Thom Yorke talks songwriting with Harry Styles for Rolling Stone

Thom Yorke and Harry Styles are this year's pairing for Rolling Stone's annual Musicians on Musicians cover story, published on 8 October. They sat down in a Camden Town studio one afternoon in July and, by the magazine's count, talked for two hours; Rob Sheffield wrote it up. Styles first ran into Yorke by chance in summer 2024 on a side street in Rome, before a Smile show he was going to, and knew him by a cap with “Acid” on it. Styles was listening to A Moon Shaped Pool at the time. Yorke remembers swearing and asking him why he was standing in the street. The talk also takes in the crash in Yorke's confidence after Radiohead's 2025 tour, which has a story of its own.

When Styles brought up “High and Dry” as a classic, Yorke called it a man with an acoustic guitar singing. That particular one I wish I hadn't [winces in pain], but there's nothing wrong with that.¹ He rarely listens to singer-songwriters, he says, and would rather have old folk, film music and electronic music; he links The Bends to a revival of that style when the band were young.

Above everything, Styles loves “Everything in Its Right Place”, and Yorke told him where it came from. He had felt lost since OK Computer and could not write. The song was the first thing he did after moving into a house that held a grand piano, a mattress and nothing else, and through a stormy winter he played the riff again and again like a mantra, with a single Arvo Pärt CD in the house. He could not write another one now even if he wanted to, and he has tried. Around Kid A and Amnesiac every new step was a struggle that he kept explaining to himself as he went, which he likens to madness; his way out was to leave the studio and walk the Cornish cliffs. One Kid A vocal was Yorke speaking lines pulled at random from a top hat while Jonny Greenwood played the ondes Martenot. Only after that record did he quietly tell Nigel Godrich that he wanted to make some things with him alone.

Being honoured at the Ivor Novello Awards in May, where Styles paid tribute and called Radiohead his favourite band, made Yorke see that he is a songwriter, though he does not mix with songwriters. He calls songwriting naive, because the good material turns up and he cannot say why. “Pyramid Song” is three chords repeated with one lyric, and it works when it should not. The fellowship itself confused him, he admits, and he has a very strange relationship with that side of his work. His children, Agnes and Noah, and his wife, Dajana, were moved on the night. He went for them, and felt numb.

In The Smile, Jonny Greenwood produces ideas constantly, Tom Skinner is quicker than anyone Yorke has met, and Yorke responds without always understanding what is going on. Radiohead, whose members met in 1985, know each other's strengths and weaknesses, he says, and spend much of their time working around them. We haven't been in the studio together for a long time, so I don't know how it would actually feel now.¹

The Musicians on Musicians conversation with Harry Styles· Rolling Stonewatch on youtube →