The tribute song that inspired Thom Yorke’s first collaboration with his brother Andy
Even before hearing Radiohead for the first time some time in the early 1990s, there was reason to suspect they were a band that wore their early influences on their sleeves. Their name, after all, was a nod to a Talking Heads song, and frontman Thom Yorke made it fairly well known from the get-go that his singing and songwriting proudly followed in the indie rock lineage of Morrissey and Michael Stipe. There was another fellow, though, who seemed to inspire Yorke to drift into an even more effusive state of nostalgic admiration. His name was Mark Mulcahy, the singer for a somewhat obscure Connecticut jangle-pop band called Miracle Legion.
“When I was 15,” Yorke wrote during a Q&A on the Radiohead website back in 2000, “the best song in the entire world and the most beautiful voice I had ever heard was on ‘All for the Best’, from Miracle Legion’s Surprise Surprise Surprise. It was the voice of someone who was only truly happy when he was singing. It affected me a great deal.”
Formed in 1983, Miracle Legion put out four full-length albums from the mid ‘80s to the mid ‘90s, never scoring a hit or mainstream notoriety, but inspiring a very devoted cult following both in the US and the UK. There were clear similarities to their friends in R.E.M. during both bands’ early college rock years, but as evidenced by Mulcahy’s subsequent solo work, his talent is wholly distinct and oft-emulated by those lucky enough to dig into his catalogue.
In Thom Yorke’s case, that fandom started early, as he recalled making a special trip to London from Oxford to pick up Miracle Legion’s debut LP in 1987. “No one seemed to know who they were but my brother and I played that record until it was completely unplayable,” Yorke said. “It changed the way I thought about songs and singing.”
Thom’s younger brother, Andy Yorke, was no less inspired by Mulcahy’s unique vocal style. When he formed his own band, the Unbelievable Truth, in 1993, he routinely cited Miracle Legion as an influence.
As one might expect, Andy Yorke was compared to his brother Thom far more often than he was to Mark Mulcahy. Perhaps as no coincidence, the Yorke brothers made something of a point of staying in their own lanes professionally. Andy sought no career boosts from collaborations with Thom, and Radiohead and the Unbelievable Truth rarely crossed paths on the road. It wasn’t until 2008, in fact, that Thom Yorke and Andy Yorke finally recorded a song together for the first time as adults. And to bring the story full circle, it was, of course, a cover of Miracle Legion’s ‘All for the Best.’
Following the unexpected death of Mark Mulcahy’s wife Melissa in 2008, a project was launched to release a covers album of Mulcahy songs to help raise money for Mark and his two young daughters. The line-up of contributors for the album, titled Ciao My Shining Star, was a true statement on the high esteem Mulcahy’s contemporaries held him in, as big names like Frank Black, Michael Stipe, the National, Dinosaur Jr., and Frank Turner all signed up. Andy Yorke, meanwhile, wound up playing on two tracks—one with the Unbelievable Truth and another with his brother, with whom he’d grown up listening to Miracle Legion.
“I get approached by a lot of people who want to get at Thom through me,” Andy Yorke told the Vancouver Sun in 2009, “but on this occasion, because of the circumstances and because it was Mark [Mulcahy], I made an exception. It was the first time Thom and I ever recorded together—it’s fitting it be a Miracle Legion song.”
No one was more appreciative than Mulcahy himself, who likened the covers project to the film It’s a Wonderful Life. “I didn’t know this many people cared,” he said.
