Thom Yorke tells Flying Lotus how “Pyramid Song” began

Dazed Digital is running “Uni of Yorke” this week, a series in which electronic producers each put one question to Thom Yorke, the cover star of Dazed & Confused's February issue. In the first class, Flying Lotus asked what inspired “Pyramid Song”, and Yorke traced it to an exhibition in Copenhagen.

We were in Copenhagen, we just started recording the first session after OK Computer, and we were all deeply dysfunctional, especially me.

Thom Yorke²

His memory runs a little short, since the sessions had begun in Paris that January and Copenhagen came in March 1999. The Egyptian section of the exhibition had figures in little boats. After a terrible session the band played the chords the next morning, and the words came quickly; the drums went on a few months later and sounded, he says, like a Charles Mingus record. The song broke a bad spell for the band, and its success still puzzles him. I never expected it to be such a popular single. When we play it live people go nuts for it, and we're like, 'Really?'²

In the second class, RYAT named Björk and PJ Harvey as favourite female artists and asked for his. Yorke still obsesses over White Chalk, Harvey's 2007 album, and says records by both women changed his life. Caribou asked how good he is at doing nothing. Useless, he says. When we got back from tour I gave myself a week off from the studio and that was it.³

The Gaslamp Killer asked for his biggest influence. Warp records were what Yorke played as a DJ at college, and Aphex Twin, the name Richard D James records under, opened up a world without electric guitar at a time when he hated Britpop and the American music around Radiohead. I would still say old Richard D James. He burns a heavy shadow.²