talk radio: interview with Thom Yorke,
following Radiohead's showcase gig in NY, june 1996.
Taken from the book «Green Plastic Watering Can».
scan and translation by qwerrie
So how are you feeling?
We just wanna go home. It's been a difficult few weeks. But, at the same time, we're quite elated really. It's stimulating. It's been a period of big ups and downs and a real test of our convictions.
What have been the low points?
Being ill and being nice to people really. I'm not very good at that. If people give me enough booze, I'm usually all right.
You must be keen to push the LP as far as it will go here.
The temptation there is just to keep going, but that would be at the expense of whatever might happen when we stopped. All you're doing is prolonging the eventual... comedown or shipwreck. I'd like to have a life really. We did a similar thing with the first album, toured until we were complete vegetables. There's no point in doing that again, the damage would be obvious.
But surely the band is your life, touring is your life. You don't need another.
That's not true because what the fuck are you gonna write about?
You see life, you meet people, you could write hotel-room songs, the sense of alienation would be the same.
Being a touring band and being good at it is not everything to me. It's a jjob, you know? I'm much more into the idea of recording. I admire Oasis for sticking to it, but we did that with 'Creep' and in the end it did us nothing but damage. It took us a good year and a half to get where we are now, to be able to emotionally cope with it. We're wimps basically... The thing that kept us going was the elation of people's responses, then it's not difficult going out and enjoying it and listening to each other play. But then the work sort of exploded and everything opened up. we started writing a lot more and it started making more sense. There wasn't this Everything's Gonna Fall Apart feeling all the time. That's why it's important for us to go with that.
The fear of not amounting to anything was a factor then.
Yeah, and I don't have that anymore. It's been embarrassingly well-received. We could really start loving it. the best thing to do is to stay guiet, especially back home. I'm not really into people coming round to my house, knocking on my door, just to look at me.
You sound much more confident than you were before.
I just feel more confident about my work. and I think we have the confidence not to tear each other apart and tear everything we do apart before we've even done it, which is what used to happen, then you go into paroxysms of fear and self-loathing and everything gets very boring. I don't think I've particularly lightened up or anything, but I know I have found a path I wanna go down. It's very uplifting for me. That's why I'm trying to avoid the press. The confidence side is so important to me because I'm not a particularly confident person. I just don't want to expose us to it because it could destroy us.
Are you suspicious of the press?
I don't read any of that stuff and, besides, I don't think my life isintriguing enough and what we do doesn't interest them enough, we're not a pop band in the same way that Pulp are. I'm not going to do talk shows, I'm not a personality.
Do you think you have an affinity in this with Michael Stipe?
I admire the way he dealt with that whole period of his life around 'Automatic For The People', with the AIDS rumours. He just wasn't gonna answer and they did give up eventually. Elvis Costello was the same. He just walked away fromit all. If you loveit so much then you're asking for trouble.
Don't you see the commercial appeal of the talk show thing?
I can't. Radiohead are just not into that talk show mindset, wanting to be personalities. We're no good at it. The most important thing in our lives is trying to maintain enough control for us to carry on being creative.
Your last tour was pretty massive. Why would anyone want to get to that level?
I didn't before but, having seen U2 and REM, there is still something you can offer in that situation. You just have to rewrite the way you feel about it. The thing that worries me more than anything else is making a record that lives up to all this hype. We've only just learnt to do this. REM and U2 and Costello have been around a lot longer. And I think it's a dangerous thing to be locked 100% into the mentality where we can be that sort of band.
How is the writing going for the next album?
I'm writing a lot more on tour, but your mind is going round at a different speed so there's no way of judging it. You just take your notes and tapes home. That's the nature of any creative process. There's always that liberating thing of spending, say, a week on something and then throwing it away.
Do you think about how your fans might connect to it?
I'm just writing a lot of gibberish. It's sort of like a curse that people listen to my voice and think that everything I sing is important. I find it highly amusing. Same with Scott Walker. If you wrote the words down they'd sound really silly.
True. You can hear the words to 'Fake Plastic Trees' very clearly, but still have no idea what they're about.
Yeah, me too. For me it wasn't about any of the words that I wrote but about the melody. The words were treated very much as noise, except perhaps the last verse which means something to me. The rest is gibberish, not relevant.
How do you feel about that burn-out idea, where you become a moth pushed into the flames?
I sort of thought that was happening last year. That gig in Germany, named 'Thom's temper tantrum' by the NME, I was supposed to have gone off in a huff. In actual fact I'd been ill. This quack doctor gave me all these drugs and told me I'd be fine. I did freak out but everyone was really supportive. I don't think people have any interest in me personally burning myself up. And, for myself, I'm very anti the whole emoting thing, you know. I just have my eyes shut, don't move or do anything. I'm not driven all the time, I can't possibly be driven all the time, and it feels really good to just stand there, just walk up and look out the front.
Thinking about the Culture Of Despair, do you ever wonder if you might be a bad influence on some people?
Any artist who worries about their audience and how their audience is going to react is stuffed. Yeah, people accuse us of being maudlin and depressing and so on, but the people who come to the shows get the point that it's not about that. It's about the music transcending how depressed I was when I wrote it. But to the parents, yeah. It's like Joy Division.
Do you get difficult letters from fans?
I don't actually get many letters like that at all. I'm quite surprised. It happened around the 'Creep' thing because of what was projected around it, none of which was our responsibility. That was what they picked up on. The letters aren't exactly funnels of joy.
Do you ever feel isolated?
It must be strange being cosseted, driven in limos from hotels to airports to hotels. I always feel like that when I go to LA. People generally get the message that we don't want to be looked after, but that's probably me kidding myself. I get more disturbed by the idea that I'm moving round the world so fast and everything is going by like flashes before your eye. You know that point where you're about to die, where your whole life is flashing before your eyes? I seem to get that a lot.
What's your worst fear for the band?
Making a crap record.
Turning into a bad stadium act might be worse.
I don't think that's in us. I'd much rather stay at home and do an album at the bottom of the garden and not tour. Like Tom Waits.
But isn't it all part of the process. You stay in big hotels, you play in huge stadiums, you get complacent...
That's why the most important thing in my life at the moment is establishing something outside of this. It's almost like a frantic desperation thing. At Christmas I tried to do it by shopping, by spending money on household appliances, taking them home and presenting them to my girlfriend and the other girl who lives in the house and saying 'Here you go'. The house is scattered with stuff, in boxes mostly, that I bought to try and claim my life back.
Does it feel weird being recognised in shops?
I'm a compulsive shopper anyway. Oxford's good for that, they don't really bother you. I don't think I'm seen as a particularly approachable person even by Radiohead fans. I've got that sort of face. This guy two days ago came up and said 'Hey! You're that guy from Radiohead' and I didn't sort of say anything and he went 'Hey! You're a rude fucker'. At home I really enjoy denying who I am, I do it on a regular basis. The look of confusion on people's faces is nice. I do seem to expend a lot of energy and time trying to avoid the issue when I get home.
What about the next album?
I have every intention of the next record being a grateful record. I don't give a fuck, it won't be in any way less valid. It will be a grateful record. I could fall into the trap of thinking 'Oh my God, I've got to supply another maudlin one' but the way that we're writing and the way that it's happening and the way that we feel when we play together is about release and it's grateful and it'll hopefully be good because of that. We're not trying to prove anything and I think that's a good thing for Radiohead.
