Thom Yorke Read Online Free PDF Page A

American act called the Miracle Legion. He and his brother Andy were obsessed with them and their singer Mark Mulcahy. Miracle Legion were similar to REM but with a darker, more intense sound. Thom wanted his own music to have the same emotional feel but he wasn’t quite sure how to find it. The result was an incredibly prolific burst of songwriting that he’d still be drawing from years later.
    “They just stuck with it,” says Nigel Powell. “Everybody else was shooting about going, ‘I’ll try this, I’ll try that, I’ll do the other’, whereas even though these extra people, like the saxophonists, came and went, the core of the band were just there plugging away going, ‘Let’s try new things’. Even when the band weren’t playing very often, Jonny and Thom would borrow the school four-track and go and demo stuff in Jonny’s bedroom, using drum loops and Soul II Soul [style] loops and throwing stuff over the top of them. They seemed to be able to forge ahead better than a lot of people.”
    Perhaps they could have made it then, in 1988 or 1989. Things could have been very different. But they weren’t rock ’n’ roll outlaws with no option but to play music or starve. They’d had expensive educations and there was a lot of pressure on them to make good use of that. They had a foretaste of what would happen when Phil disappeared off to Liverpool University to study English. The following year Colin, Thom and Ed also had to make a decision about what they were going to do next. Colin had a promising academic career ahead of him. He got top grades at A-Level and went to Cambridge University to study English, while Ed had gone to Liverpool to study politics. Thom was reluctant to follow them. He was starting to form an impressive songwriting partnership with Jonny (who was still at school). He also had a slightly tortuous and intense relationship that he didn’t seem to be able to get out of. (“Have you ever seen Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf ? It was like that for a year and a half,” he said to Melody Maker , “lots of fighting in public”.)
    He deferred his place at university and spent a gap year doing unrewarding jobs while continually writing songs and recording demos with Jonny. One of his jobs was at a clothes store selling suits. When his boss asked him why he hadn’t managed to sell any he replied, “because they’re crap and no one wants to buy them.”
    This kind of honesty wasn’t going to get him anywhere in sales. His boss took over the role of his designated hate-figure, a replacement for Abingdon’s much-loathed headmaster. The day he handed in his notice, after wrongly being accused of stealing some stock, was a great moment but Thom was uncharacteristically restrained. “I wish I’d told my boss to fuck off,” he said later. “He had this twisted little mouth and you could tell that he was desperate to make everybody’s life hell.”
    Still, it was a frustrating year. The band could only rehearse and play very occasionally. After leaving the shop, Thom – with characteristic perversity – got a job at a mental hospital as an orderly. He still hated hospitals as a result of his childhood memories and now his experiences dealing with people who had severe problems shocked him. He was particularly amazed when many of them were released.
    “I used to work in a mental hospital around the time the Government was getting passionate about care in the community,” he said in an interview with The Times in the late 1990s, “and everyone just knew what was going to happen. It was one of the scariest things that ever happened in this country, because a lot of them weren’t harmless.”
    After another job working in a bar, Thom eventually headed off to Exeter University to study English Literature and Art. In some ways it was another perverse choice. He claimed to despise the spoiled rich kids he saw in Oxford but Exeter University, at that time, was known as the place where