Hail to the chief, arch-contrarian Thom
Thom Yorke is to tour a “live electronic performance” with long-time Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich, writes Barry Egan
‘TIME takes a cigarette...” sang David Bowie famously on Rock n Roll Suicide at the end of The Rise And Fall Of Ziggy Stardust and The Spiders From Mars album in the summer of 1972 — reverberating with Spanish poet Manuel Machado’s poem Chants Andalous (“Life is a cigarette/Cinder, ash and fire...”)
Quixotic Oxford iconoclast, arch-contrarian and wonderful misery guts, Thom Yorke has been lighting up time’s ciggies since the beginning of Radiohead, the band he started with his mates at Abingdon School aged 15, in a manner that one of his idols, Mr Bowie, would certainly have recognised.
The strangely life-affirming paranoia of All I Need (from the 2007 album In Rainbows), with Yorke breathing dissonantly into the microphone, could have been taken from Bowie’s bleak masterpiece The Next Day: ‘I’m the next act/Waiting in the wings/I’m an animal/Trapped in your hot car/I am all the days that you choose to ignore.’
The Sabotage Times website said that if Sigmund Freud were alive today he would, of course, be listening to Yorke’s music. “Freud, like Radiohead, was no vendor of good cheer, essentially describing people’s smallness and powerlessness.”
The reason I am writing about Yorke is that, after coming off a huge Radiohead tour, he and Nigel Godrich, Radiohead collaborator since The Bends in 1995 and member of Yorke’s side-project Atoms For Peace, along with visual artist Tarik Barri, are heading back out on the road with what they describe, intriguingly, as “a live electronic performance”.
But the actual reason I am writing about Thom Yorke is that he is something close to God in my house. I think I have listened to In Rainbow’s Weird Fishes (to say nothing of Everything In Its Right Place from 2000’s Kid A ) more times than is good for my health.
As bassist Colin Greenwood once, helpfully, explained, the song “evokes meaning rather than states it. The chord changes bear you aloft and sweep you down and that’s a sort of meaning. If all you’re looking for in music is a way of talking about it, it’s pretty poor, isn’t it?”
Lest we forget, pretty poor was Yorke’s view of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. There is a bit a background here. Yorke, as an ambassador for Friends Of The Earth, refused several invitations to meet Blair when he was in Number 10. When he was asked by a newspaper why he missed the opportunity to directly lobby Blair on the environment, he answered: “Not when there were all sorts of conditions being put up.”
Asked about the conditions of one meeting in 2003, he was fairly straightforward in calling out the then Prime Minister: “[Blair’s advisers] wanted pre-meetings. They wanted to know that I was onside. Also, I was being manoeuvred into a position where if I said the wrong thing post the meeting, Friends of the Earth would lose their access. “Which normally would be called,” Yorke added, “blackmail”.
In May 2006, Yorke did, however, invite then Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown and Conservative leader David Cameron to The Big Ask Live, a benefit concert in aid of Friends of the Earth’s campaign to enact a new law on climate change, at the Koko in Camden.
Cameron subsequently went on BBC’s Desert Island Discs to tell Sue Lawley: “I sent [Yorke] this rather sad letter saying I’d love to come to the concert, thank you for asking me.” The Tory leader also added that the letter included a hopeful PS: ‘Please play my favourite song, Radiohead’s Fake Plastic Trees’. “And he did,” Cameron gushed to Lawley.
The following day, Radiohead issued a statement saying the choice of songs on the set list that night at The Big Ask Live had “nothing to do with any special guests”.
It is one of Yorke’s flaws that he is occasionally ponderous, even pompous, enough to issue such statements. But imagine how another politician, George W Bush, felt when he heard
‘Thom Yorke sat on a piano singing, “This is f **ked up” for half an hour’
Radiohead’s 2003 album, Hail To The Thief — a reference to Bush allegedly stealing the 2000 US election.
In the mid 1990s, when Yorke was nominated in the Best British Male Solo Artist category at the Brit Awards, Noel Gallagher told The Daily Telegraph: “Thom Yorke sat on a piano singing, ‘This is f**ked up’ for half an hour. We all know that, Mr Yorke. Who wants to sing the news? No matter how much you sit there twiddling, going, ‘We’re all doomed’, at the end of the day people will always want to hear you play Creep. Get over it.”
Yorke ignored that remark and instead quoted another Noel Gallagher dig — “I don’t know what a paint brush is, I never went to art school” — to which Yorke responsed with: “I did. It taught me to respect other artists.”