The band · the five
Thom Yorke
Lead vocals · principal songwriter
The voice, and nearly every word.
- Plays
- Vocals, guitar, piano, electronics
- Born
- 7 October 1968 · Wellingborough, Northamptonshire
- In the band since
- 1985, a founder of On a Friday
photo
Photo: Raph_PH · CC BY 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons_(cropped).jpg){kind=link}
Thomas Edward Yorke was born with his left eye paralysed. He had five operations on it before he was six, and the last was botched; the drooping lid comes from that one. His father's work took the family to Scotland before they settled in Oxfordshire in 1978.
He picked up a guitar at seven. At Abingdon School he met Colin Greenwood, Ed O'Brien and Phil Selway, and in 1985 they started On a Friday, named for the one day the school let them rehearse. He went to Exeter to read English and fine art and came back to a band that had never quite dissolved; they signed to EMI in 1991 and took the name Radiohead.
He writes the first version of most Radiohead songs and nearly all of the words, and sings them, often in falsetto. The band's big changes of course, from guitars to electronics to orchestras and back, have usually started with him tiring of the last one.
He has argued with the music business in public for most of his career. He pulled his solo music from Spotify in 2013, and in 2014 put an album out through BitTorrent to make a point about how artists are paid. He speaks up on climate change as well.
Beyond Radiohead
His solo records lean on laptops more than guitars: The Eraser (2006), Tomorrow's Modern Boxes (2014) and Anima (2019), which came with a short film by Paul Thomas Anderson.
His first film score was Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria (2018), and Confidenza (2024) followed. With Flea and Nigel Godrich he fronted Atoms for Peace, who made Amok (2013). The Smile, his band with Jonny Greenwood and the drummer Tom Skinner, put out two albums in 2024 alone, Wall of Eyes and Cutouts.
In 2025 he made Tall Tales with the producer Mark Pritchard for Warp, and reworked Hail to the Thief as the score for Hamlet Hail to the Thief, a staging of Shakespeare that opened in Manchester that April and moved on to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. The Ivors Academy made him a Fellow in May 2026, and he spent the speech going after the labels and the streaming services.
His songs are in Songs, his nights on stage in the live archive. The nights he has played without the band are listed apart.