Thom Yorke

He was born with his left eye paralysed. He had five operations before he turned six; the last went wrong and left him with a permanently drooping eyelid.

At school that eye made him the odd one, the one they picked on, the one who did not fit. Until he found some classmates to start a band with.

This is not a colourful footnote. It is the root of everything. The boy who was looked at as different became, over the years, the voice of everyone who feels out of place in the world. Radiohead is, at bottom, the band of those who do not fit. And Thom Yorke is its uncomfortable soul.

The trap of "Creep"

They came together at Abingdon School, in Oxfordshire, and at first called themselves On a Friday, for the least poetic reason imaginable: Friday was the only day they were allowed to rehearse. Later they took their name from a Talking Heads song.

And in 1992 their first big hit arrived with "Creep": an anthem for misfits, about feeling like a weirdo who does not deserve to be near the person he loves. The song made them famous all over the world.

And here is what defines him. Instead of enjoying it, Yorke came to hate it. In 1993, with the success still warm, he told Rolling Stone that it felt as though it was no longer their song, that playing it felt like doing a cover.

Almost everybody clings to the hit. He pushed his away, because he wanted something else.

Destroying the winning formula

That something else turned out to be one of the most important bodies of work in modern rock.

In 1997 came OK Computer, an album about technology, alienation, noise and the exposure of the contemporary world, which for years topped the lists of the greatest albums ever made.

But the success and the tour sank him. There is a documentary from those months, Meeting People Is Easy, in which he looks exhausted and hollow, uncomfortable in a fame others would kill for. His own bandmates described his thousand-yard stare on stage.

They were at the top, one of the biggest bands on the planet. And then they did something that almost defines what it means to be a cult band: instead of repeating the winning formula, they destroyed it.

Kid A, from 2000, was abstract, electronic, cold and difficult, closer to Aphex Twin and the Warp label than to the guitar rock expected of them. It was built, in part, to scare off the mass audience OK Computer had brought them.

It went to number one anyway. Since then Radiohead has been the band that never repeats itself, that periodically blows up its own success to avoid standing still.

The uncomfortable prophet

What makes Yorke an artist of his era, and not just a star, is that he heard this coming.

In the nineties, when the internet was barely starting and nobody had a phone in their pocket, he was already singing about anxiety, surveillance, disconnection, the sense of being a number inside a machine that does not see you. He sang it in his ghostly falsetto, one of the most recognisable and most imitated voices of his generation.

Listening to OK Computer today is listening to someone who heard the world we live in coming: the world of permanent anxiety and connected loneliness. Yorke was a kind of uncomfortable prophet, and his discomfort was ours, twenty years early.

Nor did he stop at the music. Radiohead rebelled against its own industry: in 2007 they released In Rainbows letting each listener pay whatever they wanted to download it, a gesture that went around the world and put the price of a record itself in question. And he is an outspoken climate activist, using his position to apply pressure where decisions are made.

He is one of the few giants who bites the hand of the system that raised him up.

What life charged him

Thom Yorke is alive and still working without pause: solo albums, other bands, film music.

Life charged him too. Rachel Owen, his partner for more than twenty years and the mother of his two children, died of cancer in 2016, shortly after they separated. That wound, like everything in him, filtered into his music, which became barer and sadder.

If you only know Radiohead from "Creep", you are missing almost everything. Go to OK Computer, go to Kid A, and listen to a man who took his own strangeness — the boy with the closed eye, the one who did not fit, the same strangeness others of his generation turned into shelter — and turned it into the soundtrack of an entire era of people who feel alone in the middle of everything.

Yorke does not sing for those who are comfortable in the world. He sings for the ones who feel something is wrong, that the machine is swallowing us, that the connection of screens is, deep down, the greatest loneliness of all.

He sings, if you look at it properly, for nearly all of us, even if we do not dare say so out loud.

Sources

Thomas Edward "Thom" Yorke (Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, England, 7 October 1968), singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, the principal voice and songwriter of Radiohead, known for his falsetto. He was born with his left eye paralysed and had five operations before the age of six; the last went wrong and left him with a drooping eyelid, which made him a target of mockery in childhood. He formed the band with classmates at Abingdon School, in Oxfordshire, under the name On a Friday, because Friday was the only day they were allowed to rehearse; they later took the name Radiohead from a Talking Heads song. "Creep", from the debut album "Pablo Honey" (1993), made him famous, although he developed a conflicted relationship with it: in 1993 he told Rolling Stone that it felt as if the song was no longer theirs and that performing it was like playing a cover. It was followed by "The Bends" (1995) and "OK Computer" (1997), acclaimed as one of the greatest albums ever made and centred on alienation and technology; during its promotion Yorke went through a period of severe strain, documented in the film "Meeting People Is Easy". With "Kid A" (2000), abstract and electronic, influenced by Warp label artists such as Aphex Twin, the band radically reinvented itself. In 2007 they released "In Rainbows" under a pay-what-you-want scheme. Yorke is an activist, particularly on climate change. Solo and in other projects he has released "The Eraser" (2006) and work with Atoms for Peace and The Smile, as well as film scores. Rachel Owen, his long-term partner and the mother of his two children, from whom he had separated in 2015, died of cancer in 2016. Externally authored text, edited and verified for Rebobinados. Interpretations of the meaning of his work are offered as the author's reading. No song lyrics are reproduced, for copyright reasons. Information drawn from Wikipedia, AllMusic, Rolling Stone and other press coverage.