Thom Yorke Read Online Free Page A

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.”

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ON A FRIDAY
    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’,