Classic Desert Island Discs - Thom Yorke

0:00Lauren Laverne here. We're taking our Easter break, so until we're back on air, we're showcasing a few programmes from our archive. As usual, the music's been shortened for rights reasons. This week's guest is the musician Thom Yorke. I cast him away in 2019.

0:34You know you're in trouble when people stop listening to sad music because they're turning themselves off. So speaks this week's castaway, Tom Yorke. And if anyone would know, it's him. Along with his bandmates in Radiohead, he has expanded ideas about what pop music can be and what it can do. As a child, he learned to play the guitar and then built his own. He wrote his first song at 11 about an atomic bomb and has been performing in a band since his school days. Radio Head have endured for 34 years, been critically acclaimed the world over and sold over 30 million albums. Beyond the band, Tom has continued to push boundaries as a solo artist and now as a composer.

1:13He recently created his first classical piece, Don't Fear the Light, and scored the horror film Suspiria. He says when an artist starts repeating themselves because they think that's what people want, it's all over. All I've done with the band is try and create enough of a space of safety around what we're doing creatively to feel free. Essentially, you've got to be prepared to torch it at any moment. Tom York, welcome to Desert Island Discs. Thank you for having me. So that idea of torching it then, does that mean that as music fans we're hearing a tiny proportion of your total creative output of your recordings?

1:48No, I mean, I wish there was vaults full of other stuff, but no, it's more you need to feel an unsureness. Is that a real word? About where it is you're going. Oftentimes in the studio, someone's recording something and they come in and they go, was that good? And the people in the control room are going, oh my God. That's sort of it. The torching it is saying to yourself, I don't know what I'm doing. Good music comes because you are there ready to receive it. I've heard you talking about being in the studio and describing the search for a hit, not as in a hit single, but as in the hit of a drug almost.

2:27What's that like? What's it like when you reach that moment? Suddenly something happens and you get this elation. It can feed your soul for like months or even years, which probably sounds incredibly precious. But honestly, that's what I choose to do with my life for how many years? 34, I think, is radiohead now. Good while. That's me. You know, and if it's really powerful, it's almost visual for me. I see things. Yes, you've described having synesthesia. It's not like synesthesia in the sense that I can't see anything else, but especially when a piece of music first happens in the way you've been hoping it happens, I get that thing.

3:04It's a colour or a shape or a movement. I can see it in my head. Yeah, I mean, that's normal, right? Well, I think it might be common, but I'm not sure about normal. Well, how long's that been going on? I guess since I started making music, I've always had that. But then, of course, the Eureka moments didn't really happen when I was 12. It's time to go to the music. Tell us about your first piece today. Why have you chosen this? These are friends of ours, the Lebeck sisters, and they are two virtuoso piano players. And I recently actually wrote, for the first time in my life, I wrote piano music for them, even though I can't read music.

3:42And I was thinking, OK, you're on a desert island, And I'm a musician. So I'm going to struggle with my choices because by the nature of being a musician, I'm going to hate them. Go on, tell me more about that for the non-musicians listening. Well, I spend my life listening to the same thing over and over and over and over and over again until I've got it right. And the same goes with any piece of music. If you listen to it enough times, you're going to see through it or you're going to hate it or your relationship with it changes. And I would not want that to happen. So the choices on a desert island, they'd have to be small doses of something very, very sweet at the time when I really, really need something.

4:22So this particular piece starts sad, tentative, cautious, you know, feeling around where it wants to be. And then it opens up and it opens up and it flowers, you know, literally like the dawn to me. And I felt I'm going to need that because I'm going to be going completely out of my mind. Thank you.

5:21Thank you.

5:53Ravel's Le Jardin Féirique by the Lebec sisters, Katia and Marielle. Tom, you were spellbound. Yeah, I was also thinking, because the only reason I chose that was to make it look like I'm smart. So I could whack one classical piece in and I'm like, okay, phew. No false modesty on this programme because you have taken a new route into classical music, as you said. in fact encouraged by them. They kept saying, you should write something for us. I'm like, ha ha ha ha, can't read music. And then I realised actually I didn't really need to read music. I'd just do it on the computer. Radiohead have enjoyed 34 years together.

6:26What about being a lead vocalist for all those years? Do you have to take care of your voice when you're not on stage or recording? I used to have, when we first started, I had a lot of problems with my voice because I'd not really ever done it before and because I was drinking myself senseless all the time. That didn't help. and I sort of had a wake-up call. I had to give up smoking. I found myself in a Harley Street doctor's one time, and he was really cool, and he explained the exact physics of the voice and why you need to do this and this with it and blah, blah, blah. And then there was a time when I was working with Bjork.

7:02We went out somewhere and got really trashed, and then the next morning I woke up to the sound of her warming up. What's that like? That's pretty wild. Can you imagine? Yeah. Anyway, it was pretty beautiful. but also like wow it's 10 30 in the morning and you're warming up and we're only going to be like singing for a bit and then i started taking it seriously but uh i was winging it for many years but i think mostly it's um i have to say being a musician and being someone who has been in the fortunate position to do all these big shows and so on there's one really awful feeling and that's when a singer loses their voice on tour.

7:40It's awful, because you don't want to let anyone down. Every single time this happens, my band have been just amazing. They always supported me, because they can see me freaking out. I remember doing a show in Brisbane once, walking on stage, and I'd just convinced myself that I could do it. I'd been to see a doctor, and they were like, well, and they'd give me God knows what to try and make it work. and 20 minutes in my voice just went completely went I couldn't speak nothing and there was 20 ,000 people there and I walked off and there was booing and the guys went back on and they explained people weren't happy about it and honestly that's the most terrible you don't want to let people down but it's I've got my head around it now and I forgive myself because it's not my fault you know if it happens it happens it's interesting hearing you relay that experience it's literally like an anxiety dream that someone would have but real actually that particular night i had like this for some peculiar reason i thought it would be a good idea to get someone to come in to like do one of those you know what they call it reiki things whether like i've never done it for my life good choice so there i am after going through this terrible experience this person doing this And I have a complete out-of-body experience, like a flat-out out-of-body, like I'm above myself going, well, that's not good at all.

9:03Not only have I just let down all these people, now I'm not inside my body. This is really not going very well. Oh, Tom. Let's gather ourselves. Time for the next track. Tell us about this one. Speaking of golden voices. Yeah, go on, stay with it, commit. I'm vying for a job on Radio 6, 6 Music. Scott Walker, one of my heroes. This song because it's a desert island, right? And it's going to rain. It's in a sort of tropical style. And I was thinking I'll put it on when it rains. And I'll listen to this lovely love story, remind myself of what it feels like to be on a train, see someone in the distance, that whole romance thing, sort of something from a film.

9:48It's such a sort of beautifully whimsical piece, but weirdly so profound musically. The way he sings it leaves me gobsmacked every time. It's saying, I'm here now, this is happening now, and then it's going to be gone and I'm going to be moving on, trying to relay my dreams to someone else, as we all want to do, as we all need to do, and there I am on my desert island, not able to do that, so it felt a good choice for that. It's raining today And I'm just about to forget The train window girl

10:34That wonderful day we met She smiles through the smoke

10:50From my cigarette It's raining today, Scott Walker. Tom York, you were born in Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, 1968. Apparently so. Along with your brother Andy and your parents Barbara and Grabe, you eventually settled in Oxford in the late 70s. How would you describe family life? Well, actually, before the 70s, we were in Scotland. I had a thick Scottish accent, which I can still recall now. Yeah, what was it like? It was very normal, suburban, lived in a house down a cul-de-sac. My father was a sort of complicated chemical engineering stuff I didn't understand. I spent a lot of time on my bike because we lived near gravel pits and I would go off on my own for the day cycling for miles and then doing stunts on the gravel pits, which I realise now is a bit stupid because I was on my own and if I'd hurt myself, no one would have ever found me.

11:46But anyway, I spent a lot of time listening to music, obviously. What were you listening to? Breaking things. In fact, I listened to Jeremy Deller talking about this. It's very similar to him. Started off recording stuff off the radio, watching Top of the Pops, getting excited when something weird happened like Gary Newman. And I got really obsessed with music and I thought everyone was and I realised they weren't quite in the same way I was. You said you like breaking things. Yeah, I was really fond of breaking electrical things. I took one of an old TV of my parents and I had it in my room and I pulled all the back out.

12:22And it was probably incredibly dangerous. But I liked the fizz of the cathode ray when you turned it on. I liked the smell of the old electronics. And I would try and pull bits out and see if it still worked. Younger than that, I was obsessed with Lego. Always building things, I guess. You built a guitar. You'd started playing when you were quite young. I started playing when I was seven, eight. And I was obsessed with Queen when Bohemian Rhapsody came out. I lay down in front of these big speakers in my friend's house and we just listened to Bohemian Rhapsody. And at that point I decided, yep, this is what I'm doing.

12:54And then soon after that I decided I was going to do what Brian May did, build a guitar. And it sort of worked, but I mean it was like rough, literally rough cut out with a saw. You know, it was terrible. I think that's quite impressive for that age. It really wasn't, believe me, it really wasn't. And then shortly after that, my dad felt sorry for me and eventually bought me one. Why did you want to sing, though? I didn't want to sing originally. We used to go to a friend's house who had a very, very tolerant mum who let us play for hours, just make terrible noise, and no one else would sing. I want to go back a little bit.

13:28I mean, you did have quite a tough time when you were little. You had eye surgery when you were really young. Tell me about that. I mean, it was probably tough. When I was born, the left eye was shut. There was no muscles that would open it. So this was in the 70s where they take a bit of muscle from elsewhere, in my case, my ass, and they graft it on to make it work. But it's quite a tricky operation. I won't go into the details, but it's pretty blech. And this was an initial operation when I was just about old enough to deal with it. And I woke up, my mum said, and I said, mum, mum, mummy, mummy, what's I got?

14:08What's I got? Because I couldn't understand what was going on, you know. And then I went for like three or four operations after that. You know, people go through this stuff. It's not a big drama. But I started trying to work it in my favour by the end because my parents were saying, so for this last operation you can ask for anything you like. I was like, anything I like. What am I, like four or something? So I asked for Adidas red tracksuit. Did you get her? Yeah. That is a hard thing to go through. You know, were you teased kids can be quite cruel? Yeah, they were cruel. There's always a few arseholes.

14:47But the one point for me was the last operation went wrong and it's kind of blind. So it looks good, but I can't really use it much. And then after that, I went to see this amazing old surgeon. He said, well, mate, you're never going to fly in the RAF, but at least it looks right. And he said, I can do one more operation, which means it comes up to exactly the same level as the other and you'll look normal. But this means you won't be able to close it properly and you'll have to probably put a patch over your eye when you sleep. So at that point, I decided I liked the fact that it wasn't the same.

15:21And I've liked it ever since. And when people say stuff, I kind of thought it was like a badge of pride. I still do. I think we're all born with something wrong with us, and that was mine. Let's go with the music. Tell me about your next choice. Talking Heads. So going back to my friends with a tolerant mother, John, he was called. All right, John? I remember him one weekend saying, I've got this new record, Talking Heads. It was Remain in Light. He puts this thing on, and it was like a bomb going off in my head. I'd literally never heard anything like it and didn't realise that you could put people into a trance like that I later realised that its influences were from Fela Kuti and Afrobeat and all that stuff but Talking Heads did something with a studio that had never been done before and even at a young age I could kind of see that and still now it's not like anything else ever and I would ask and you're going to say no because there's rules about these things but I'd have to say, I'd have to take the whole record come on please don't do me that way Tom it's a bold play it's not going to happen is it 1942, start doing this come on then anyway, I'll just have to imagine the rest of the record won't I yeah, you will Take a look at these hands Take a look at these hands The hand speaks The hand never got a name hand Well, I'm a tongue look Falling the punches I'm so thin

17:24Talking Heads and Born Under Punches. Tom York, Radiohead are of course named after a Talking Heads song. Yes. And you met your bandmates, brothers Johnny and Colin Greenwood, Philip Selway and Ed O 'Brien at Abingdon School in Oxfordshire. So it's your music teacher there, Terence Gilmore James, remembers you as, I quote, forlorn and a little isolated. Oh, really? Yeah. Thanks, Terry. You wouldn't have thought it, would you? Judging by what I've been saying so far.

17:56Yeah, probably right. I mean, to me, the music school and the art school was my sanctuary. That's where I spent all my time. Sanctuary from what?

18:07A posh private boys' school. Full of arseholes. Not completely, obviously. there were some good teachers but the system of it I didn't really get on with I'm not really a, what do you call it I don't blend well anyway there I was mostly with my headphones on or playing guitar or playing piano and I guess I was really lucky two of these teachers, the head of the art department and the head of music department saw something in me and were incredibly supportive I couldn't read music but Terry's like I'm not bothered about that I can see you have something did you try to learn to read music I tried and tried I can't I still can't and the same with the hunter the art teacher I didn't really see myself as an artist and he came to me and said I can see something in what you're doing that's very different and you don't realize until after how important that is.

19:10I'm absolutely convinced that if both those kind men, if they had not done that, I wouldn't be here today doing this. Convinced. Have you ever thought about where you might have ended up? God knows. So you had music to kind of shield you from what was going on. Did you feel like you'd found your place or did you still kind of feel like you hadn't found a place that you fit in? Well, what's weird about it is that music became like my escape but also the only thing that I could use to resolve the schisms of life, right? And I could not do without it. It's physically not possible. I mean, I've read a lot about what music does to people now.

20:02you know the mathematics of music the the frequencies what they do to human beings you know the these emotions that the music can give you they're real things and they're precious things to me and i might sound completely gaga these days because music is now seen as just another product i mean i'm one of many many content providers but i've never seen it like that and I never will see it like that. It's a sacred thing to me because I believe that human beings need it. I never ever say this stuff publicly so this is a good time to do it right? Let's get it out Tom. I think now's the time. Where was I?

20:41I have no idea. We were talking about school. How'd I get to that point anyway? You couldn't be without it. How did your parents react to that? They were pretty tolerant actually I've got to be fair especially when I got like my big amp and then the amp was above the tv room and my dad would come up and say i literally cannot hear the television at the time i'm like i'll go away i'm doing my thing man but uh it's like yeah you know what fair enough they would you know take me along to gigs when i had gigs but i was really very very determined to do what i did you know there's a few times when they said you can't do something this weekend and I would just go AWOL and report back sheepishly on a Sunday because I was going to do a concert and that was that.

21:30It's time for your fourth disc. Tell us about this one. This is Squarepusher and Aphex Twin Freeman Hardy and Willis Acid. I chose this because this was one of those pivotal musical moments in one's life when I had just been on tour for too long at the end of this massive cycle of endlessly endlessly endlessly playing the same songs being in a band playing with guitars and i'm driving through the night down to cornwall and john peele is on and he in his dour manner announces this this track and um i'm driving quite fast down country lanes halfway through something happens in this track it's like i'm having a seizure or something you know i'd slam the car to a halt pull into the side and just i can't i can't i can't drive i'm like completely transfixed it's so intense it's electronic but it's got jazz in it it's just really vicious but it also harkens back to this whole period that i felt like i'd missed because i decided to be in a rock band and you know sometimes you hear a piece of music and like thank god someone's done that thank god this track came on and it was like a door opening up for me it was like this is really important to me there's something in here that i need

23:35Freeman Hardy and Willis Acid Squarepusher and Apex Twin Banging Banging it is But also jazz It's jazzy isn't it really Basically Tom York You took a gap year after you left school. Gap year? How come? Because I wanted to figure out whether I was completely insane, whether I really wanted to be a musician or not. I just did a bunch of dead-end jobs and made a demo tape. Working in a shop, would that be one of the dead-end jobs? Oh, yes, Debenhams. I sold suits, that was one of the jobs. Were you good at that? Well, what do you think? No. No, I think no. No. Sorry. My first fatal flaw was being brutally honest.

24:15my second fatal flaw was that the old boy I worked with was an amazing guy and these these old boys would come in and they'd try these brown suits and they were all brown and tweedy and whatever none of them fit right I mean this lovely old man would say I'm sorry that really doesn't look very good and then they would leave um and then I got called up to the manager's office he said you really don't have the right motivation and I said well you really don't have the right suits so it really didn't go very well after that. Pay was terrible. God damn. You made a demo, you said. And I think that was quite well received, right?

24:50Yeah, I made this demo. This was what I was really doing in my life. Sent it in. There was this free magazine in the music shop. Of course, I went to the music shop every weekend, annoyed the people in there and tried drum machines or whatever. And in this music monthly magazine, they had a demo review thing. so I sent this demo in there with Ed's help, and Ed put his name at the bottom, because I was too nervous to put my name at the bottom. I didn't think really much of it, and then I was back in the shop a few weeks later and pick up the magazine, and there's my face, and it says, Who is this guy?

25:32This is amazing. Top demo. He sounds just like Neil Young, to which my response was, Who's Neil Young? so I went and bought, after the gold rush, the record. So Ed O 'Brien had his name on there as well. That's right. Was it him that they contacted? Yes. Because you were offered a record deal, wasn't it? Yeah, they contacted that. Me and Ed found ourselves in the offices of Ireland Records shortly afterwards. What was that like? It was cool. Neither of us felt mentally ready for what was going on, so we kind of just basically said, listen, we don't think we're ready for this yet. and the head of A &O was like, that's cool, don't worry.

26:10Come back when you're finished. Because we're like, you know, we want to be good boys and go to university and in the back of my mind we're going, don't do it, don't do it. But we did it. We went to university instead. And why did you make that choice? I don't know. I don't know. No, I do know. It's like, I felt like I really wanted to go and study art especially and I didn't feel I was mentally ready to spend my life on tour. And it was like actually the best decision I made because I did English and I did fine art and the art college thing just blew my mind. And without that, those three years, I wouldn't have been creatively prepared for then what happened after.

26:52We've got to go to the music now. It's your fifth disc today, Tom. Tell us about it. Why have you chosen it? Well, I feel like one of the things I've been thinking about on this desert island is when I first started thinking about what music to choose. Obviously, I gravitated towards weirdness and ambience and electronic. And then I realised like, okay, hang on a minute, I'm going to be on my own on a desert island, I'm going to need human voices. And I'm going to need the voices that really have helped me and Neil Young. From that moment after that demo tape, I bought After the Gold Rush, I took it home, and it's always been one of my favorite records and um this particular song especially the lyrics I remember just thinking wow someone's writing that I still now I blows my mind the words to this song um after many years and going the circles of life I end up being asked to play a benefit concert of his and i agreed to do it and uh the night before you go to his house and you hang out with all these other musicians who are doing it so me being me i'm not a particularly sociable kind of guy not very good in these situations so i have to sort of prepare myself by drinking heavily and eventually after pretty much the entire evening's gone by and he keeps walking past me and i'm like freezing you know because it's basically like someone meeting Elvis in their house.

28:27Eventually he stops to talk to me and I just go I really want to play After the Gold Rush tomorrow. He's like really? That's great. You could do it on the piano I recorded it on. I'm like ah ah So there I am on the day with Neil Young side of stage watching me playing this incredible song or trying to because it's too high for me to sing in front of him on the piano it was recorded on. Well While I dreamed I saw the knights in armor coming Saying something about a queen There were peasants singing and drummers drumming And the archers split the tree There was a fanfare blowing to the sun That was floating on the breeze

29:29Look at Mother Nature on the run In the 1970s Neil Young and After the Gold Rush. I mean, a unique voice, Tom York. and I can see why early reviewers and people subsequently have drawn parallels between his voice and yours. In my dreams. Yeah, it's funny listening to it. I remember when I got that record, it was the first time where I thought, wow, it's so fragile. Even when a singer is singing technically brilliantly, the powerful stuff is the stuff where there's the vulnerability, the sense that things could just fall apart at any minute. I mean you know I was only like 18 but until I got that record I didn't realize how important that was going to be to me and the other guys picked up on it quicker than I did and I was always trying to hide behind turn the vocal down had things on top but I think by the time we were doing the bends the second record it was like oh okay and we actually gone to see Jeff Buckley the night before or something.

30:37And that was the final nail for me. I'm like, OK, now I get it. Because he was just on his own. So I sort of gradually put all the layers away and said, OK, well, sometimes it's just going to be vulnerable and that's going to be OK. Radiohead were a hit straight away. You connected pretty quickly. Was that something you were expecting and how did it feel when it happened? Was it fun? Yeah, it was kind of cool. we were suddenly arriving in America for the first time and stretched limos bless them, they've all gone now, thank God and I remember being in the record company and they'd laid out a hundred records and we had to sign them and I was looking at this pen thinking, and I said, I've never done this I've never signed a record before it was mad, so they put us in first class on an aeroplane, I'm like what?