Tom Skinner tells Rolling Stone Japan how The Smile began

Tom Skinner has told Rolling Stone Japan that The Smile began with an email from Jonny Greenwood in 2018, under the subject line “Situation Vacant”. Greenwood wrote that he and Thom Yorke were writing new songs and wanted to try a different drummer. Greenwood and Nigel Godrich had both suggested Skinner at the same moment, and the email asked him to Oxford to jam.

The Smile turned down interviews, especially at first. Around the first album in 2022 Skinner said he was not allowed to talk about the band; now he was happy to. Mitsutaka Nagira met him at his Tokyo hotel in July, when Skinner was in Japan with his own band.

The three met in Oxford a few weeks after the email and spent about the first two days just jamming. Greenwood was driving it and brought riffs and ideas, one of them “The Smoke”, which was then only a riff; Yorke brought ideas too. Skinner says it was not an audition at all. Yorke and Greenwood then went on tour with Radiohead, and the three met again about a year later, early in 2019. After rehearsals they spent two weeks at Godrich's studio, and most of A Light for Attracting Attention, at least its foundations, was recorded there. The pandemic held it back until 2022.

He already knew all three. Around 2005 or 2006 he played on three or four tracks of Zero 7's The Garden at Godrich's studio, with Godrich engineering. Greenwood wanted a jazz group for some scenes of The Master and found a YouTube video of Zed-U, Skinner's trio with Shabaka Hutchings and Neil Charles. Skinner and Hutchings play on “Able-Bodied Seamen”. He met Yorke in 2013, when the Owiny Sigoma Band, a Kenyan and London group he played in, opened Atoms for Peace's European tour.

The drums on “Skrting on the Surface” are a single live take, recorded before the song existed. Yorke said afterwards that they had caught something special, and Skinner felt the same. It is the song he names as most his own. “Thin Thing” was put together by editing jams, and “A Hairdryer” came out of one that ran about ten minutes.

With one album out, the band did not have the songs for a full set, so much of Wall of Eyes and Cutouts was written at soundchecks on tour and sometimes played that night. Skinner names “Read the Room”, “Under Our Pillows”, “Friend of a Friend” and “Bending Hectic”, whose opening draws on Bennie Maupin's The Jewel in the Lotus. “Eyes & Mouth” was recorded for the first album and dropped, and the band kept playing it live until they caught a studio take they liked. The last two albums came largely from the same sessions, with about 25 songs on hand. Many made neither record, and Skinner says they could still take shape.

Kid A is the Radiohead record that hit him hardest, because it made him realise a rock band could make music like that.