Thom Yorke

Thom Yorke [5'5"] and much taller photog

Been a Radiohead fan since day one. Despite the odds at the time. I was big into punk in high school, and “Creep” was in heavy rotation on that much-hated (but secretly watched) bastion of corporate rock, MTV.

I liked it. Sort of in an ironic, tongue-in-cheek way. But I liked it. It had a certain I-don't-know-what. My good friend Corey went so far as to dub that single over and over again on both sides of a 60-minute cassette. Half ironic, half serious. I think Side B was the ironic side.

Another friend and I spent a lot of time trying to find another halfway decent song off of Pablo Honey to play on our show at the local college's radio station (that broadcast from a puny 10-watt tower). Pretty hard to do. “Anyone Can Play Guitar” was the closest contender, but it paled. One-hit-wonders...



And then freshman year of college: The Bends. All the potential in that first single was fully realized -- and then some. It’s still my favorite album.

Saw them live with my new girlfriend at the Worcester Centrum, April 15, 1997. Spiritualized opened. Radiohead played most of their new album OK Computer, but the best thing I've ever heard them do was the OK Computerization of a lot of Bends songs.

I snagged a UK work visa after college and headed to Oxford, England, with my friend from the radio show. Kid A had just come out. I didn’t mind that they’d traded mind-bending riffage and smart lyrics for repetitive bloops and garbled haikus. The ghostly monotony was a great soundtrack to the barren, wintry English landscape I watched pass by the windows on many bus trips through the Oxfordshire countryside.

While I was over there, my roommate and I saw a few shows at a club around the corner from our flat  – The Fall, The Soft Boys. The club was called The Zodiac. Unbeknownst to me at the time, it’s where they shot the video for “Creep.”

Amnesiac seemed like an collection of Kid A outtakes. It just didn’t go anyplace new. But I caught them live again when I returned home to the states. Big racetrack in Rhode Island. The live treatment – droning, extended jams, a lot of tambourine, Thom shaking his ass – and suddenly it clicked. Radiohead was now a hippie band for the 21st century. Not sayin' that's a bad thing.

After that, I lost interest. The last few albums have been OK, nothing more. And I’ve tired of their themes (the banality/horror of modern life/love).

But I still break out The Bends every now and then. And man, what a voice that guy has, huh?