Thom Yorke Read Online Free

Thom Yorke
Book: Thom Yorke Read Online Free
Author: Trevor Baker
Pages:
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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 killinghimself 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
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