Anyone Can Play Guitar

everyone on guitar

The intro is a crowd. At Chipping Norton, Paul Kolderie, who produced the record with Sean Slade, handed guitars to whoever was in the studio, the band, the staff and the cook, and let them make whatever noise they liked, because the idea was to live up to the title. Jonny Greenwood played his part on a Telecaster with a paintbrush, a technique that Gary Walker, looking back for Guitar.com thirty years on, reckoned Steve Albini would have approved of.

Greenwood's own view of guitar worship, as Walker quotes it, was flatter. Anybody can play the instrument; writing the song is the hard part.

long hair and leather trousers

The song is Thom Yorke's go at the rock-star myth, with Jim Morrison as the named target. Annie Zaleski, in Salon, traces the Morrison verse to Oliver Stone's The Doors; Yorke ranted it out the day after seeing the film, which had really wound him up. The week the single charted he told Stuart Bailie of NME that it was aimed at people who think growing their hair and wearing tight leather trousers makes them a rock star.

Well, Jim Morrison was a bimbo.

thom yorke · nme, 13 february 1993

By May he was tired of people reading it as a serious look at pop stardom, which it had never been.

‘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, with “Faithless, the Wonder Boy” and “Coke Babies” behind it, both written on the road, the band told Curfew, the Oxford monthly. Dave Jennings made it his Single of the Week in Melody Maker and took it as proof that “Creep” had been no fluke. It entered the UK chart at number 32 on 13 February and stayed two weeks, the band's first Top 40 hit, nine days before Pablo Honey came out on 22 February. In Australia it reached 97. Dwight Clarke, who later made the video for “Pop Is Dead”, directed this one, and in America the song went out as the B-side of a jukebox 7-inch of “Creep”.

the pool and the ankle

On 4 July 1993 the band played it for MTV's Beach House in the Hamptons. Yorke screamed improvised words at the camera through the breakdown, then jumped into the pool still holding a live microphone and narrowly avoided electrocuting himself.

Less than a year later, in Manchester, he landed badly at the end of it and sprained his ankle. Holly Barringer, with the band for Melody Maker, found he could not walk properly for two days. Two nights later it closed the main set at the London Astoria, the show EMI filmed and released the next year as Live at the Astoria.

anyone could

The archive first has it at The Wherehouse in Derby on 8 June 1992. Its busiest year was 1995, with seventy-two nights, when The Bends was the record being toured, and by the Oxford Apollo that February John Harris, reviewing the show for NME, heard it rebuilt with harsh, discordant edges. It was dropped after the Big Day Out in Galway on 28 July 1996.

It closed their set on the main stage at Reading on 27 August 1994, a year after they had pulled out of the festival with Yorke's throat in trouble. Andrew Mueller, reviewing the day for Melody Maker, thought the songs were not built for a stage that size, and noted that they made this one sound as if anyone could.