Thom Yorke (4 page)

The main thing that made Headless Chickens so popular in their own little world was the amount of effort they put into their performances. Unlike On A Friday, they were as much about the spectacle as they were about the music.

“Thom had that long blonde bob that he used to swish about onstage,” says Martin. “Shack had very long hair and I was a Goth so I had dyed, back-combed hair. We looked quite good and had a lot of energy and attitude onstage. We used to shout at the audience. People would scream and shout. There’d be lots of banter. It was always a fun night rather than, ‘there’s a band up there taking themselves seriously’. This was the fun band where Thom could let his hair down.”

“We did lots of stupid covers,” Laura Forrest-Hay remembers. “Like a really heavy, thrash version of ‘Postman Pat’. And we did Prince’s ‘Raspberry Beret’ at four times the speed. Shack was quite into punk, as well, and anarchic music. Myself and John Matthias were bringing in more melodic stuff on top of it.”

“We did a very hard, grungy cover of ‘Funky Town’, continues Martin. “Thom would prance up and down in a way that … although his onstage presence got quite professional, musically, he would definitely fuck about. We also used to get a lot of dancers in who’d strip off and paint themselves in funny coloured paint and all that. Part of it was that if you have a visual appeal and make it a party, people will come. I remember a couple of gigs where we had four to six dancers covered in DayGlo paint down to their underwear. We did a couple of gigs at farms in the middle of nowhere with properly decent light shows. There was definitely a buzz about it. I mean I didn’t leave [the band] thinking,
Oh my God, I’ve just done a Pete Best
. I was never good enough as a drummer to have gone the distance. But it had enough of a buzz about it that a lot of people would have remembered those times, regardless of what Thom had gone on to do. It was a good enough band and stage show and a good enough thing that happened for people to say that, ‘Yeah, there was a band called the Headless Chickens and they were really good and we had a lot of fun.’ We were better than the average student band.”

This was proved when they achieved something else that On A Friday had never come close to – their own record. Local promoter Dave Goodchild had a record label, Hometown Atrocities, and when he saw the small following that Headless Chickens were building up among the student population, he suggested that they record a song for an EP of Exeter bands. The Headless Chickens’ song was called ‘I Don’t Want To Go To Woodstock’ and Dave arranged for them to go to a studio in nearby Honiton to record it.

The other three bands on the record, Jackson Penis, Beaver Patrol and Dave’s own band Mad At The Sun, had a completely different sound, much louder and heavier. Headless Chickens were unmistakably a student band.

“They were different from all the other punk bands in Exeter,” Dave told this author. “The big influence in Exeter at the time was hardcore. We were into Emo bands like Fugazi, which is very different to what they call Emo now, but they’d branched off into more of an avant-garde thing. It had more of an indie appeal.”

“Thom had done a bit of demo recording before but none of us had been involved in anything like that,” says John. “It was great. It was a laugh. We went to a studio called Daylight Studios in Honiton. And it was just a day. I remember Thom over-dubbing lots and lots of very noisy guitar, very quickly. Then we over-dubbed the violin. I think we did the whole thing in about four hours and then took about an hour and a half to mix it and it was mastered the next day and that was it.”

Despite the fact that it was a micro-budget recording, it was a fantastic moment for all of them when they heard the finished record. It was an anti-hippy piece beginning with Shack ranting, “with flowers in their hair/they say that they don’t care” and ending, “don’t let the hippies get me”. The biggest influence seems to be the cussed humour of The Wonder Stuff’s Miles Hunt. In the background you can just about make out Thom’s backing vocals, a falsetto that would later become very familiar.

“It was brilliant, totally brilliant,” says Martin. “As a drummer I’d never heard myself play in a band before. I’m sure it wasn’t that polished at all but it did sound great. It was fantastic to hear, particularly Thom’s vocal over the top of Shack, [it] sounded really good. It was a real buzz hearing it and I remember thinking it would be great fun to do more of that.”

“Thom’s very high backing vocals are probably the best thing in it, looking back!” says Laura. “I remember my string broke so I had to do it with three strings like Paganini because I didn’t have a spare violin string. It was very fast.”

The result was the kind of frantic indie rock that was designed to be played live to an audience of enthusiastic, and, ideally, drunk students. “It sounds like The Wonder Stuff or something,” says John. “It’s very of its time, 1989, poppy, grungey English pop music.”

Dave Goodchild arranged for an impressive 1,000 copies of the EPs to be pressed at a plant in Czechoslovakia. When he collected them, though, hundreds were missing. “What happened was a box of them broke and got lost somewhere in between the Czech pressing plant and Exeter,” he says, “so there’s not many of them around. I think a load of sleeves went missing as well. There were 1,000 run and literally about 600 of them got lost.”

It didn’t cause the band too much concern. 1,000 records seem like rather a lot for an EP which would surely only ever be of interest within the small alternative scene of one small city. Plus the cost was spread between the four bands and Hometown Atrocities, so it wasn’t as expensive as it might have been. It was just one of those things,” says Dave. “It did end up costing us. One box arrived instead of five but because it was a collective, nobody really cared.”

It also means that the EP is now worth a lot of money. There were two different sleeves and one is particularly rare. Above a picture of a fang-toothed female zombie it bears the legend:
Hometown Atrocities Present
…
A Disgrace To The Corpse Of Kylie
…
The Hometown Atrocities
EP.

It was an incongruously ‘punk’ image for a band who had much more in common with the indie scene but the EP, and particularly Headless Chickens’ song, received an enthusiastic response in Exeter. In their own tiny world they were now almost pop stars and when it was sold in local shops their fan base expanded.

“After the EP we had a following, not just in the university but in the town as well,” says Martin. “Dave Goodchild was a local rather than a university type and he bridged the gap. Quite a few people bought that EP and they’d love it when we played it and we’d always get encores and stuff.”

As a band they were increasing in confidence. What had started out as a bit of fun was starting to become a little more serious.
At that point, Thom didn’t particularly stand out from any of the other people in his clique in terms of his talent. They were all very talented. But he stood out with his attitude and his work ethic.

“He was quite a good guitarist in the way that the other people in the band were quite good as well,” says Martin. “It was more in his attitude and his energy and his belief that he was conspicuous, rather than his actual ability at that point. Although he was an art student, there were no particular themes or passions or points that he was trying to make. It was kind of, ‘I want to be different like everybody else’. He had this general thing of wanting to do stuff and be passionate but not quite being sure of what he wanted to let out. So, later on, probably catalysed by his friendships with the other guys in [On A Friday], those things started to come out. He worked fucking hard at being a musician. We’d do a song and then the next time you saw him he’d really polished it and worked on it and made an effort to make it as good as it could be. He’d always got loads of ideas. He was very good at collaborating. So although some people might think it was all about him, it wasn’t. He was definitely passionate about the band and the music coming over well and everybody getting on. It’s interesting in that he’s gone full-circle in that his persona now is very much a shy bloke who doesn’t like talking about it, who just wants to get up and do it and doesn’t want to project himself as unusual or as a pop star or anything else. Whereas [back] then he was definitely all about his persona. He was an OK guitarist. He could kind of sing and looked alright onstage but it was almost the other way round.”

As he started to feel more confident in Headless Chickens, Thom started contributing his own songs. One of them, in an odd throwback to his first, childhood song, ‘Mushroom Cloud’, was called ‘Atom Bomb’. It was just “generic indie”, says Martin, but it was a sign that Thom wasn’t just along for the ride. Nevertheless, even as he became more confident and started bringing more to the band there were still moments when they were reminded that he wasn’t a rock star, yet.

“In the first year in halls, everybody was a little bit green,” says Laura. “I’ve got this video of our gig and everybody’s desperately trying to be so cool and Thom’s there in these cut-off shorts like your man out of AC/DC and we’re all onstage and he suddenly shouts into the microphone, ‘This one’s for everyone in Moberly’, which was
one of the Halls Of Residence. Which was so uncool! The rest of us were going, ‘Would you shut up! You’ve just completely ruined our street-cred!’”

In the second year, Thom moved out of halls and into a shared house. There were only 12 people on his course and so they decided to split into two groups of six. He lived in the basement of a big, three-storey house on Longbrook Street in the centre of Exeter. Unsurprisingly it was a very arty environment. Perhaps slightly too arty at times. One housemate, Shaun, was an amateur film-maker and he remembers that, although on occasion they worked together, there was some friction between them, too.

“There were some funny things going on in that house,” Shaun recalled in an interview for this book. “I used to do a lot of my film stuff there. We’d perplex each other with our idiosyncrasies! I’d say me and him were quite similar but I’m a bit more easy-going. I would do weird things. I was doing films and things would come spilling out of my room. He just thought I was mad. And I think a lot of people thought Thom must be mad because of his music! But there was a conventional side to his character as well.”

Nevertheless, Thom was happy to collaborate with his housemates on their projects. On one occasion Thom and Shaun went to nearby Dawlish-by-the-Sea to work on another film for their art class, almost getting trapped by the rising tide. Another time Thom sang ‘10 Green Bottles’ for one of Shaun’s films. “It’s nice that he was happy to get involved with something like that,” says Shaun. “It’s not the stereotype of the intense, depressed person.

The rest of the house would regularly hear Thom working on songs downstairs and, on one occasion, Shaun and Thom wrote a song together. Thom was still experimenting and didn’t have a clear idea of what kind of music he wanted to make. Shaun says that the result was an odd hybrid of alternative, drone-rock bands like Loop or Spacemen 3 with a kind of Prince vocal on the top.

“We sat down to jam a couple of songs,” he says, “and as we were playing, he had an idea for something and I was just tuning my guitar in and out and we ended up getting something that sounded really
good. He was just singing, ‘Baby let’s grind,’ like Prince, or something.”

In his art class, Thom was experimenting, too. Towards the end of the first year, when he finally came back to class, he discovered that they’d bought a load of Apple Macs. After that he spent most of his time scanning images, playing around with bits of text. Even then he felt that many of his fellow students were dubious that what he was doing was ‘art’ at all. One exception was one of his best friends at Exeter, Dan Rickwood. He had a similarly dark sense of humour to Thom and the same preoccupations with war and disaster. Talking to Craig McLean of the
Observer
, he remembered Thom later as, “mouthy. Pissed off. Someone I could work with!” Later on, using the name Stanley Donwood, he would collaborate with Thom on almost all of Radiohead’s artwork.

“I think that my obsession with nuclear apocalypse, Ebola pandemics, global cataclysm and Radiohead’s particular brand of unsettling melody have gone together quite well,” he later quipped in an interview with
Antimusic
website. Like a lot of students, they relished the feeling of being outsiders. Thom still retained the distaste for students that he’d had at Oxford.

“I was embarrassed to be a student because of what the little fuckers got up to,” he said to
Q
. “Walking down the street to be confronted by puke and shopping trolleys and police bollards. Fucking hell. I used to think, no wonder they hate us.”

That hatred was directed directly at him on one occasion. He’d taken to wearing a long overcoat and an old man’s hat. When a group of locals mocked him, he turned and blew them a kiss and they promptly pulled sticks from their own jackets and proceeded to batter him.

To begin with, Thom had managed to steer clear of most student clichés. He drank but he wasn’t somebody who would have ten pints and then run amok with a traffic cone on his head. “He was a crap drinker!” remembers Martin. “He’d be asleep after a pint and a half. He was that kind of drinker. He wasn’t a raconteur. He wouldn’t stand there and entertain everybody. He was definitely somebody who was on the sidelines of things until he was onstage.”

Thom had some of the best times of his life at Exeter. He was asked in a magazine interview years later about the best party he’d ever been to and he remembered one occasion where he was
summoned to a kind of “happening” on a hillside outside Exeter. They were picked up at The Red Cow pub and driven to Dartmoor where, in the absence of any moon, it was almost pitch black. They then walked across the moor until they got to the edge of a deserted quarry. Then suddenly somebody switched on lights and the whole thing was illuminated. They smashed an abandoned car up and made instruments out of the pieces before crashing out in sleeping bags. Shaun, too, remembers it as being one of the highlights of their time at Exeter.

“‘Info Freako’ by Jesus Jones was a hit at the time and I recall trying to dance to it on very lumpy ground with Thom and other friends, surrounded by TV sets playing the cult film
Koyaanisqatsi
!” he remembers. “The rave was followed by some performance art around the quarry ponds and we slept in the open, huddled around bonfires.”

It was the kind of thing that Thom might have sniffed at in Oxford a couple of years before but, despite himself, he was swept up in student life for a while. At the same time, music was still far more important to him than anything else. He would take his guitar with him to parties, he was writing constantly and his songs had reached another level. He was inspired by the new direction that REM had taken with a more mainstream, classic songwriting sound.

“I really noticed the passion in his singing in the student bar when I heard him singing the REM song ‘The One I Love’, says Shaun. “The way he sang it, that’s when I realised how good his singing was. He did a really emotional performance of that with just him and his guitar.”

Despite the fact that Headless Chickens were so popular, it was becoming very clear that, as he kept practising, Thom was beginning to stand out even among his talented peer group. At the end of Thom’s first year at Exeter, Laura Forrest-Hay and Martin Brooks graduated and left the band, which carried on by recruiting a new drummer Lindsey Moore and a new bass player Andy Hills. Thom was starting to have a greater input.

“I just thought he was an incredibly talented musician,” John says. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the same room as him playing the guitar, but it’s quite an awesome experience, really. A lot of the tracks that are on [Radiohead’s debut album]
Pablo Honey
he would play at parties on acoustic guitar.”

Among other songs, he would also play ‘Stop Whispering’, a particular favourite among his peer group. But it was at Exeter that he first came up with an even later Radiohead song ‘High And Dry’. “At the time everything was flowing between all sorts of different projects and bands and things,” says John Matthias. “They were just songs. Sometimes he’d say, ‘This is a song I wrote with Jonny’, or ‘This is a song I wrote with my band at home’. We’d basically rehearse once and then do a gig at a party or a ball or something like that. Then we wouldn’t see each other for ages and then we’d rehearse in a student house and do another gig. It was very ad hoc. But, for example, we played ‘High And Dry’ in the Headless Chickens.

This caused some confusion for fans of Headless Chickens when
The Bends
came out. “When I first heard ‘High And Dry’ I loved it and thought it sounded really familiar,” says one Exeter contemporary of Thom’s, Eileen Doran, “but I thought it was just one of those songs that strike a chord straight away. Then I realised that I had heard it many times! I’ve got a video of them doing it and it’s a really interesting version. It was slightly faster and they had this black girl singing backing vocals and that added a different sound to Headless Chickens. When they did ‘High And Dry’ it had this really lovely backing vocal to it.”

Increasingly Thom believed that pop music, with its directness and endless possibilities, had a lot more to offer than the elitist world of fine art. Although he would still diligently study his English Literature texts, he wondered what he was doing in his art class. Apart from anything else he just didn’t have enough time. “That’s the amazing thing,” says Shaun. “He had his course and Headless Chickens and he was going back to Oxford to do On A Friday as well.”

He’d always known that he wasn’t a great artist technically. “He wasn’t good at drawing,” says Shaun. “He wasn’t an academic, traditional artist. He was interested in outsider art. Art done by insane people, or people who are not conventionally trained. And all that comes through in the artwork he does with Stanley Donwood. It’s ‘badly drawn’, scratchy stuff but it’s wonderful. He was just interested in his own style. He was one of the few people who started to use computers in his art.”

“They told me I couldn’t draw at art college,” Thom said to
Q
.
“At least I’m honest about it. My whole argument at art college was, ‘What’s the fucking point in painting or drawing this thing in this way when I can go and buy a camera for two quid and do it like that? Why should I bother drawing it?’ I could never quite work out how I blagged my way into art college anyway.”

Although he’d always had a strong sense of self, and of where he was going, at Exeter Thom’s ideas about the world crystallised. He became disillusioned with the art scene, seeing it as an elitist, phoney playground for pseuds and their rich backers.

“I did a few things on computer,” he said. “But I spent most of the time bragging about my future as a pop star.”

This is no exaggeration.

“With Thom it was literally, ‘What are you going to do when you leave?’ ‘I’m going to be a rock star’,” says Martin. “That’s an actual quote. I remember people asking him that and it was almost a standing joke, ‘Oh, I wonder what Thom’s going to be then.’”

Laura remembers that too, above everything else about Thom Yorke. “He was absolutely convinced, without any doubt whatsoever, that he was going to be a rock star,” she says. “There was no question about it. He was studying art and a lot of people who were studying art would have been looking to that as a career of some sort. But I remember us all talking one night about what we wanted to do after university and Martin, I think, was into politics and various people had other ambitions and Thom just said, ‘I’m going to be a rock star’, and I thought, ‘Yeah, right!’ Looking back now he was completely focused on it and there was no suggestion that he was going to do anything else.”

To people outside the band, this claim was starting to look more and more plausible. Eileen says that Thom always had something different about him. “It sounds like the sort of thing you say in hindsight,” she says, “but one thing I really remember is that when we saw Thom onstage, we all thought he
was
destined to be a rock star. He just looked completely in his element. He was onstage with a few people who were talented. Him and Shack were joint lead singers and Shack went on to have lots of success as well, but there was something about Thom’s presence onstage where he just came alive. He looked like he was in the right place. We used to say, almost laughing, how ‘at home’ he was onstage. We used to say, ‘He’s going to be a rock star’. He just looked like a rock star. But we
had no idea that he’d be in this amazing band and go on to the level of success he’s had.”

“I think it’s one of the most impressive things about his achievement,” says Shaun McCrindle, “that he knew he’d be doing what he did. He knew he was destined for it all the time he was there. In the house you couldn’t get away from the music. When we used to go out to parties it was like, ‘Oh, no, he’s getting his guitar out again!’ It sounds funny now. He wasn’t playing Radiohead classics but he was obviously honing his craft.”

“When I heard of the success of Radiohead, I was thrilled for him but I was also surprised,” says Laura. “I’d not dismissed him but I’d not taken him seriously. A few of us were doing things like that and there was a lot of talk and I was surprised it had gone so well. I always laugh at myself because I didn’t take him seriously, when he obviously took himself very seriously. I always think,
Who’s
laughing now?
with me scoffing and going, ‘Thom’s saying he’s going to be a big rock star! Give us a break!’ The egg’s on me. But I’m absolutely thrilled because he deserved it. There were so many others talking about stuff but he actually did it and it’s fantastic.”

Ironically, at the time, Thom was probably even more acclaimed for his sideline. He had a job as a DJ at Exeter University’s main bar, the Lemon Grove. He would play a night of mostly guitar-based music called ‘Shindig’ on Friday evenings, while, on another night Felix Buxton, who would go on to be half of hugely successful duo Basement Jaxx, would play dance music. Thanks to the burgeoning rave and clubbing scene, DJs were now given considerable respect. The days of the middle-aged 1980s DJ with the flashing set of traffic lights and one bag of records were over. He would be bought drinks all night until, by the time the club was closing, he was so drunk he could barely put the records on the turntable. But, despite this, it was a career that would be surprisingly successful.

“When we were first at Exeter, the Lemon Grove wasn’t a place you particularly wanted to go to,” says Eileen Doran. “But when Thom DJ-ed it was really popular.” When he started, there were only about 250 people and he just played the relatively limited selection of tunes he had in his own collection. This was only about twenty albums and a few singles. Then, as it became more popular and he played every week, he realised that people were very quickly going
to get bored. He borrowed £250 from the bank and went record shopping. It was probably one of his shrewdest investments. A few months later there were about 1,000 people at the Lemon Grove and he was making a significant amount of money for a student.

Yet his set wasn’t the selection of Joy Division or elitist art-rock bands that you might expect. Eileen remembers him regularly playing ‘Push It’ by Salt-N-Pepa. He had a knack for knowing what people wanted to hear and an innate populism which would mean that, years later, even when he was going as far ‘out-there’ as possible, there would always be a part of his music that was unashamedly pop, even when he didn’t necessarily want it to be.