed remembered Thom from a school performance of
A Midsummer Night’s
Dream
. Ed – tall, handsome and well-spoken – was one of the actors. Thom was crouched with his guitar way up at the top of a tower of scaffolding. He was supposed to be providing the musical accompaniment but, during the first dress rehearsal, the sounds he was making were becoming increasingly bizarre and inappropriate. He was playing what Ed described as “a kind of cod-jazz”. Eventually the teacher had had enough. He shouted up to Thom to stop, trying to find out what was going on and Thom shouted down, “I don’t know what the fuck we’re supposed to be playing. And this,” Ed remembered in an interview later, “was to a teacher.”
To start with, the band was just the three of them and a drum machine, a Bon Tempe that they’d bought in a charity shop. They didn’t know anybody of their own age who was cool enough to own a drum kit. That seemed fine until they had their first gig. It was in a village hall with most of their parents in attendance. Halfway through every song, the drum machine would either crash or get stuck in one of its bizarre, cheesy pre-set rhythms. Thom got more and more wound up until he totally lost it, screaming obscenities into the microphone as yet another song fell to pieces. There was only one option. They had to ask the only drummer they knew, Phil Selway whether he would join.
At that point, even talking to Phil was a daunting prospect. He was two years older than Thom and Colin and, at that age, two years seemed like a huge generation gap. “We were all scared of Phil,” Colin said later. “He was in the class above us and he was in a band called Jungle Telegraph so we called him the ‘Graf’.
Ed, the most self-assured of the band, was sent to ask him whether
he would consider joining but even then he couldn’t ask outright. “I was a bit scared going up to him,” he told journalist Clare Kleinedler. “It was like a scene from
Grease
. I was like, ‘Um, so how’s it going?’ And Phil was like, ‘OK, how was your gig last night?’ And I say, ‘Yeah, cool, man. We had a bit of trouble with the drum machine.’ Phil says, ‘Yeah?’ And I say ‘We’re rehearsing next week, wanna make it?’” He did want to make it. Phil turned up on the appointed day and was disconcerted when Thom listened to him play and then muttered, “Can’t you play any fucking faster?”
“They had one of those Dr. Rhythm things,” Phil told
Modern
Drummer
magazine later, “which always stalls after around ten bars. Of course, you get a drummer and he stalls after eleven bars.”
Thom might have been shy and reserved in some circumstances but where music was concerned he was never slow to speak his mind. Even then he was highly critical of everything they did and, although they took a narcissistic delight in listening to tapes of their songs, he was frustrated that he couldn’t get them to sound how he wanted. He was intrigued when he heard the tape of another school band, Illiterate Hands. The recordings sounded much more professional than anything he’d managed. They’d been recorded by another pupil, Nigel Powell. At the time, Nigel was much more advanced in his musical knowledge than most of the kids at Abingdon. He’d gone there from London and had been in bands with his brother since he was eleven years old.
“Thom thought, ‘That’s really good’ for some reason,” says Nigel of the Illiterate Hands tape. “Listening back I don’t know what he was thinking! He phoned me up and asked if I would do his band as well, which I did.”
Nigel can probably claim to be Thom Yorke’s first ever producer, although he wouldn’t make any such claim himself. Essentially he was the one who knew where to put the microphones. He was also another source of advice and feedback on songs, something Thom always craved.
“There wasn’t a lot of production going on because I was only 15!” Nigel admits. “One of the few things that I said that could be counted as production was that Thom should sing in an English accent. At the time he was a big fan of REM and he used to sing in a thick American accent. That’s about the only creative input I would have had apart from setting microphones up, stuff like that.”
Thom eventually poached Illiterate Hands’ keyboard player, Colin’s younger brother Jonny Greenwood, for his own band! Jonny had wanted to join his older brother’s band since they’d started. He’d heard Thom’s songs and genuinely thought that they were as good as the records by Elvis Costello and REM that he was listening to at the time. He was already highly talented for his age on a variety of different instruments; piano, viola, violin and guitar. He also played with the Thames Valley Youth Orchestra. This might not have seemed a natural fit with a rock band and, according to legend, he regularly turned up to rehearsals with different instruments in a vain attempt to be allowed to join in. Eventually Colin relented, so during one Sunday morning rehearsal he persuaded the rest of the band that it wouldn’t hurt to let him play the harmonica every now and then.
The week after that he performed for the first time at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford. They’d taken the name On A Friday and started gigging locally. They’d still only played a handful of gigs and most of those were just in village halls or at the school. Sadly, before long, playing at the school was no longer an option. Another band had played a gig that turned – by the school’s conservative standards – a little rowdy and the headmaster promptly banned ‘pop music’ of all kinds. Perhaps as a result, Thom has always painted a picture of the place that sounds like Lindsay Anderson’s public school rebellion film
If
. He focused much of his teenage hatred on the headmaster, a man of stern morals and an old-fashioned outlook.
“We went to a school where you had to go to church every morning, which is quite weird looking back,” said Jonny in a radio interview, “very weird.” “The headmaster was definitely a man out of time,” admits teacher, Andy Bush, who taught music once a week at Abingdon much later. “He was from a different era. It was incredibly British public school at that time, it’s moved on since then, but it was absolutely the antithesis of everything that Radiohead stand for artistically and politically.”
Thom hated the headmaster and the school itself and some of that hatred was focused in the lyrics he was now writing. By the time Jonny joined the band, Thom was working much harder on the words. They were the springboard for the melodies and dictated the kind of music he was writing, too. It varied enormously in style, from four-track demos that were just a Soul-II-Soul rhythm and some vocals, to attempts to emulate U2 and REM. They were
continually experimenting, trying to find something that worked. They weren’t a great band; initially Thom and Colin were some way ahead of the others in technical ability, but they worked far harder than most of their contemporaries.
“For a school band they were very good,” says Nigel Powell. “But if you put a really good singer in any band they sound a hundred times better. They probably would have been a completely typical school band if it hadn’t been for Thom and, honestly, listening back to those tapes, Colin was well ahead of the rest of them in terms of playing prowess as well. He was a really good bass player.”
But it was Thom who stood out.
“Thom was already an amazing singer,” says Nigel. “I remember saying to somebody at the time, while we were still at school, ‘We’re all trying to make it and get record deals but if Thom doesn’t get one then there’s no point in anybody trying.’ He’d just got such an amazing voice and, even at the time, I recognised that it’s the voice that’s the most important thing about any band.”
The five of them wouldn’t have been friends if it wasn’t for the band. Thom was in some ways a difficult person to get to know and there was something of the ‘mad scientist’ about the curious, creative Jonny but the other three were simply nice, normal blokes. Phil was the most mature and Ed and Colin were the most gregarious and outgoing, but they were all very different characters. Later they would hate having their picture taken as a band partly because they felt they looked so ridiculous together, particularly the towering Ed O’Brien at six-foot five and Thom at five-foot seven.
By the time he was sixteen, people already found it hard to work Thom out. He was obviously shy and yet took great delight in making a statement with the way he dressed. He wanted people to notice him and yet he wanted to be left alone. He had a great sense of social justice and worried constantly about the state of the world, his own health and that of his friends and yet at times he would throw himself into music to the exclusion of everything else.
His tendency towards nervousness and introspection was exacerbated when he got his first car at the age of 17. By this point his parents had moved further away from Oxford and he’d gone with them, so he was regularly driving back to go out with the rest of the band. One night he hadn’t slept and that morning he was driving with his then girlfriend when he had a serious crash, almost killing
himself and giving her severe whiplash. When he did eventually get another car, an old Morris Minor, he was scared to go above 50mph in it. He told
Addicted To Noise
magazine that, from then on, things got worse and worse.
“On the road that went from my house to Oxford, there was fucking maniacs all the time,” he said, “people who would drive 100 miles an hour to work, and I was in the Morris Minor, and it was like standing in the middle of the road with no protection at all. So I just gradually became emotionally tied up in this whole thing.”
This came out later in a whole series of songs – ‘Stupid Car’, ‘Lucky’ and ‘Airbag’ – about crashes and death. He hated saying goodbye to friends when they had to drive home and he frequently dwelt on the everyday insanity of driving.
He was also deeply affected by the events of August 19, 1987, when unemployed labourer Michael Ryan armed himself with two semi-automatic rifles and a handgun and walked out on to the streets of Hungerford. He shot sixteen people, including his mother, and then turned the gun on himself. Thom was sixteen at the time and he wrote the song ‘Sulk’ in response, which would later appear on Radiohead’s second album
The Bends
. Although oblique, it was said to originally contain a line about shooting guns.
Still, his position as a sensitive outsider can be overstated. He had a girlfriend; he had a group of friends. At least part of his air of alienation and disillusionment was just the same pose that many people put on during their teenage years as a kind of protective barrier against the world. Everybody who knew him then and later said that once you got past that, he was a perfectly nice person and easy to talk to.
But with On A Friday he was already creating a kind of cocoon around his creativity. They weren’t an ordinary group of friends. They respected his prodigious musical talent. They also gave him the security that he liked and the affirmation that the songs he was writing were genuinely good. Like many artistic people, he swung wildly between an absolute belief that he was destined to produce great work and a terrible feeling that perhaps what he was doing wasn’t any good at all. Even in the early days, this made producing music a painful process. He probably thought at the time that the feelings of inadequacy would go away but the writing process was still exactly the same, if not worse, years later …
In classic pop psychology, this should all be laid at the door of that dodgy eye, the difficult childhood, the car crash and the bullies. In reality he would probably have been the awkward, creative type even if both eyes had functioned perfectly. His younger brother, Andy, born four years after him in 1972, was very similar in some ways. He also formed a band (the fleetingly successful and acclaimed Unbelievable Truth) and he too struggled with the mutually contradictory urges to be a “rock star” as against a private person. Andy gave Thom the nickname “Dodo” and there was a distinct vulnerability to both of them, a sense that they were targets because of their refusal to blend in with the crowd. Nevertheless, long after he ceased to be a child, Thom still occasionally had to explain himself over again.
“When I was eighteen, I worked in a bar,” he said to
Rolling Stone
, “and this mad woman came in and said, ‘You have beautiful eyes but they’re completely wrong.’ Whenever I get paranoid, I just think about what she said.”
In retrospect, it’s lucky that Thom didn’t become a star when he was eighteen. He was already talented enough that it was entirely possible. He had an enormous pile of songs, many of which would turn up in various forms years later. For example, a bass riff he came up with when he was just sixteen would later become the centrepiece of ‘The National Anthem’, a song that wouldn’t be finished until 1999. But if On A Friday had made it as teenagers, history would have been very different. On A Friday was very much a 1980s band. They had a faintly embarrassing whiff of white funk about them which chafed disturbingly with influences from the likes of U2 and REM. It’s not hard to imagine them becoming as big and important as, say, Fine Young Cannibals, if they’d had a break in 1987.
Their very different sound is partly explained by the fact that the five original members of On A Friday were conscious that they lacked something. Thom wasn’t yet the charismatic front man that he became later and, onstage, they were just another bunch of five blokes playing music. The solution, suggested by Colin, was to bring in a brass section. He had three friends who could play the tenor sax.
“It’s just the way things are at school when you’re in a band,” says Nigel Powell. “You bump into somebody and say ‘Do you play anything?’ and they say, ‘Yes, I play glockenspiel’ and you say, ‘Hey! Join our band!’ There happened to be three saxophonists who were relatively close in age to them, so they got them in the band. Two of them were good-looking sisters, which certainly helped.”
The three other members of On A Friday, Rasmus Peterson, Liz Cotton and her sister Charlotte were also pretty talented. By 1987 the band, as a collective, was getting better and better. They could have played more often but Thom wasn’t sure they were good enough. This might just have been the same lack of confidence that has dogged him throughout his career. They played a gig in 1987 at the Old Fire Station in Oxford (described by Thom as looking like
“it was designed by the people who build Little Chefs. The stage is almost an afterthought, you feel like you’re playing on a salad bar.”) And Nigel was impressed by how much they’d improved.
“I’d just done a demo for them and it was the release party,” he says. “They’d made lots of tapes and they were going to sell them to people. I particularly remember the horn section. They sounded really good that night. It was almost R&B.”
This comes across in another demo recorded in 1988 at Woodworm Studios in a small village called Barford St. Michael in Oxfordshire. The studio had been set up by Dave Pegg, the bassist in folk rock band Fairport Convention. He was also the studio engineer and he did a good job of capturing their sound on three very different tracks. The first, ‘Happy Song’, has a jaunty calypso rhythm overlaid with jangly guitars like early REM. The second, ‘To Be A Brilliant Light’, has a sax opening that sounds like Duran Duran before it heads off, once again, in more of an REM direction and the third, ‘Sinking Ship’, sounds like a cross between The Wonder Stuff and Violent Femmes.
They weren’t great songs by any means but for a teenage band that’d played only a handful of gigs they were pretty impressive. Most teen bands struggle to master one genre, yet Thom already had them hopping from one distinct style to another in every track. It was a sign of his talent but also an indication perhaps that he hadn’t yet found his voice. For someone who loved performing so much, it is surprising that he didn’t get the band to play more shows at this point, but then they were only kids, and the student-dominated live music scene in Oxford must have been quite intimidating. Thom had lived there since he was eight-years-old but he had highly ambiguous feelings about the city. In an interview with
The Observer
, he once said that it made him feel like an outsider, one of the few places in England where the expensively educated members of Radiohead wouldn’t feel middle-class.
“The middle-class thing has never been relevant,’ he told journalist Andrew Smith. “In Oxford we’re fucking lower-class. The place is full of the most obnoxious, self-indulgent, self-righteous oiks on the fucking planet, and for us to be called middle class … well, no, actually. Be around on May Day when they all reel out of the pubs at five in the morning puking up and going, ‘Haw haw haw’ and try to hassle your girlfriend.”
Nevertheless he also said, in his first interview with fanzine
Curfew
, that although it was a “weird place”, it was “very important to my writing.” He would often sit and just watch people, scribbling ideas for lyrics in his notebook. His main inspiration was purely negative. He learned to despise certain elements of the student population, a feeling that may have been bolstered by the fact that, in the poorer southern parts of the town, he would have been considered much more like a student than a townie. He was desperate to disassociate himself from some of the grating public school types who poured into the city each year.
“Seeing these fuckers walking around in their ball gowns, throwing up on the streets, being obnoxious to the population,” he said to
Q
. “They don’t know they’re born and they’re going to run the country. It’s scary. Of all the towns in the country, it’s one of the most obvious examples of a class divide.”
At one point he even considered changing the name of the band from On A Friday to ‘Jude’ after the protagonist of Thomas Hardy’s novel
Jude The Obscure
. It is, in part, the story of somebody desperately trying to get into Oxford University and being driven mad by their failure. By then Thom was already starting to get bored of repeatedly being told how awful the name On A Friday was, but for some reason they couldn’t think of anything better. They considered calling themselves simply ‘Music’, which says something about how seriously they were taking things. But the name On A Friday stuck, even if no particular style of music did. They tried country, ska, funk, punk and rock. “We used to change musical styles every two months,” Colin Greenwood once said.
If they’d wanted to get attention fast, the best thing would have been to take their inspiration from My Bloody Valentine’s 1988 album
Isn’t Anything
. At that point, a whole swathe of bands in Oxford and the surrounding area were about to do just that, inventing the so-called ‘Shoegazing’ scene. Bands like Ride would soon be the ‘Big Thing’ in the music press, with a sound that relied on a wall of guitars and dreamy, ethereal vocals. But Thom was always much too spiky and acerbic to be interested in anything purporting to be “blissful”. Instead he leapt from one sound to another, constantly finding inspiration from new bands. His latest discovery was an American act called the Miracle Legion. He and his brother Andy were obsessed with them and their singer Mark
Mulcahy. Miracle Legion were similar to REM but with a darker, more intense sound. Thom wanted his own music to have the same emotional feel but he wasn’t quite sure how to find it. The result was an incredibly prolific burst of songwriting that he’d still be drawing from years later.
“They just stuck with it,” says Nigel Powell. “Everybody else was shooting about going, ‘I’ll try this, I’ll try that, I’ll do the other’, whereas even though these extra people, like the saxophonists, came and went, the core of the band were just there plugging away going, ‘Let’s try new things’. Even when the band weren’t playing very often, Jonny and Thom would borrow the school four-track and go and demo stuff in Jonny’s bedroom, using drum loops and Soul II Soul [style] loops and throwing stuff over the top of them. They seemed to be able to forge ahead better than a lot of people.”
Perhaps they could have made it then, in 1988 or 1989. Things could have been very different. But they weren’t rock ’n’ roll outlaws with no option but to play music or starve. They’d had expensive educations and there was a lot of pressure on them to make good use of that. They had a foretaste of what would happen when Phil disappeared off to Liverpool University to study English. The following year Colin, Thom and Ed also had to make a decision about what they were going to do next. Colin had a promising academic career ahead of him. He got top grades at A-Level and went to Cambridge University to study English, while Ed had gone to Liverpool to study politics. Thom was reluctant to follow them. He was starting to form an impressive songwriting partnership with Jonny (who was still at school). He also had a slightly tortuous and intense relationship that he didn’t seem to be able to get out of. (“Have you ever seen
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf
? It was like that for a year and a half,” he said to
Melody Maker
, “lots of fighting in public”.)
He deferred his place at university and spent a gap year doing unrewarding jobs while continually writing songs and recording demos with Jonny. One of his jobs was at a clothes store selling suits. When his boss asked him why he hadn’t managed to sell any he replied, “because they’re crap and no one wants to buy them.”
This kind of honesty wasn’t going to get him anywhere in sales. His boss took over the role of his designated hate-figure, a replacement for Abingdon’s much-loathed headmaster. The day he
handed in his notice, after wrongly being accused of stealing some stock, was a great moment but Thom was uncharacteristically restrained. “I wish I’d told my boss to fuck off,” he said later. “He had this twisted little mouth and you could tell that he was desperate to make everybody’s life hell.”
Still, it was a frustrating year. The band could only rehearse and play very occasionally. After leaving the shop, Thom – with characteristic perversity – got a job at a mental hospital as an orderly. He still hated hospitals as a result of his childhood memories and now his experiences dealing with people who had severe problems shocked him. He was particularly amazed when many of them were released.
“I used to work in a mental hospital around the time the Government was getting passionate about care in the community,” he said in an interview with
The Times
in the late 1990s, “and everyone just knew what was going to happen. It was one of the scariest things that ever happened in this country, because a lot of them weren’t harmless.”
After another job working in a bar, Thom eventually headed off to Exeter University to study English Literature and Art. In some ways it was another perverse choice. He claimed to despise the spoiled rich kids he saw in Oxford but Exeter University, at that time, was known as the place where middle-class kids who weren’t clever enough to get into Oxford or Cambridge went to create a similarly cloistered environment. It was a fairly long way from Oxford but socially it wasn’t a giant leap. It was the same thing on a smaller, less intimidating scale.
Nevertheless, it had its advantages. At a place like Exeter it was much easier to be seen as ‘alternative’. And when he got there Thom found that although there weren’t many people who shared his tastes, those who did formed a much more solid bond than they might have done elsewhere. Also, when he arrived in 1988, being ‘alternative’ was suddenly about to become fashionable and much more mainstream.
Just like a young couple heading off to different universities, the rest of the band must have wondered whether their relationship would survive. What would happen, say, if one of them met somebody else?