Thom Yorke on the demo review that compared him to Neil Young

Thom Yorke never wanted to be the singer. As a boy who loved Queen he saw himself as Brian May, he tells Jason Thomas Gordon in The Singers Talk, Gordon's book of interviews with singers, which Rolling Stone has excerpted. He first felt like a singer at school, singing Schubert in German at a recital for about 20 people, after the head of music sent him for lessons to stop him straining his voice.

He modelled himself on Michael Stipe and always thought his own voice too high and too soft. At 18 his tape was made Demo of the Month by a free music magazine whose reviewer said he sounded just like Neil Young. I’d never even heard Neil Young, so I went out and bought After the Gold Rush and was like, “Wow! It’s OK to sound like that?”¹ What he heard was the softness and naivety he had been trying to hide.

Going to see Jeff Buckley during The Bends told him the same thing. Yorke first recorded “Fake Plastic Trees” on his own, and when the others wanted to use the take he refused. No, no, we can’t use that, it’s too vulnerable. That’s too much me.¹ Asked whether he cried at the playback, he says he did.

For OK Computer he believed he had to be drunk to sing without feeling self-conscious, which cost weeks of bad vocals, “Let Down” included, until he sobered up. One bad day on “Paranoid Android” he spent mostly in the pub with Stanley Donwood. When they cycled back up the hill to the studio, he said the end needed someone shouting, shouted into a little Dictaphone, and Nigel Godrich loved it.

“True Love Waits” seemed too easy as an acoustic song and was written to end a show rather than to be recorded. It was Godrich, more than the band, who told him to stop trying to change songs like it. Poor thing, it became a victim of its own simplicity.¹ The vocal he is proudest of is “Bloom”, which live means ignoring the technical chaos around him and singing very openly. On the surface, that’s quite simple, but actually is a real bastard, which is what’s nice about it.¹

At Shoreline, near San Francisco, he smoked a blunt with Jonny Greenwood before the last encore, got lost in “Everything in Its Right Place”, sang the second verse first and walked off. In Australia he lost his voice in front of about 12,000 people, and when Ed O'Brien came back out to apologise, some of the crowd booed.

Before a show he meditates for about 20 minutes, stands on his head for three or four and runs through 10 to 15 minutes of odd scales, a habit he took from Jonny, and he has always refused the steroids some touring singers take. Age has made his voice softer and a little lower, which he prefers, though the middle of “Creep” is now very hard.

His favourite singers are Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone, Scott Walker, Stipe and Tom Waits, and Waits's “Tom Traubert's Blues” and Bob Dylan's “Simple Twist of Fate” make him cry every time. The one duet he would want is with John Lennon, though he says it would sound awful.