Thom Yorke Read Online Free PDF

middle-class kids who weren’t clever enough to get into Oxford or Cambridge went to create a similarly cloistered environment. It was a fairly long way from Oxford but socially it wasn’t a giant leap. It was the same thing on a smaller, less intimidating scale.
    Nevertheless, it had its advantages. At a place like Exeter it was much easier to be seen as ‘alternative’. And when he got there Thom found that although there weren’t many people who shared his tastes, those who did formed a much more solid bond than they might have done elsewhere. Also, when he arrived in 1988, being ‘alternative’ was suddenly about to become fashionable and much more mainstream.
    Just like a young couple heading off to different universities, the rest of the band must have wondered whether their relationship would survive. What would happen, say, if one of them met somebody else?

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HEADLESS CHICKENS
    One of the first people Thom saw when he got to Exeter University was Martin Brooks, whom he’d first met at the National Youth Music Camp several years before. It was in the main hall during Freshers’ Week, or ‘Freshers’ Squash’ as they called it at Exeter. Martin was sitting at one of the stalls when he saw the unmistakable figure of Thom Yorke walking into the room.
    “I used to run the University magazine,” Martin explained to me. “And I was trying to get new people to write [for it]. I saw him over the other side of the room and remembered him and went, ‘Thom!’”
    Thom had a long blonde bob at the time. He was looking at the floor with his usual air of not wanting to talk to anybody and yet unmistakably wanting to be noticed. Nevertheless when he realised that there was somebody at university that he already knew, Thom was undoubtedly relieved. After his experiences at Abingdon, coming to another institution was an intimidating prospect.
    “He was quite dweeby in that he’d walk into a room and be very shy about talking to anybody,” says Martin. “He’d just look into his fringe and was generally quite shy but he had this self-concept about being a rock star. When you’re at university everybody carries their guitar around all the time with that, ‘I’m gonna be someone’ thing. And often it was the ones who were like, ‘No, I really am’ who you knew absolutely never would. He wasn’t quite a joke in the, ‘I’m going to be a rock star’, sense but you didn’t need to ask him what his future was going to be because he was very clear.”
    But, beneath his self-conscious ‘rock star’ persona, Martin found that Thom was still the same person he’d been at camp. “My main recollections from that time,” he says, “are that he was a very nice bloke, right from the start, very friendly and keen to be nice.” Martin was in his second year. The previous year he’d been in a band with another student, an old school friend called Simon ‘Shack’ Shackleton. They’d played covers but were planning on starting a new group to play original songs. Shack would sing and play bassand Martin could play drums so they still needed a guitarist. Thom was the obvious choice. “I knew that he could play guitar and I knew he had some attitude and he looked good,” Martin says.
    At this point, the band had the ridiculously ‘studenty’ name of ‘Git’. Despite this, Thom readily agreed to join. His university life couldn’t have had a better start. It was far removed from his experiences at school, particularly in the art department where being moody and creative was the norm. Thom quickly made far more friends than he ever had at school. He was still self-consciously “different” but at university so were lots of other people. His desire to make a statement no longer seemed unusual.
    “I love that sensation when you walk into a room and everyone looks at you twice,” he admitted to Andrew Collins in Select magazine later. “That’s great. Pure vanity, you’re there for effect. When I went to