Thom Yorke On ‘Creep’, Bad Art, And Stalking Ed Norton
Thom Yorke and Alec Baldwin chatted for over an hour in the latest episode of 'Here's The Thing'. Some of it was rambling. But some of it was great.
The latest instalment of Alec Baldwin’s consistently brilliant podcast, Here’s The Thing, features a rare lengthy chat with Thom Yorke, of Radiohead and Atoms For Peace.
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Thom Yorke started a band when he was 11:
“[We were] not very good at all, but it was very exciting. Like going round to a friend’s house, setting up and jamming, and all of our mates would come and hang out. And girls – which I thought, “Hmm, this is interesting” as puberty hit. But … I kept fighting with the drummer.”
Thom Yorke started Radiohead when he was 16. By going around his school and pointing at people, basically:
“I got Ed [O’Brien] because he was dressed like Morrissey and he had some cool socks, and I saw he had a guitar. I had no idea whether he could play or not. I didn’t really care. I got Colin [Greenwood] because I knew Colin could play very well and I needed a bass player who could play very well, but he’d never played bass before. And his brother Jonny was this mythical musical prodigy, so I roped him in, and then Phil [Selway] was the only drummer we knew anyway – and he had a house down the road that we could rehearse in.”
Thom Yorke doesn’t think he’s the best at what he does:
“I like the fact that I still don’t know what I’m doing. I’ll go through whole phases of months where I haven’t got a clue. I regularly lose complete confidence in what I’m doing.”
Thom Yorke sings to the top of his foreheard:
“In yoga and stuff or whatever, [they say] that spot at the top of the forehead that you really – most singers – like Neil Young is the same. He sings to this spot in his head. And what he’s singing, he’s already heard. You know what I mean? He’s hearing it come out.
And the same with Björk. When she’s singing, she’s singing what she’s hearing, so there’s no force. It’s a force in itself.
It took me awhile to get that. You know, even when we were on tour with REM back when we were doing The Bends in ’96 or whatever, it was still – I was still trying to figure it out then. Watching Michael [Stipe] and wanting to sound like Michael, but I couldn’t, you know, because my voice is in a different tone completely and so on.
But what I did learn watching him, was again that thing of like watching someone who, their voice is in sort of command of them rather than the other way around.”
Thom Yorke stalked Ed Norton:
“I don’t hang out with people because they are who they are necessarily, unless I’m a big admirer of them. Like I mean, I stalked Ed Norton for ages until eventually he gave in… I’m a big admirer of him. I think he’s brilliant. So I hang out with him a bit occasionally. And Flea [from Red Hot Chili Peppers]. I’ve always really admired Flea anyway, even before it became an issue of sort of playing with him.”
Thom Yorke no longer sings ‘Creep’ because he just doesn’t recognise it any more:
“Just that voice. I don’t even recognise that. It’s kind of odd. But then I remember hearing Lou Reed on some radio station in Dublin years and years ago, and they were asking inevitably about Velvet Underground. And he said, ‘Yeah, sometimes it comes on and I’m like, ‘This is cool, what’s this?’ And then I realise it’s the Velvet Underground and it’s like, ‘Wow’.’ Yeah.”
Thom Yorke needs a break, maybe? (Actually, we’re not quite sure what he’s saying here at all):
Thom Yorke: A break is due because what I’ve found with a break is it can be an incredibly exciting, that thing of thinking of all the stuff you want to do, but you just force yourself not – you just force yourself to wait and get back into just time and space. Not being in music all the time, I think, because it’s like anything. You start to go in small circles, so you’ve got to stop when that happens.
… I find that I’m, well my family and my friends know that I’m a nicer person if I’m working and if I’m into what I’m doing than if I stop. There’s a period where I’m fairly unbearable if I do stop … for too long.
There’s a threshold. But like if you want to shift, right, with your work, if you want to shift. If you’re writing, if you’re being creative at all, you kind of have to stop to make that shift. Because if you just, ‘I’m constantly creating, I’ve got this mountain of brilliant ideas,’ you’re making the basic mistake that you’re assuming all your ideas are brilliant, where in fact actually the more you do, then probably the more – kind of your thing in reverse because actually I need to go and do normal shit. I need to – I can’t write unless I have a period where-
Alec Baldwin: You’re restored.
Thom Yorke: Well no, it’s not restored, just reset. I’m like just normal – normal. Normal, normal, normal, normal, normal, normal.
Thom Yorke’s mum thought art college would be a waste of time…
“My mom was very upset when I chose to go to art college. Because she’d been to art college and she said, ‘It’s a complete waste of time, don’t bother.’
It’s kind of bonkers like seeing [my parents] backstage at a really big show. They’ll come to a big show and there’s all sorts of shit going off with my mates. They’re doing whatever, you know, and there’s my mum and dad going, ‘That was fun. Got any beer?’”
… But at least he learned how to paint.
Thom Yorke: My mate Stanley Donwood, who I went to art college with and who does all our artwork with [me], we always have these lovely plans about we want to go and live in Berlin for a month, [to] just paint and get in trouble and things like that. We call ourselves the Sunday Painters and we go on bad painting trips …
One of my favorite ones was [when] we went on the moors down in Cornwall … which is very, very, very bleak but really beautiful. We’re in this stone circle. We drove part of the way, walked the rest of the way with these big canvases and paints. But we discovered we only had purple and blue and yellow, so I thought, ‘Well okay, we’ll use that’. And we painted landscapes all afternoon but they were purple and blue and yellow.
[I remember] some poor woman in the late afternoon, like coming and asking us for directions. We’re both sitting there, canvases up like this, all huddled up with our hoods on and our just doing this – [mimics painting]. And this poor woman comes up and asks for directions to go somewhere or other and then looks at the paintings and just wanders off like…
Alec Baldwin: “Good luck, boys. I hope you have another career. I hope you’re not counting on that.”
Thom Yorke: “I don’t think the purple’s working for you.”
Alec Baldwin: That was like me being in Italy and this beautiful couple, they were like – they were older. And the man walked up to me with a camera and said, ‘Scusa, schuss. Il photo.’ He’s pointing to me and his wife. He’s triangulating. And I go, ‘Oh!’, and I put my arm around his wife to take a photo. He goes, ‘No, no. You photo my wife and me. You take the photo with the mountain in the background.’ I was like, ‘Oh my God, they don’t know who I am. I should move here.’
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If you’re a newcomer to Alec Baldwin’s Here’s The Thing, get started on this one with Lena Dunham, this one with Judd Apatow, and this one with Billy Joel.