Earlier this month, on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” the host asked Radiohead’s Thom Yorke: “For decades, you’ve been writing music that is uneasy and anxious with regards to society, our government, technology — the general direction of the world. How does it feel to be right?” (It’s cold comfort, Yorke acknowledged.) But more impressive than any soothsaying — to me, anyway — is how, given Yorke’s continued exploration of such dark themes, the singer has never let his music curdle into hopelessness or simple finger-pointing, always moving gracefully forward, including on “Anima,” his recent solo album. “I’m always inspired by finding music that turns me on,” Yorke says. “If you love music, you’re looking for that hit all the time.”
Over the years, you’ve never shied away from putting politics into your music,1 which isn’t something that, as far as I can tell, younger popular musicians are doing a ton of these days. But you’ve also never been shy about writing songs that have to do with feelings of personal anxiety and alienation, which is something younger musicians are doing. Why has one mode of expression become common and the other not? Ten, 15, 20 years ago, there was a sense that saying political stuff in lyrics or talking about it in magazines had some significance. Now if you stray to the political, you get lost in a fast-moving stream, and if you stay within the realm of the personal, you feel insignificant. Art’s ability to engage in any significant way has changed. There’s a sense of paralysis when you watch this theater of the absurd going on, politically speaking, and it doesn’t seem as if you can put your soul into that theater, because that theater has no soul. The subversion of truth and reality that we’re witnessing at the moment means that it would be dangerous for art to engage in them. It’s [expletive] up.
So you’re saying that the aesthetic turn inward is reactive? Maybe. A sense of insignificance can mean that you turn inward. There is anger out there, and it’s waiting to find a good place in art; the anger of witnessing this theater of the absurd and seeing where it came from and why it exists and where it’s going and where it’ll end. Something else is going to happen. Hopefully something significant. There’s a lot that needs to be done to repair this damage.
Can music play a role in that? Yeah. The repair has to be about empathizing rather than about being pitted against each other in a false way, and music can do that. It gives people the chance to experience coming together for a reason that is not factional. Good music has always been a form of rebellion, whether it’s the Beatles or Public Enemy. All good artists have that element. In order to change things, or in order to form any resistance, people need a language in which to express it, and that can be music, art, literature, journalism.
Aside from any possible inward turns of their own, do you have a sense of whether there’s something different about the nature of contemporary music fans’ relationship with music in the era of streaming? No, I don’t think so. My objections to streaming are well documented.2 I wouldn’t want to go into that. But if you ignore the fact that the artists aren’t being paid and are having their careers destroyed, people’s having access to all this music could be a wonderful thing.
Did you learn anything from the “In Rainbows” experiment3 that shaped how you think about the business of streaming music? When we did the “In Rainbows” thing, we were simply saying that we believe that people value music. We were saying, “This is a contract of faith between the people creating the music and the audience, and we don’t believe it’s necessary for all this stuff to be between the two.” We were also saying that people are always going to need music, and it’s not just material to fill the hard disk on your phone. It’s more than that. Even now, when Radiohead’s music is getting more and more weird, we’re still seeing people have profound experiences with it. And absolutely our faith in all that was rewarded.
What we’re talking about is the ultimate value of music. How do you define that value beyond the most simplistic terms of what someone is willing to pay for it? The value is in the way you encounter music. It was going to a record shop with someone who you think is cool and trying to be as cool as them while they talked about the latest Red Lorry Yellow Lorry4 record. It’s being around a friend’s house and putting on a record and talking about it with them. It’s having a girlfriend who’s constantly playing the Velvet Underground, and eventually you believe it’s great, too. The pleasure of discovering stuff like that is why music is so valuable. I guess we’re lucky that there are so many ways to discover music now, but at the same time I feel that “If you like this, you’ll love this” or “share this” is commodifying a deeply personal human experience between people. That experience is why music matters, because the experience stays with you forever.
Aren’t people are still having those experiences? No, no, I agree. My problem with it is the way it’s commodified, the way all our behavior is commodified and sold as false gold.
Looking at the other side of musician-listener relationship, I’ve always been curious about whether musicians at your level of popularity can conceive of their audience as anything more than an indistinct mass. Is it even possible to think of your fans as a collection of individuals? It’s an interesting thing not touring as Radiohead.5 We started out doing small shows and then meeting people afterward. It has been good for me getting out of the bubble and understanding how, for some people, the work that I’ve done is important. It’s eye-opening. I try to live a normal life and go about my day, and then when you meet someone and they want to shake your hand and tell some story about the music, it’s good. I needed a slap around the face.
Why? I don’t understand. I just wasn’t exposed to fans that way. Deliberately, because it’s weird. Nigel Godrich6 always laughs at me. In his mind it’s amusing that I retain only a dim awareness of how people see the music that I’ve done or Radiohead has done. I’ll walk into these situations, and I’m surprised. “Why do these people want to speak to me?” I definitely handle it better than I did 20 years ago. A lot of that I would put down to my partner, Dajana.7 She’s from Italy, and we spend time there, where I’m pretty well known. Walking the streets of Rome, I’ll get a lot of people coming up to me. The hipster areas of Rome I literally can’t go to. But Dajana was like: “You don’t need to push people off. Pause for a minute and see what happens.” She taught me not to be so sniffy about the attention.
There’s something unique about the intensity of the connection between musicians and their fans. I don’t think it’s the same with actors or writers. Yeah, I know.
And unless you were prone to delusions of grandeur, that attention must be so disorienting. How do you reorient yourself in such a way so that you don’t wind up alienated from the people who love your music? Initially I couldn’t get my head around it. I couldn’t get used to the fact that people would follow you. People you didn’t know would talk to you in a strange way or ask things of you. I’m not complaining. I just found myself going into this reflex of “You can’t invade my privacy.” I still struggle with that. But I try not to have that negative reflex. Then there’s the thing of the public Thom Yorke and the one at home. I used to pretend they were separate, but that started to do my head in. This is very difficult to describe, because it sounds completely self-indulgent, but it’s about embracing the attention rather than pretending it’s something that happens somewhere over there. It’s much healthier this way. Not that it isn’t still weird.
Did you have ways of tricking yourself into believing your private and public selves were separate? When I wasn’t working, when I was at home, I tried to pretend that everything was normal. I didn’t want to get sucked into a hall of mirrors, and a way to do that was to walk away. I got a little extreme about it. I’d disappear, walk on the cliffs for months. I went too much the other way, and then when you walk back into that world of attention it’s a huge shock. And I had impostor syndrome. For a long time my life was about being extremely self-critical and overthinking everything as a way of trying not to fall off the perch. It’s partially cultural. We grew up in a British culture of “If you’ve made it, then you’ve cheated.” There was all of that. Then you come to terms with everything in a good way with a fake smile, which was necessary to do. Or go mad.
It is clear to me that you’re comfortable with yourself now in a way that you didn’t used to be. It’s there in your music, which is more emotionally plain-spoken than it was before. And physically you’re now so at ease onstage. Even the way you dress and look is looser. What I’m really asking is how the tortured guy from “Meeting People Is Easy”8 became a guy wearing his hair in a man bun?How did that uptight, catatonic guy change? Wow. One side of it is that the shows that I’m doing now, because there’s no band, I’d started wandering around the stage, and it has become a theatrical thing. What was fun about it — and I started doing this in Radiohead shows as well — was messing around with the idea of being the rock star or the uptight “Meeting People Is Easy” guy. I can choose to do something completely different and be stupid or jump around. The other aspect is, at some point around “Meeting People Is Easy” and for a few years after, I was still angry about public attention. I had to let go of the steering wheel. I can’t explain why, but it was a revelation to not take it so seriously. It was either that or stop, because my relationship to work was becoming unhealthy. You get to a point where if you’re choosing to spend your time away from your family, it has to be worth it, and it’s only worth it if you’re really getting something from it. You have to claim it for yourself and understand why you love it.
So why do you? I didn’t find a why. I just fell back in love with it. It was gradual. I mean, the last time we went out with Radiohead, we did three shows at Madison Square Garden, different sets every night, and that was my favorite touring experience in years. You’d have to be a bloody idiot not to have the humility to go, “I can’t believe that I get to do this.”
This is maybe a heavy thing to bring up: There was a tragedy that happened in your life relatively recently. Certainly was.9
In my life, too, I have just had something awful happen, and I feel as if, among a million sad things, what happened diminished my relationship with music. I used to fully believe, probably naïvely, that music could adequately address any emotional holes in my life, and now that belief seems totally false. And when I was thinking about your situation, I was wondering if what happened had an effect on your feelings about the limits of what music can do for us when something terrible happens. I realize this is a selfish line of questioning. No, no. It’s all right. It was difficult to work after what happened. God bless Nigel and the others for gently pushing me to keep working. If I’d stopped and lost my relationship to anything musical, I really would have lost my [expletive], because I’ve always had that cathartic thing with music. Even though in moments of high stress it’s very difficult to connect with music in that cathartic way, what I found was that you do connect. You end up being surprised by music. It catches you unawares. It’s true that you can go through traumatic emotions, and your emotions can become dulled. Your way that you relate to the world becomes difficult. You go into a sort of paralysis. But because I kept working, because I kept listening to music, I never felt that paralysis. I do understand what you’re saying, though.
I think I always felt that art and life were basically indistinguishable, and now there’s a gap there. Keep looking. Music can handle extreme reactions. If it’s needed, it will find you. Just keep looking.
I will. I’ll try. I have no good segue into the next question, so I’ll just ask it: What does progress look like to you at this point? It’s obvious that Radiohead has had concrete ideas about how to move forward, whether it was musically with “Kid A”10 or businesswise with “In Rainbows.” But that’s my reading of your career. What does moving forward in a satisfying way look like to Thom Yorke? This idea of progression is not really progression. Instead, it’s the constant dance into a new area that you find stimulating. It’s finding an old Sicilian folk singer11 or bits of Terry Riley’s music that you didn’t know about or listening to the Idles and being influenced by all that. Then there’s progression in terms of technical things. Forcing yourself to find new methods of coming up with chord progressions or melodic ideas, finding a new piece of software or hardware that’s exciting. You want to feel as if once you’ve developed a method it should no longer work, because when you tell yourself, “O.K., I’ve got this now” that’s the point where things fall apart. Lyrically, it’s a different thing. I usually have to throw out the stuff when I understand what it means — it’s too flat. Lyrics should be a series of windows opening rather than shutting, which is incredibly hard to do. First-world problems, though.
Are there aspects of your music that people miss? I think there’s an element of humor to Radiohead that people rarely mention. Absolutely. Even in the darkest parts there is, I hope, some humor. The artwork also represents a sense of humor. I’ve been going through the artwork that we did for “Kid A” recently, and we were angry, reacting to what happened with “OK Computer”12 and determined to counter every positive element of anything that happened with extreme sarcasm. We used to communicate by fax, and I’ve been going through those, and the faxes are scathing about everything, but funny as well, because we knew our reaction was indulgent nonsense.
Why would you have wanted to counter the positive things that arose out of “OK Computer?” What was so bad? That’s a good question. I was fighting my own cynicism about the work. That was a manifestation of feeling that I didn’t particularly deserve the level of attention that I was getting, not feeling as if what we were doing was that special. It was special to us, but it’s one thing to talk of it meaning a lot to you, and it’s another thing to realize that it means maybe even more to other people. That’s kind of strange. That tied me up in weird knots, and I was feeling as if the only way to get past that was to blow it up.
Looking back at “Kid A,” was the idea that it represented a radical break from Radiohead’s previous music a little overblown? I get that we hear that album now in a wider continuum of the band’s music, but listening to “Kid A” today, it’s like: “What’s the big deal, there are drum machines on a few songs. It still sounds like Radiohead.” Wow, it’s a drum machine! Wow, it’s a vocoder! I didn’t think “Kid A” was a huge departure. Standing in a room and playing distortion on your guitars or whatever wasn’t interesting in the same way, but I felt as if our aesthetic went from one style to the other really obviously. I was surprised at the reaction. It was quite alarming. The British press, as usual, was absolutely vicious.
Were they? Maybe the American press reaction was different, but I remember that album getting a lot of praise. It was as if we were Judas. In a weird way it fired us up. I saw footage of us playing one of the early “Kid A” shows in the tents that we used for live shows at that time. Yeah, we went around in a tent in the autumn — genius. It was freezing cold and the sound was terrible. We put everything up against us but came out fighting. We played a 10-minute version of “The National Anthem,” and it’s completely insane. You can tell we felt as if everyone was turning on us. But we were like, “No, we’re going to stand our ground.” Which is exactly what we decided to do.
This next question might sound skeptical, but I don’t mean it that way. What keeps you wanting to go back to Radiohead? 34 years together is a long time. We’ve been playing together since we were 16, 17. You have telepathic vibes. You’ll never find that anywhere else. Obvious, but true. That familiarity is a good thing, and it can be a bad thing some days.
How? Because as with a family, you form habits. The challenge is to try and break them, and that’s not easy. Any musician draws upon what they’ve known before. It takes a lot of work to move to something different. If you work with the same people for many, many years, you’re constantly coming up against that.
Does the relationship you’ve built with your fans — and I know Radiohead’s are famously devoted — factor into the band’s continued existence? I can imagine wanting to stick together just to honor that connection. If that’s the only reason you would do it, then it wouldn’t be enough. People come and watch our shows, and they know when we’re not feeling it. And that’s good, because if we didn’t feel it, there’d be no point. If we don’t feel it, we can’t fake it. People can see right through us.
David Marchese is a staff writer and the Talk columnist for the magazine.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.
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