Thom Yorke on Tel Aviv: “I'm glad I went”

Thom Yorke is glad Radiohead played Tel Aviv in July last year, though Roger Waters, Brian Eno and others had asked them to cancel. An Israeli journalist put the question to him at a round table on the Venice Lido in early September, during the festival where Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria had its premiere with Yorke's score. Rolling Stone Italia has published Giovanni Robertini's account. I'm glad I went. I just wanted to play for the audience there. There are people who will always hold it against us, and I think that's the price to pay.¹ In their eyes the band compromised their principles, he said, and he is fine with that.

For his first film score he went to Jonny Greenwood for advice. Jonny teased him about how he works, Yorke surrounded by chaos where Jonny is methodical, and told him to start from the screenplay before anything else arrived. Write in the abstract, don't write to the screen, because you're not used to it. Only do it when you have to.¹ Two or three weeks after reading the screenplay, Yorke knew which way to go.

The hardest part was the film's main dance scene, choreographed and shot before he had written a note for it. The choreographer explained the mathematics behind the steps, and Yorke had to find a way to forget them before he could write. Guadagnino had told him in a London bar that he wanted something simple, a clock; Yorke heard space filled with melodic variations, and that is what the film got. Having now seen it, he rates the dance scene its best moment.

He told 6 Music earlier this month about passing on Fight Club. In Venice he says the offer came through his friend Edward Norton, just as Radiohead got back from the OK Computer tour, when he could not think straight. He calls it a pity. Apart from that, nobody had offered him a film before Guadagnino, who found him with a letter.

On that tour, when he was struggling, he would sit in the bus watching The Exorcist. He watched Dario Argento's 1977 Suspiria dozens of times before he started, and was relieved to find Guadagnino's had nothing to do with it.

Asked the secret of his work, he said he took the film to get out of his comfort zone. I'm incapable of doing what people want me to do. It seems like a curse, but it's a blessing.¹