Thom Yorke by Trevor Baker Read Free Book Online Page A

saw him he’d really polished it and worked on it and made an effort to make it as good as it could be. He’d always got loads of ideas. He was very good at collaborating. So although some people might think it was all about him, it wasn’t. He was definitely passionate about the band and the music coming over well and everybody getting on. It’s interesting in that he’s gone full-circle in that his persona now is very much a shy bloke who doesn’t like talking about it, who just wants to get up and do it and doesn’t want to project himself as unusual or as a pop star or anything else. Whereas [back] then he was definitely all about his persona. He was an OK guitarist. He could kind of sing and looked alright onstage but it was almost the other way round.”
    As he started to feel more confident in Headless Chickens, Thom started contributing his own songs. One of them, in an odd throwback to his first, childhood song, ‘Mushroom Cloud’, was called ‘Atom Bomb’. It was just “generic indie”, says Martin, but it was a sign that Thom wasn’t just along for the ride. Nevertheless, even as he became more confident and started bringing more to the band there were still moments when they were reminded that he wasn’t a rock star, yet.
    “In the first year in halls, everybody was a little bit green,” says Laura. “I’ve got this video of our gig and everybody’s desperately trying to be so cool and Thom’s there in these cut-off shorts like your man out of AC/DC and we’re all onstage and he suddenly shouts into the microphone, ‘This one’s for everyone in Moberly’, which wasone of the Halls Of Residence. Which was so uncool! The rest of us were going, ‘Would you shut up! You’ve just completely ruined our street-cred!’”

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SUPERSTAR DJ
    In the second year, Thom moved out of halls and into a shared house. There were only 12 people on his course and so they decided to split into two groups of six. He lived in the basement of a big, three-storey house on Longbrook Street in the centre of Exeter. Unsurprisingly it was a very arty environment. Perhaps slightly too arty at times. One housemate, Shaun, was an amateur film-maker and he remembers that, although on occasion they worked together, there was some friction between them, too.
    “There were some funny things going on in that house,” Shaun recalled in an interview for this book. “I used to do a lot of my film stuff there. We’d perplex each other with our idiosyncrasies! I’d say me and him were quite similar but I’m a bit more easy-going. I would do weird things. I was doing films and things would come spilling out of my room. He just thought I was mad. And I think a lot of people thought Thom must be mad because of his music! But there was a conventional side to his character as well.”
    Nevertheless, Thom was happy to collaborate with his housemates on their projects. On one occasion Thom and Shaun went to nearby Dawlish-by-the-Sea to work on another film for their art class, almost getting trapped by the rising tide. Another time Thom sang ‘10 Green Bottles’ for one of Shaun’s films. “It’s nice that he was happy to get involved with something like that,” says Shaun. “It’s not the stereotype of the intense, depressed person.
    The rest of the house would regularly hear Thom working on songs downstairs and, on one occasion, Shaun and Thom wrote a song together. Thom was still experimenting and didn’t have a clear idea of what kind of music he wanted to make. Shaun says that the result was an odd hybrid of alternative, drone-rock bands like Loop or Spacemen 3 with a kind of Prince vocal on the top.
    “We sat down to jam a couple of songs,” he says, “and as we were playing, he had an idea for something and I was just tuning my guitar in and out and we ended up getting something that sounded reallygood. He was just singing, ‘Baby let’s grind,’ like Prince, or something.”
    In his art class, Thom was