Thom Yorke tells Third Way that depressing music is just bad music

Thom Yorke's long interview with Brian Draper of Third Way, a British Christian magazine, can now be read online. They talked at Café Rouge in Oxford on 11 October, and the magazine printed it in its December issue.

A man once pinned Yorke down in a bar to tell him “No Surprises” was the most depressing piece of music he had ever heard, and to ask why the band would inflict it on people. Depressing music to me is just shit music. It's like air freshener – just a nasty little poison in the air.¹ On the last tour, he says, that slow song from 1995 and 1996 stirred American audiences every night with its line about bringing down the government. The band chose big shows partly to get over their fear of them, and partly because he wanted to know whether a huge crowd really feels things together. He found that it does.

The music business went into meltdown after the band had worked too hard on Hail to the Thief, he says, and music has come to feel cheap and disposable, a pound a download through McDonald's or Metro. it's kind of doing my head in at the moment, and it's stopping me knowing where to go next.¹

Amnesiac came out in the summer of 2001, and almost every other image in its artwork is two towers collapsing, which Yorke says freaked the band out. “Street Spirit” came from Ben Okri's novel The Famished Road, which he read on tour in America, and from R.E.M., whom he says he has ripped off for years. The first time he heard “Freeman Hardy and Willis Acid” by Aphex Twin and Squarepusher, driving home, he had to stop the car.

He calls himself a shameless dabbler in Buddhism who never gets it together and cannot meditate. The Bible carries too much baggage for him, and he does not know how his son came to be called Noah.

Campaigning stresses him; the CND march at Fylingdales, two weeks before the interview, stressed him out totally, though he accepts he is using his position to get the issue across. He names Bono refusing a photocall with Tony Blair at the 1999 G8 summit in Cologne as one of the most formative things for him, but unlike Bono he cannot flatter politicians to get what he wants. I'd probably end up punching them in the face rather than shaking their hand, so it's best that I stay out of their way.¹