Thom Yorke: “I definitely went pop”

Thom Yorke has talked about the breakdown that followed the OK Computer tour, in Andrew Smith's long profile of Radiohead for The Observer's Life magazine, out today, the day before Kid A is released. Yorke rarely speaks to the British press, feeling misrepresented by it, and avoided Smith for days before agreeing to talk on the train from Paris to London.

Asked whether he went over the edge, Yorke laughs. Oh, I did go pop. I definitely went pop.¹ It was a fairly quiet little pop, he says. After the tour he had a block, believed he would never again be able to do what he does, and lost all confidence in himself. He spent weeks sitting in the woods near his home drawing hawthorn hedges, whose woven branches made him think of a human brain. I used to draw these things endlessly, for weeks on end, I used to go sit in the woods and draw these trees. I still do it.¹

He came out tougher and more confident, and says the other four were brilliant to him, even when he was difficult; he could not work without them as points of reference. On “How to Disappear Completely” he did nothing after the demo, and Jonny Greenwood did the rest, which Yorke says was good for him to watch.

Kid A runs 48 minutes over ten tracks, and Smith counts three with any obvious guitar. I just wasn't interested in guitar music anymore.¹ A month in Paris in early 1999 with all five produced almost nothing, and Copenhagen went the same way. Only after a run of rows did the band agree there was room for each of them, not always on his usual instrument. Smith reports that they came close to splitting in February this year, over whether to put all 23 recorded tracks on a double album or cut to one disc.

The band plan no singles or videos from the album and have left the lyrics off the sleeve, and they may in future put music out over the internet as it is ready. Yorke denies the title comes from Carl Steadman's book. The reading he likes is that somewhere a rogue scientist has already cloned the first human baby, and called it Kid A.

Smith saw the second of the two Paris tent shows, at Saint-Denis on 20 September, where about 10,000 people in a big blue tent heard “Idioteque” for the first time.

Jonny and Colin Greenwood met Smith in a north London restaurant. Colin likened success to slow-drying glue that sets around a band, and said the trick is to stay in the corner of people's vision. Jonny is glad of the distance. It feels like Radiohead are famous. But that no one knows who we are. Which is brilliant, really.¹