Anyone Can Play Guitar

everyone on guitar

The intro is a crowd. At Chipping Norton, Paul Kolderie handed guitars to whoever was in the studio, the band, the staff and the cook, and let them make whatever noise they liked; the idea, he said, was to live up to the title. Jonny Greenwood played his part on a Telecaster with a paintbrush. Guitar.com, looking back thirty years on, thought Steve Albini would have approved.

Greenwood's own line on guitar worship was flatter. Anybody can play the instrument, he told the same magazine; writing the song is the hard part.

long hair and leather trousers

The song is Yorke's go at the rock-star myth, with Jim Morrison as the named target. He told Stuart Bailie in NME, the week the single charted, that it was aimed at people who think growing their hair and wearing tight leather trousers makes you a rock star. Asked why Morrison in particular, he did not soften it.

Well, Jim Morrison was a bimbo.

thom yorke · nme, 13 february 1993

Annie Zaleski, in Salon, traces the Morrison verse to Oliver Stone's The Doors: Yorke said he ranted it out the day after seeing the film, and that it had really wound him up. By May he was already tired of people reading it as a thesis.

‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’ was a false cursor.

thom yorke · select, may 1993

the second single

Parlophone put it out on 1 February 1993 on 12-inch, cassette and CD, catalogue 6333, with “Faithless, the Wonder Boy” and “Coke Babies” behind it, both written on the road according to the band's interview in the Oxford monthly Curfew. Dave Jennings made it the lead single in Melody Maker of 23 January. It entered the UK chart on 13 February at 32 and stayed two weeks, which made it the band's first Top 40 hit, three weeks before Pablo Honey. In Australia it reached 97. Dwight Clarke, who later did “Pop Is Dead”, directed the video. In America it went out as the B-side of a jukebox 7-inch of “Creep”.

the pool, the ankle, the edges

On 4 July 1993 the band played it for MTV's Beach House in the Hamptons. Yorke screamed improvised words, broke down on camera, and jumped into the pool while still holding a live microphone, narrowly avoiding electrocuting himself.

Less than a year later it cost him a leg. Holly Barringer's Melody Maker cover story of 11 June 1994 reports that Yorke sprained his ankle at the end of it in Manchester and could not walk properly for two days. It was on the set EMI filmed at the London Astoria on 27 May 1994, released on video the next year as Live at the Astoria. By the Oxford Apollo in early 1995, John Harris heard the song rebuilt with harsh, discordant edges.

on stage

The archive has it on 198 nights, from The Wherehouse in Derby on 8 June 1992 to the Big Day Out in Galway on 28 July 1996. Its busiest year was not 1993 but 1995, with seventy-one nights, when The Bends was the record being toured. It opened seven shows and closed twelve. After Galway it did not come back.