Thom Yorke: “Every time I picked up a guitar I got the horrors”

Thom Yorke has talked for the first time about how low he was before the Kid A sessions began in January 1999, in Q's October issue, on sale from tomorrow. David Cavanagh's feature on the making of the album talks to him and to Ed O'Brien. Kid A is out in Britain on Parlophone on 2 October. New Year's Eve '98 was one of the lowest points of my life. I felt like I was going crazy. Every time I picked up a guitar I got the horrors.¹

He would start a song, stop after 16 bars, hide it in a drawer and then tear it up. Instead he bought electronic music, the whole Warp back catalogue and records ordered off the internet, and listened to John Peel. He felt as strongly about it as he ever had about guitar music, and wanted rhythm rather than melody. All melodies to me were pure embarrassment.¹

O'Brien says the others had to learn to take part in a song without playing a note on it, which caused tension, and that there were several crisis meetings about how the record was going. He puts Yorke in a line with John Lennon and David Bowie, for an art-school drive to finish a thing and move on. Thom drove the album, more so than on any other album. It was an eye-opener for me.¹