Thom Yorke

Thom Yorke
Thom Yorke in concert at Brixton.
Background information
Birth name	Thomas Edward Yorke
Born	7 October 1968 (1968-10-07) (age 41) Wellingborough, Northamptonshire
Genre(s)	Alternative rock Electronic music
Occupation(s)	Musician
Instrument(s)	Vocals Guitar Piano Keyboards Percussion Bass Guitar
Years active	1991—present
Label(s)	XL
Associated acts	Radiohead

Thomas Edward Yorke (born 7 October 1968) is an English musician who is the lead singer and principal songwriter of the alternative rock group Radiohead. As a singer, Yorke is recognisable by his distinctive tenor voice, vibrato, frequent use of falsetto and ability to reach, and sustain, high notes. He mainly plays guitar and piano, but he has also played drums and bass guitar (notably during the Kid A and Amnesiac sessions). In 2006 he released his debut album, The Eraser, in July 2006, which was heavily influenced by electronic music. In 2005, Yorke was voted alongside the likes of Freddie Mercury, Bono, David Bowie and Bruce Springsteen as one of the greatest voices in the history of popular music in MTV's "22 Greatest Voices in Music."^[1] He was also featured in Rolling Stone magazine's "100 Greatest Singers of all Time."^[2]

Biography

Early years

Yorke was born on 7 October 1968 in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire. At birth, his left eye was fixed shut; the doctors determined that the eye was paralyzed and that the condition was permanent. Yorke's parents took him to an eye specialist, who suggested a muscle graft. Yorke underwent five eye surgeries before he was six years old.^[3] Yorke's father, chemical equipment salesman, was hired by a firm in Scotland shortly afer his son's birth; the family lived there until Yorke was seven. During this time Yorke had to wear a patch over his eye.^[4] He has stated that the last surgery was "botched", giving him a drooping eyelid.^[5]

Yorke's family moved frequently; Yorke would move from school to school, where classmates teased him because of his eye problems.^[6] The family finally settled in Oxfordshire in 1978.^[7] Yorke received his first guitar when he was seven, inspired by a televised performance of Queen guitarist Brian May.^[5] By age eleven he had joined his first band and written his first song.^[8] He attended the all boys public school Abingdon where he met Ed O'Brien, Phil Selway, Colin Greenwood and Colin's younger brother, Jonny Greenwood.^[9] Yorke and his friends formed a band named On A Friday, as Friday was the only day on which the members were allowed to rehearse.^[5] Yorke, in this early line up, played guitar and provided vocals, and was already developing his songwriting and lyrical skills. Yorke, speaking about music's influence on him as a schoolboy, said, "School was bearable for me because the music department was separate from the rest of the school. It had pianos in tiny booths, and I used to spend a lot of time hanging around there after school."^[10]

After graduation, Yorke postponed going to college for a year. During that time he worked a few jobs and was involved in a car accident that made him wary of any kind of mechanized transport.^[11] Yorke left Oxford to study at the University of Exeter in late 1988, which as a result put On a Friday on hiatus aside from holiday break rehearsals.^[12] While at Exeter, Yorke worked as a DJ at Guild nights in the Lemon Grove and played briefly with the band Headless Chickens.^[13] Yorke also met Rachel Owen, whom he began dating.^[14]

Radiohead

Main article: Radiohead

On A Friday resumed activity in 1991 as the members were finishing their degree courses. Now relocated to Oxford, they signed to Parlophone and changed their name to Radiohead. Radiohead first gained notice with the worldwide hit single "Creep". The song appeared on the band's 1993 debut album Pablo Honey, which received mixed reviews. Yorke, coming to resent the way "Creep" had overshadowed their career, described the band's feeling toward it in the lyrics of "My Iron Lung", which appeared on their second album, The Bends, in 1995. By this time the band, through frequent touring and greater attention to detail in the recording studio, had picked up a large cult fan base and had begun to receive wider critical acclaim. Radiohead charted their first top 5 single in the UK with "Street Spirit (Fade Out)" in late 1995.

The band's third effort, 1997's OK Computer, was heralded as a landmark album by nearly every publication that reviewed it, establishing Radiohead as one of the leading rock/alternative acts of the 1990s. But Yorke was ambivalent about this success. Some of these concerns were voiced in the documentary film Meeting People Is Easy, which focused on the period. Yorke has explained in various interviews that he dislikes the "mythology" within the rock genre, and hates the media's obsession with celebrities.^[15]

Yorke and the band adopted a more radical approach on 2000's Kid A and 2001's Amnesiac, processing vocals, obscuring lyrics, and departing from rock for a more varied musical landscape including electronic, jazz and avant-garde classical influences. Expanding Radiohead's sales while earning acclaim for experimentation, the albums also divided fans and critics. In 2003, Radiohead released their sixth album, Hail to the Thief, a blend of rock and electronica that Yorke described as a reaction to the events of the early 2000s and newfound fears for his children's future, though he denied a specific political intent. The band has continued to tour, and in 2005 they undertook recording sessions for a seventh album, In Rainbows, released as a digital DRM-free download on 10 October 2007. The album was well received, with many critics noting that Yorke's songwriting felt more personal, and when later released in stores, In Rainbows had Radiohead's best sales since Kid A.

Solo work

Yorke his solo album released The Eraser in 2006. Produced by Nigel Godrich and featuring cover art by Stanley Donwood, it was released on the independent label XL Recordings. Yorke described the album as "more beats and electronics" and denied that it meant he was leaving Radiohead, saying, "I want no crap about me being a traitor or whatever splitting up blah blah... this was all done with their blessing."^[16] The Eraser reached number 3 in the UK in its first week and number 2 in the United States, Canada and Australia, as well as number 9 on the Irish charts. The album was on the prestigious Mercury Prize shortlist and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album.

Yorke has never toured as a solo act. He has sometimes played short acoustic sets of Radiohead songs in the band's webcasts and television appearances, and occasionally on his own at rallies. In 2006 he performed stripped-down versions of several songs from The Eraser ("Analyse", "The Clock", "Skip Divided" and "Cymbal Rush") on radio and TV programmes, and since then he has played and sung "Cymbal Rush" as an encore at some Radiohead concerts. Yorke hasn't played any other songs from The Eraser live.

Collaborations

Aside from his own solo work, Yorke has collaborated with several artists. He sang backing vocals on PJ Harvey's Mercury Prize-winning 2000 album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea and duetted with Harvey on one of its songs, "This Mess We're In". In the same year, he also appeared on Björk's soundtrack album Selmasongs, singing "I've Seen It All" with her. The Oscar-nominated song was written for Dancer in the Dark, a film starring Björk, and Yorke's part is sung in the film by an actor; due to time constraints Björk performed it alone at the 2001 Oscars. The two worked together again in 2008 on a charity single named "Náttúra".

Yorke also sang covers of the Roxy Music songs "2HB", "Ladytron" and "Bitter-Sweet" for the 1998 film Velvet Goldmine, as part of a band named Venus in Furs. The band existed solely for the film's soundtrack and also consisted of Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, Suede's Bernard Butler, and Roxy Music's Andy Mackay. Yorke was duplicating the original vocals of Bryan Ferry. Two other cover songs were performed by Venus in Furs, with vocals by an actor in the film. Yorke never appeared on screen.

Examples of Yorke's other collaborations are the 1998 single "Rabbit in Your Headlights", which he sang and co-wrote with DJ Shadow and which closes Psyence Fiction, the debut album by the group UNKLE; "El President", a 1998 duet with Isabel Monteiro of the band Drugstore, which was also released as a single; and vocals on the 2007 track "The White Flash", by the electronic music group Modeselektor, from their album Happy Birthday.

Personal life

Yorke currently lives in Oxford with his girlfriend, Rachel Owen, a printmaker who holds a doctorate in art history, and their two children, Noah, born in 2001, and Agnes, born 2004. He has one brother, Andy, ex-vocalist of the band Unbelievable Truth. Yorke is also very active in creating public awareness for cultural and political issues. In 2005, Yorke became a spokesman for Friends of the Earth and their campaign to reduce carbon emissions, The Big Ask.

Musical approach

Thom Yorke in 2006

As a singer, Yorke is known for his distinctive falsetto and his ability to reach, and sustain, high notes. During the recording sessions for The Bends in 1994, the band watched Jeff Buckley in concert; Yorke later said the concert had a direct effect on his vocal delivery on "Fake Plastic Trees".^[17] However, Yorke has said, "It annoys me how pretty my voice is... how polite it can sound when perhaps what I'm singing is deeply acidic."^[18] He has often adopted other styles of singing, such as an aggressive shouting style in the middle section of "Paranoid Android" and a semi-spoken style for 2003's "Myxomatosis" and "A Wolf at the Door".

Aside from vocal duties and writing lyrics, Yorke's musical contributions to Radiohead include guitar, both acoustic and electric (usually rhythm parts, with band member Jonny Greenwood handling lead), and piano (including Rhodes piano, especially on Kid A). He also plays bass guitar on occasion (the bass line for "The National Anthem" was recorded by him) as well as drums; in 2006 he performed percussion on stage in tandem with drummer Phil Selway on the track "Bangers & Mash".

Yorke, like most members of Radiohead, has never learned how to read music. He said, "If someone lays the notes on a page in front of me, it's meaningless... because to me you can't express the rhythms properly like that. It's a very ineffective way of doing it, so I've never really bothered picking it up."^[19] In interviews Yorke has sometimes played down his skills on both guitar and piano; he rarely plays guitar solos, and joked about the simplicity of his part in "Bishop's Robes". Yorke explained how he had bought a "proper" baby grand piano after OK Computer and began writing songs on it, despite a lack of proficiency, constantly relying on pedal points and pivot tones. Yorke said, "I'm such a shit piano player. I remember this Tom Waits quote from years ago, that what keeps him going as a songwriter is his complete ignorance of the instruments he's using. So everything's a novelty. That's one of the reasons I wanted to get into computers and synths, because I didn't understand how the fuck they worked."

Since Kid A, Radiohead, and in particular Yorke, have incorporated many elements of electronic music into their work. As a result, Yorke has taken an increased role in programming beats and samples and has been credited with playing "laptop" on recent albums. On a radio show in 2003 to publicise the release of Hail to the Thief, Yorke remarked that he would rather make a record just with a computer than with only an acoustic guitar.^[20] His solo effort The Eraser featured piano, bass and guitar, but was built primarily around electronics.

In interviews Yorke has cited a variety of personal musical heroes and influences, including jazz composer and bassist Charles Mingus, Neil Young, singer Scott Walker, electronic acts Aphex Twin and Autechre, and Krautrock band Can. Talking Heads, Joy Division, Magazine, Elvis Costello, The Smiths and Sonic Youth were early influences on Radiohead and Yorke. In 2004, at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, Yorke mentioned to the crowd, "When I was in college, the Pixies and R.E.M. changed my life",^[21] and he has often mentioned both bands as examples. In 2008, at the All Points West festival, Yorke noted that the British electronica group Underworld had a large influence on the band as well.

Activism

Yorke has been outspoken on various contemporary political and social issues. Radiohead had read No Logo by Naomi Klein during the Kid A sessions ("No Logo" was also briefly considered as the album title) and all the members were reportedly heavily influenced by it, though Yorke said it "didn't teach him anything he didn't already know".^[22] Yorke's activism in support of fair trade practices, with an anti-WTO and anti-globalisation stance, garnered significant attention in the early 2000s.^[23] Yorke had previously referenced maquiladoras in the title of a Radiohead B-side in 1995, and decried the IMF in 1997's "Electioneering". Yorke is also a professed fan of Noam Chomsky's political writings,^[24] and is a vegan.^[25]

Yorke is friends with the environmentalist writer, academic and journalist George Monbiot; he lent a quote to feature on Monbiot's book Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain. He is also notable as a political activist on behalf of other causes, including human rights and anti-war movements such as Jubilee 2000, Amnesty International and CND, and Friends of the Earth's Big Ask campaign.^[26] Radiohead played at the Free Tibet concert in both 1998 and 1999, and at an Amnesty International concert in 1998.^[27] In 2005 Yorke performed at an all-night vigil for the Trade Justice Movement.^[28] In 2006, Jonny Greenwood and Yorke performed a special benefit concert for Friends of the Earth. Yorke made headlines the same year for refusing Prime Minister Tony Blair's request to meet with him to discuss climate change, declaring Blair had "no environmental credentials".^[29] Yorke has subsequently been critical of his own energy use. He has said the music industry's use of air transport is dangerous and unsustainable, and that he would consider not touring if new carbon emissions standards do not force the situation to improve.^[30] Radiohead commissioned a study by the group Best Foot Forward which the band claims helped them choose venues and transport methods that will greatly reduce the carbon expended on their 2008 tour. The band also made use of a new low-energy LED lighting system and encouraged festivals to offer reusable plastics.^[31]

Discography

Main article: Thom Yorke discography

See also: Radiohead discography

• The Eraser (2006)

References

• Randall, Mac. Exit Music: The Radiohead Story. Delta, 2000. ISBN 0-385-33393-5

Notes

External links

• Media related to Thom Yorke at Wikimedia Commons
• The Eraser: Official website for Yorke's solo album release
• Thom Yorke, Going Solo: Interview with Yorke, from NPR's "Fresh Air" radio program -- July 2006