Thom Yorke talks Suspiria and Brexit on France Inter

Thom Yorke was Augustin Trapenard's guest on Boomerang, France Inter's morning programme, today, ahead of the French opening of Suspiria next Wednesday. Asked for the first song that ever cast a spell on him, he owned up, a little sheepishly, to the Moody Blues' “Nights in White Satin”, heard at a school party when he was nine. That song was like hearing ghosts.¹

Yorke called Suspiria his first commission of its kind, with everything new and his musical limits to work around. He said one reason he took it was the studio he had just built and wanted to try out. He leaned on repetition. One of the taboos in music is repeating the same phrase over and over for no reason. It automatically makes the audience uneasy. So I did it a lot.¹

Music, he said, can be a way to resist feeling powerless. A character in the film accuses the young of never having known war, and Yorke tied that to Brexit. I live in a Britain that has decided to slam the door on the European institutions built to protect us from war. We are living through a collective amnesia.¹