NME's Radiohead retrospective recalls Thom Yorke's five-year boycott

For more than five years Thom Yorke would not speak to NME, and Stephen Dalton's look back at Radiohead's first decade, in the paper's 3 August issue, tells why. The last straw was a news report in December 1995, headlined “Thommy's Temper Tantrum”, about Yorke's breakdown on stage in Munich, where he was ill and blacked out during “Creep” at Riem Airport on 25 November. What they wrote in that piece hurt me more than anything else anyone has ever written about me.¹

NME owns up that it had been merciless about the band's early records too, and that the freeze-out coincided with OK Computer. It ended in May 2001, when Yorke said he had got sick of holding grudges. The paper's own album scores, printed alongside, run from 6/10 for Pablo Honey to 10/10 for OK Computer, with Kid A on 7.

A friends-and-foes page has Michael Jackson naming Kid A first among his favourite albums of 2001. Naomi Klein, whose No Logo the band read and who has since become a friend, says they held their politics long before her book.

My personal influence on Radiohead has been greatly exaggerated.

Naomi Klein¹