Thom Yorke

the eye

Thomas Edward Yorke was born in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, on 7 October 1968, with his left eye paralysed. He had five operations on it in the first five years of his life, and the last of them left the eye as it is now. His father sold chemical engineering instruments, and the job moved the family from school to school. They lived, he told Lauren Laverne on Desert Island Discs in 2019, in a house down a cul-de-sac.

When “Bohemian Rhapsody” came out he lay down in front of the big speakers in a friend's house, and decided there and then what he was going to do. He was seven, he got his first guitar, and he wanted to be Brian May. On the island in 2019 the one record he kept was Talking Heads' “Born Under Punches”, because he would need to dance.

on a friday

At Abingdon School, a private boys' school south of Oxford, he wrote the music for a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in which Ed O'Brien played Lysander. In 1985 he, O'Brien, Colin Greenwood and Phil Selway started a band and named it On a Friday, after the one day they were allowed to rehearse. Colin's younger brother Jonny joined soon after. Their first gig was at the Jericho Tavern in Oxford on 4 August 1986. Nobody else would sing, he says, so he did.

He went to the University of Exeter to study English and art. There he played in another band, the Headless Chickens, and met two people who stayed: Rachel Owen, a fellow art student, and Stanley Donwood, whose first impression of him was “Mouthy. Pissed off. Someone I could work with.” For his degree show he scanned the whole of the Sistine Chapel into a computer, changed every colour and gave it away as photocopies, as he told Select in 1993. He left with an upper second, and “Creep” went back with him to Oxford.

creep

On a Friday signed to EMI and, steered by the label, became Radiohead. EMI put out “Creep” on 21 September 1992. “I want nothing more in the whole world than to be a star,” he told Select the following May, and that summer a sore throat took him out of the Reading Festival.

For The Bends he came in early every morning at RAK, made tea and played the piano alone for four hours. He rang Donwood, and the two of them got into the basement of the John Radcliffe Hospital to film an iron lung; they filmed a resuscitation dummy instead, and it went on the sleeve. On 28 March 1995 he played on his own at the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto, and the band put the film of that night out 30 years later.

Thom Yorke talking to Deadeye video magazine on 23 September 1994, the day of Radiohead's charity show at the Old Gaol in Abingdon· Deadeye video magazinethe whole interview →

ok computer

“Fitter Happier” came out of three months of writer's block in which he could write nothing but lists of words. He typed it on the Mac in ten minutes, “feeling incredible hysteria and panic”, and the Mac's own voice reads it.

Success made him angry, he told Laverne. “I sort of put my hands on the steering wheel and I white-knuckled,” and he did not care who got hurt. When people in the street started talking to him “like it was Jesus or something”, he would ring Michael Stipe, who told him to put the shutters down and walk away. “Years later I sat down with the guys and I apologised.”

Grant Gee followed the OK Computer tour for Meeting People Is Easy, out in November 1998. “I was a complete fucking mess,” Yorke told The Guardian in 2000. He sang outside the band in those years too: UNKLE's “Rabbit in Your Headlights”, which he wrote with DJ Shadow, and three glam songs for Todd Haynes's Velvet Goldmine as the singer of Venus in Furs, with Jonny in the band.

Thom Yorke talking about OK Computer on a Canadian music programme, 12 April 1998, the day of Radiohead's show in Torontothe whole interview →

kid a

After the tour he bought a house in Cornwall, walked the cliffs, drew, and sat at a new grand piano. “Pyramid Song” and “Everything in Its Right Place” came in “the week I bought a piano”, he told Mojo in 2001, and “Pyramid Song” was him “totally obsessed” with Charles Mingus's “Freedom”. On the Kid A sleeve he is Tchock: the artwork credits its landscapes, knives and glue to Stanley and Tchock.

The music really was coming out of the landscape, as far as I was concerned, and the words were coming out of the stones on the ground.

Thom Yorke · P3 Pop, 19 September 2001

His and Rachel's son, Noah, was born on 6 February 2001. Being a new father, he says, was what turned his worry about the climate into something he did. In July 2002 he recorded a message for Friends of the Earth before the Earth Summit in Johannesburg. In 2000 he had sung “I've Seen It All” with Björk, which was nominated for an Oscar, and three songs on PJ Harvey's Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea.

Hail to the Thief was taped mostly in under three weeks in Hollywood. The recording was good, he said in 2025; the finishing and mixing were “really hard and not fun at all”. Donwood came out to paint, and the two of them drove round Hollywood and Beverly Hills.

Thom Yorke on E!, 30 September 2003, the year of Hail to the Thief· E!the whole interview →

the eraser

The Hail to the Thief tour ended in 2004 with the band flying the wrong way round the world and nobody sleeping for three or four weeks. “It felt like everyone was under obligation to do it rather than because we wanted to do it,” he told The Observer. Radiohead went quiet, largely for their families, and a daughter followed Noah.

He spent part of the quiet on the climate. In May 2005 he spoke up for the Big Ask, Friends of the Earth's campaign for a climate law.

My son really loves wildlife and… draws polar bears, and… every time he draws a polar bear, I want to tell him that they probably won’t be there by the time he’s my age.

Thom Yorke · The Big Ask, 1 May 2005

That September he turned down a meeting with Tony Blair, because Blair's advisers wanted meetings first. “Which normally would be called blackmail,” he said.

Before he started on a record alone he formally asked the others whether they minded, expecting nothing to come of it. With Nigel Godrich he cut and pasted samples without looking at the screen, and it was so easy it felt like cheating. His voice was only going to be texture. “Nigel basically dragged me kicking and screaming toward the concept of them being actual songs,” he told The Globe and Mail. He had written part of “Harrowdown Hill” before he saw that it was about David Kelly, found dead in 2003 in woods near Yorke's old school, and he called it the angriest song he had ever written.

It annoys me how pretty my voice is… That… doesn’t sound incredibly immodest, but… it annoys me how… polite it can sound when perhaps what I’m… singing is deeply acidic.

Thom Yorke · The New York Times podcast, 2 July 2006

The Eraser came out on 10 July 2006, dedicated to his daughter, and reached number three in Britain. What it taught him, he told VPRO, was “how incredibly sketchy I am and actually it's the band that usually picks up the pieces”. “I'm good at disgruntled,” he told Mark Radcliffe backstage at the Mercury Prize that September, after losing to Arctic Monkeys. The music business had talked over the jazz pianist Zoe Rahman, so 20 seconds into his own song at the piano he glared at them. “I've got 4 minutes, so shut up for those 4 minutes.”

At Latitude in July 2009, playing alone at noon, he was so nervous that he could not feel his hands for the first two songs, and afterwards Adam Buxton stopped him with a list of stage names, plain Thom Yorke being fine but not great.

atoms for peace

Within three months of Latitude he had a band. The Eraser had left “this niggling worm in my head”, he told Marc Maron: “I want to try and make the Eraser thing real.” The bass was the lead instrument on it, and when he played those parts he had been thinking of Flea. He asked Flea and Joey Waronker the same day and both said yes within hours. With Godrich and Mauro Refosco they first played at the Echoplex in Los Angeles on 2 October 2009. They had no name until February 2010, when they took the title of a song on the record, Atoms for Peace. AMOK came out of three days of improvising at the end of a tour, which he and Godrich took away and made into an album.

In July 2013 Godrich took it and The Eraser off Spotify, calling that a “small meaningless rebellion”, and Yorke backed him. Fourteen months later Tomorrow's Modern Boxes appeared with no warning, and the two of them sold it directly, as a BitTorrent bundle. “If it works anyone can do this exactly as we have done,” they wrote.

On 15 August 2015 he said that he and Rachel had separated, “after 23 highly creative and happy years”. It was amicable, he wrote, and had been common knowledge for some time.

suspiria and anima

A Moon Shaped Pool was made while they separated. Rachel Owen, a lecturer in Italian at Oxford and an artist, died of cancer on 18 December 2016, aged 48. In 2025 he told The Sunday Times that he had not given himself time to grieve, and that by 2018 the wheels had come off a bit and the band had to stop.

He had envied Jonny's film work. “I was a little bit jealous but felt that I couldn't [do it] so I never tried,” he told Radio 1 in 2018, because he can't read music. Luca Guadagnino's confidence got him to try Suspiria. He failed four or five times at following the film's central dance before he saw he had to disconnect himself from it, he told NPR, and he wrote much of the score on Jonny's advice to stay away from the picture. Noah plays drums on two of the pieces, “Has Ended” and “Volk”.

Anima came out on 27 June 2019 with a film by Paul Thomas Anderson, who cast him as a silent clown chasing a woman across a city to return the lunchbox she left on a train. “More Buster Keaton, more Buster Keaton!” was the direction, Anderson told Variety. The woman is the actor Dajana Roncione. She and Yorke married on 19 September 2020 in Bagheria, Sicily, and the other four were there.

Thom Yorke talking to Zane Lowe for Beats 1, June 2019, the week Anima came out· Beats 1the whole interview →

the smile

“Ladies and gentlemen, we are called 'The Smile',” he said on 22 May 2021, in a corrugated shed on Glastonbury's Live at Worthy Farm stream, with Jonny and the drummer Tom Skinner. “Not the smile as in 'ahh!', more 'The Smile' as in, the guy who lies to you every day.” The name is from a Ted Hughes poem.

Songwriting is quite a naive thing. It’s like you can’t be savvy about it. You can work really hard on it, but the good stuff just happens and you don’t know why.

Thom Yorke · Rolling Stone, 2026

He had long thought of Hail to the Thief as “the record that got away”, he told Rolling Stone UK. Jonny had begged him not to give it that title. The title came more from Yorke's lack of self-belief than from politics. “It's all I've got, man,” he told The Observer. Christine Jones saw the Hail to the Thief tour at Madison Square Garden in 2003, went off to design a Hamlet, and kept hearing the two answer each other. When she asked him to make it with her, his first answer was no. “It took about five years to get over the presumption of putting those two things together,” he told Wallpaper. Hamlet Hail to the Thief opened in Manchester on 27 April 2025 and reached the Barbican in London on 31 October 2026, with all 14 of the album's songs rearranged by him.

In August 2025 the Ashmolean in Oxford hung his paintings with Donwood's. “I'm painfully aware of my limitations,” he said for the catalogue. “We would both work in front of the same canvas, taking turns until someone won, which was usually me,” Donwood told The Art Newspaper.

Radiohead came back that November for 20 arena nights, and he sent the others a list of 65 songs to learn. In Madrid, on the first night, they walked through the audience to reach the stage, which they had never done. “I wanted to burst into tears, and we hadn't even played a note,” he told Harry Styles for Rolling Stone. Afterwards he crashed, “massively crash, in terms of self-confidence”, and it took starting his own record again, two months later, before he could say, “Oh, OK. I'm good now.”

He was mixing it, with a song on it called “Arse-Kissers”, when Styles handed him the Ivors Academy Fellowship in London on 21 May 2026. He used the speech to go after the labels and the streaming services. “Just remember: without us, you ain't shit!”