Thom Yorke on Rolling Stone

Thom Yorke and Harry Styles sit down in a London studio for Rolling Stone's Musicians on Musicians series, with Rob Sheffield credited as interviewer, though for most of the hour they question each other. They start where they first met, on a side street in Rome in 2024, a few hours before a Smile show: Styles spotted a cap with “Acid” on it, took off his headphones, which were playing A Moon Shaped Pool, and said hello. Yorke admits his reply was to swear. From there they talk about walking the streets without security. Yorke wrote “A Wolf at the Door” over two and a half days of walking in the rain with a notebook, and credits Michael Stipe, on the 1995 R.E.M. tour, with teaching him that if you are not looking, nobody looks back.

Most of the hour is about writing. Yorke says that around Kid A he could not stop explaining the music to himself while he made it, a kind of madness he walked his way out of, and that the cure was accepting that nobody cares that it is difficult. Being given the Ivors fellowship, he says, taught him that he is apparently a songwriter, and that songwriting is a naive thing: three chords and the same line over and over is “Pyramid Song”, and there is no explaining why it works. He hands his discarded lyrics to Stanley Donwood, who turns them into collages for the artwork, and says he wishes he had not written “High and Dry”, though there is nothing wrong with it. The rest of the band, he adds, made him finish “Codex” when he wanted to give up on it.

The talk turns to working alone and together. It was only after Kid A that he told Nigel Godrich he wanted to make things on his own, and he says the band have not been in a studio together for a long time. In The Smile, Jonny Greenwood throws out ideas without pause and Tom Skinner answers anything faster than anyone he has met, while Yorke stands in the middle, lost, and goes away to think. He remembers Godrich bringing the first Pro Tools rig to the Kid A sessions, for the strings, and wanting to learn it on the spot. “Everything in Its Right Place”, he says, came out of a winter in an empty house with a grand piano and a mattress, after a long spell of not being able to write, playing one riff over and over to make himself feel better.

Asked how he feels about being celebrated, he says the fellowship was deeply confusing and that he finds it hard to believe in that side of his work. After Radiohead's 2025 tour, which he enjoyed while it lasted, his self-confidence crashed, and it took starting his own record again two months later to feel himself. His children Agnes and Noah, and his wife Dajana, were moved at the Ivors, and he does it for them. Looking back, the worst of OK Computer was being sent out on the road for two more years after he had begged to move on. He ends on the first night of the tour in Madrid, where the band walked through the crowd to the stage in the round and told each other to keep it together, because he was already close to tears.