Thom Yorke by Trevor Baker Read Free Book Online Page B

experimenting, too. Towards the end of the first year, when he finally came back to class, he discovered that they’d bought a load of Apple Macs. After that he spent most of his time scanning images, playing around with bits of text. Even then he felt that many of his fellow students were dubious that what he was doing was ‘art’ at all. One exception was one of his best friends at Exeter, Dan Rickwood. He had a similarly dark sense of humour to Thom and the same preoccupations with war and disaster. Talking to Craig McLean of the Observer , he remembered Thom later as, “mouthy. Pissed off. Someone I could work with!” Later on, using the name Stanley Donwood, he would collaborate with Thom on almost all of Radiohead’s artwork.
    “I think that my obsession with nuclear apocalypse, Ebola pandemics, global cataclysm and Radiohead’s particular brand of unsettling melody have gone together quite well,” he later quipped in an interview with Antimusic website. Like a lot of students, they relished the feeling of being outsiders. Thom still retained the distaste for students that he’d had at Oxford.
    “I was embarrassed to be a student because of what the little fuckers got up to,” he said to Q . “Walking down the street to be confronted by puke and shopping trolleys and police bollards. Fucking hell. I used to think, no wonder they hate us.”
    That hatred was directed directly at him on one occasion. He’d taken to wearing a long overcoat and an old man’s hat. When a group of locals mocked him, he turned and blew them a kiss and they promptly pulled sticks from their own jackets and proceeded to batter him.
    To begin with, Thom had managed to steer clear of most student clichés. He drank but he wasn’t somebody who would have ten pints and then run amok with a traffic cone on his head. “He was a crap drinker!” remembers Martin. “He’d be asleep after a pint and a half. He was that kind of drinker. He wasn’t a raconteur. He wouldn’t stand there and entertain everybody. He was definitely somebody who was on the sidelines of things until he was onstage.”
    Thom had some of the best times of his life at Exeter. He was asked in a magazine interview years later about the best party he’d ever been to and he remembered one occasion where he wassummoned to a kind of “happening” on a hillside outside Exeter. They were picked up at The Red Cow pub and driven to Dartmoor where, in the absence of any moon, it was almost pitch black. They then walked across the moor until they got to the edge of a deserted quarry. Then suddenly somebody switched on lights and the whole thing was illuminated. They smashed an abandoned car up and made instruments out of the pieces before crashing out in sleeping bags. Shaun, too, remembers it as being one of the highlights of their time at Exeter.
    “‘Info Freako’ by Jesus Jones was a hit at the time and I recall trying to dance to it on very lumpy ground with Thom and other friends, surrounded by TV sets playing the cult film Koyaanisqatsi !” he remembers. “The rave was followed by some performance art around the quarry ponds and we slept in the open, huddled around bonfires.”
    It was the kind of thing that Thom might have sniffed at in Oxford a couple of years before but, despite himself, he was swept up in student life for a while. At the same time, music was still far more important to him than anything else. He would take his guitar with him to parties, he was writing constantly and his songs had reached another level. He was inspired by the new direction that REM had taken with a more mainstream, classic songwriting sound.
    “I really noticed the passion in his singing in the student bar when I heard him singing the REM song ‘The One I Love’, says Shaun. “The way he sang it, that’s when I realised how good his singing was. He did a really emotional performance of that with just him and his guitar.”
    Despite the fact that Headless Chickens