Thom Yorke on France Inter

Thom Yorke talks about his Suspiria score on France Inter in November 2018, with the questions put in French. At nine, at a school disco on a trip, he heard “Nights in White Satin” and it was like listening to ghosts; years later he read that the Moody Blues were among the first to use a new reverb plate at Abbey Road, and on the morning of the interview he played it on repeat about five times. Recording, for him, is about whether a take carries you somewhere new, “making a hole in the wall”. Now 50, he realises he has spent more than half his life trying to carry himself and other people beyond the everyday.

He kept away from Goblin's original score because Luca Guadagnino's script was so different, though one thing he loved about the original, he says, was its repetition. The film was his excuse to get into modular synthesis in a home studio built, according to Nigel Godrich, very badly. He also identified with the film's time and place, Berlin in 1977, a period he remembers from England, growing up under Thatcher, friends going to celebrate the Wall coming down, and a belief that people on the streets could change things. A speech by the film's Madame Blanc, who tells people they don't remember the war, stayed with him as Britain chose to walk away from the institutions of Europe built to stop another one.

Kid A went to number one while he sat in Central Park with a Rolling Stone writer, and EMI let him and Stanley Donwood make 15-second films for the adverts that never said Kid A. There is a new kind of anger now with no outlet, and people singing quietly into a microphone about how hard life is bore him, “which I'm sorry I used to do”. He found his voice on a borrowed four-track at the end of school.