Thom Yorke breaks his own ban on the British press for NME

On the flight home from America, Thom Yorke decided he would stop talking to the British press, and Paul Moody's interview in this week's NME is the one exception. Yorke is hostile to the press, in Britain most of all, because of how he has been treated, and he dreaded coming back. America took the pressure off. He finds the country strange, generous and kind, with an energy most of Europe lacks, and also a dumb animal. He can't take the success there seriously, and can't wait to go back.

NME puts Pablo Honey at 500,000 copies in America, outselling Suede's album there by 15 to 1, with “Creep” in the US Top 50 and its video all over MTV. “Stop Whispering” is the next American single, and Arnold Schwarzenegger, the paper says, wants “Creep” in his next film. At home the singles struggle to make the Top 40, and Moody argues that Britain is in danger of failing to claim a great British band. Colin Greenwood says the band badly want to succeed in Britain. Given the choice, he would take it over America.

I think going to America holds a mirror up to yourself. It can be whatever you want it to be.

Colin Greenwood¹

Colin's stories are not the stuff of rock and roll. On the day they signed their deal, the band went to London, came back to Oxford, split up to meet later for a drink, and spent hours in heavy rain looking for one another. After a gig in Dallas, with the next day off, Ed O'Brien turned down a woman's invitation home, drugs included. Phil Selway says they always expected to succeed, even when they were On a Friday.

Moody met them in Oxford for a low-key warm-up for Reading at the Venue, where, NME says, the “Creep” video was filmed. He calls the gig amazing and rates Pablo Honey the best English rock record of the year. The set had “Vegetable” and “Pop Is Dead”, whose fury he puts down to that single's failure to reach the Top 40, and “Creep” drew a huge roar. Afterwards Yorke was too tired to talk, so Colin and Phil did it for him.