Thom Yorke Read Online Free Page B

has a sax opening that sounds like Duran Duran before it heads off, once again, in more of an REM direction and the third, ‘Sinking Ship’, sounds like a cross between The Wonder Stuff and Violent Femmes.
    They weren’t great songs by any means but for a teenage band that’d played only a handful of gigs they were pretty impressive. Most teen bands struggle to master one genre, yet Thom already had them hopping from one distinct style to another in every track. It was a sign of his talent but also an indication perhaps that he hadn’t yet found his voice. For someone who loved performing so much, it is surprising that he didn’t get the band to play more shows at this point, but then they were only kids, and the student-dominated live music scene in Oxford must have been quite intimidating. Thom had lived there since he was eight-years-old but he had highly ambiguous feelings about the city. In an interview with The Observer , he once said that it made him feel like an outsider, one of the few places in England where the expensively educated members of Radiohead wouldn’t feel middle-class.
    “The middle-class thing has never been relevant,’ he told journalist Andrew Smith. “In Oxford we’re fucking lower-class. The place is full of the most obnoxious, self-indulgent, self-righteous oiks on the fucking planet, and for us to be called middle class … well, no, actually. Be around on May Day when they all reel out of the pubs at five in the morning puking up and going, ‘Haw haw haw’ and try to hassle your girlfriend.”
    Nevertheless he also said, in his first interview with fanzine Curfew , that although it was a “weird place”, it was “very important to my writing.” He would often sit and just watch people, scribbling ideas for lyrics in his notebook. His main inspiration was purely negative. He learned to despise certain elements of the student population, a feeling that may have been bolstered by the fact that, in the poorer southern parts of the town, he would have been considered much more like a student than a townie. He was desperate to disassociate himself from some of the grating public school types who poured into the city each year.
    “Seeing these fuckers walking around in their ball gowns, throwing up on the streets, being obnoxious to the population,” he said to Q . “They don’t know they’re born and they’re going to run the country. It’s scary. Of all the towns in the country, it’s one of the most obvious examples of a class divide.”
    At one point he even considered changing the name of the band from On A Friday to ‘Jude’ after the protagonist of Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude The Obscure . It is, in part, the story of somebody desperately trying to get into Oxford University and being driven mad by their failure. By then Thom was already starting to get bored of repeatedly being told how awful the name On A Friday was, but for some reason they couldn’t think of anything better. They considered calling themselves simply ‘Music’, which says something about how seriously they were taking things. But the name On A Friday stuck, even if no particular style of music did. They tried country, ska, funk, punk and rock. “We used to change musical styles every two months,” Colin Greenwood once said.
    If they’d wanted to get attention fast, the best thing would have been to take their inspiration from My Bloody Valentine’s 1988 album Isn’t Anything . At that point, a whole swathe of bands in Oxford and the surrounding area were about to do just that, inventing the so-called ‘Shoegazing’ scene. Bands like Ride would soon be the ‘Big Thing’ in the music press, with a sound that relied on a wall of guitars and dreamy, ethereal vocals. But Thom was always much too spiky and acerbic to be interested in anything purporting to be “blissful”. Instead he leapt from one sound to another, constantly finding inspiration from new bands. His latest discovery was an