Thom Yorke by Trevor Baker Read Free Book Online

Stuff’s Miles Hunt. In the background you can just about make out Thom’s backing vocals, a falsetto that would later become very familiar.
    “It was brilliant, totally brilliant,” says Martin. “As a drummer I’d never heard myself play in a band before. I’m sure it wasn’t that polished at all but it did sound great. It was fantastic to hear, particularly Thom’s vocal over the top of Shack, [it] sounded really good. It was a real buzz hearing it and I remember thinking it would be great fun to do more of that.”
    “Thom’s very high backing vocals are probably the best thing in it, looking back!” says Laura. “I remember my string broke so I had to do it with three strings like Paganini because I didn’t have a spare violin string. It was very fast.”
    The result was the kind of frantic indie rock that was designed to be played live to an audience of enthusiastic, and, ideally, drunk students. “It sounds like The Wonder Stuff or something,” says John. “It’s very of its time, 1989, poppy, grungey English pop music.”
    Dave Goodchild arranged for an impressive 1,000 copies of the EPs to be pressed at a plant in Czechoslovakia. When he collected them, though, hundreds were missing. “What happened was a box of them broke and got lost somewhere in between the Czech pressing plant and Exeter,” he says, “so there’s not many of them around. I think a load of sleeves went missing as well. There were 1,000 run and literally about 600 of them got lost.”
    It didn’t cause the band too much concern. 1,000 records seem like rather a lot for an EP which would surely only ever be of interest within the small alternative scene of one small city. Plus the cost was spread between the four bands and Hometown Atrocities, so it wasn’t as expensive as it might have been. It was just one of those things,” says Dave. “It did end up costing us. One box arrived instead of five but because it was a collective, nobody really cared.”
    It also means that the EP is now worth a lot of money. There were two different sleeves and one is particularly rare. Above a picture of a fang-toothed female zombie it bears the legend: Hometown Atrocities Present … A Disgrace To The Corpse Of Kylie … The Hometown Atrocities EP.
    It was an incongruously ‘punk’ image for a band who had much more in common with the indie scene but the EP, and particularly Headless Chickens’ song, received an enthusiastic response in Exeter. In their own tiny world they were now almost pop stars and when it was sold in local shops their fan base expanded.
    “After the EP we had a following, not just in the university but in the town as well,” says Martin. “Dave Goodchild was a local rather than a university type and he bridged the gap. Quite a few people bought that EP and they’d love it when we played it and we’d always get encores and stuff.”
    As a band they were increasing in confidence. What had started out as a bit of fun was starting to become a little more serious.At that point, Thom didn’t particularly stand out from any of the other people in his clique in terms of his talent. They were all very talented. But he stood out with his attitude and his work ethic.
    “He was quite a good guitarist in the way that the other people in the band were quite good as well,” says Martin. “It was more in his attitude and his energy and his belief that he was conspicuous, rather than his actual ability at that point. Although he was an art student, there were no particular themes or passions or points that he was trying to make. It was kind of, ‘I want to be different like everybody else’. He had this general thing of wanting to do stuff and be passionate but not quite being sure of what he wanted to let out. So, later on, probably catalysed by his friendships with the other guys in [On A Friday], those things started to come out. He worked fucking hard at being a musician. We’d do a song and then the next time you