The book Thom Yorke said “completely influenced” a Radiohead classic
I don’t intend to compare Thom Yorke to Mark Corrigan, but there’s something very fitting in the fact that David Mitchell and the Radiohead frontman are both Abingdon School alums. Mitchell once recalled the school’s “Dickensian” atmosphere, and one can imagine that he sought refuge from belligerent adolescents and haughty teachers. Perhaps the only difference here is that Radiohead first coalesced in the music room, while Mitchell would most likely have found solace in the library.
Yorke is also an avid bookworm and idolises artists who refrain from imposing their egos despite his rock star status. This introverted outlook is immediately apparent upon perusing the Radiohead catalogue, and it doesn’t take an Einstein to figure out why Yorke might despise the late Jim Morrison and all that he stood for. Granted, he could get on board with the countercultural movement, but vanity has always rubbed Yorke up the wrong way.
In Radiohead’s second single, ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’, Yorke sings, “Grow my hair I am Jim Morrison / Grow my hair, I want to be, want to be, want to be Jim Morrison”. These words are somewhat innocuous until one understands the songwriter’s implications. Above all else, these lines criticise those who worship the late Doors frontman as a messiah.
Yorke discussed the song in 1992, revealing why he could never get on board with Morrison. “I’ve got this pathological disrespect for Jim Morrison and the whole myth that surrounds Jim Morrison,” Yorke told Ian Fortnam, “simply because it affects and has affected the people in bands and in the rock business, in that they think they have to act like fucking prats in order to live up to the legend.”
The Radiohead singer has much more respect for quiet underdogs and dignified artists. “All my heroes were people that didn’t really care how they looked and didn’t care about getting all the glory or whatever – they just got on with their thing,” he told Brian Draper in 2004. “He then listed novelist Thomas Pynchon, R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe and polymath professor Noam Chomsky as some of his heroes.
As this list of heroes might suggest, Yorke values cerebral art invariably inspired by literature. It takes just a little light reading to discover that ‘Pyramid Song’ was inspired by Dante’s Inferno, ‘Bodysnatchers’ by Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives and Paranoid Android by Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. These examples are just the tip of an iceberg of literary influence in the Radiohead catalogue.
In his interview with Draper, Yorke revealed that the popular The Bends cut ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’ was inspired by R.E.M. and a classic Ben Okri novel. “[It was] completely influenced by Ben Okri’s book The Famished Road, which I read on tour in America, and also by R.E.M.”
Several immensely popular alternative rock acts of the past four decades, Nirvana included, admit to basing their sound on R.E.M. “It was just a straight rip-off, you know,” Yorke admitted. “I’ve ripped them off left, right and centre for years and years and years and years.” It’s all good, though, since Yorke is close friends with Stipe, and the relationship has become fruitfully symbiotic.
Okri’s 1991 novel The Famished Road is a mystical tale set in an unnamed African city. Tragic and existential, the novel explores tribal religion through a unique narrative style that blends a spiritual world with the “real” word. In ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’ Yorke taps into the book’s foreboding tone in an angst-ridden dreamscape: “Rows of houses all bearing down on me / I can feel their blue hands touching me / All these things into position / All these things we’ll one day swallow whole”.
As an artist of admirable integrity and originality, Yorke is careful to publically praise any luminaries he has benefited from in his own career. He told Draper that he feels “accountable” to the likes of Okri, Stipe and Pynchon. “If people have been really affected by something, I think they need to know the source you got it from,” he explained, “because otherwise, you’re pretending that it came from nowhere when it didn’t, sort of thing.”
Below, listen to ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’, one of the highlights of Radiohead’s 1995 album The Bends.
