Thom Yorke on BBC

Thom Yorke tells the BBC how he found Neil Young. At 15 or 16 he sent a demo tape to a magazine, which wrote that he sounded like Young, a singer he had never heard, so he went out and bought After the Gold Rush. At 16 you hate your own voice, he says, and here was someone singing that high and that frail; it told him “it's okay to be like that”.

The night before one of Young's Bridge School benefits, at the party Young throws at his house for everyone on the bill, Yorke found the nerve to ask if he could play “After the Gold Rush”. Young looked at him as if he were raving mad and said yes, then told him to play it on the piano it was written on, his old upright with the coins on it. He stood at the side of the stage while Yorke tried to remember the words, and Yorke calls it one of the craziest experiences of his life. At that show, Yorke says, Young stood at the side of the stage for nearly the whole of every act's set, and Yorke watched the others on the bill terrified by it. Talking to Young went less well. “I wanted to say all that stuff and then just got drunk and went gaga,” he says.

Apart from R.E.M., Young shaped everything about the way he writes lyrics, and he only got into Bob Dylan because of him. Whenever Radiohead lose their way he goes back to a Neil Young record to be reminded how little you need; Radiohead have always had far too many tools. The 1970s band records, with their tight Motown kick and bass, were an obsession for the band from the start, and Colin Greenwood, he says, is the man for that. Weld, the live double album from the tour Sonic Youth supported, was one of their big records as they left college and began to gig. If he gets another ten years still true to the songs he writes, “that would be a major achievement”.

He once watched Young play “Cortez the Killer” at a festival with Pearl Jam as his band, and describes the solo as a wind coming off the stage that simply did not stop.