The one genre that Thom Yorke absolutely hated: “I didn’t want any part of it”
By the late 1990s, it was anyone’s guess what the next big thing in rock music was going to be. The grunge movement didn’t leave many people with a place to go once Kurt Cobain passed away, and since the alternative rock movement was still in full swing, bands were almost encouraged to be as weird as possible so they could get maximum exposure on MTV. While that normally catered to a certain definition of weird, Thom Yorke had more than enough song power to make rock and roll sound exciting again once Radiohead hit the ground running.
Granted, it’s not like they didn’t have stiff competition in terms of raw beauty. As much as Yorke’s voice sounded absolutely gorgeous against Jonny Greenwood’s guitar half the time, there were also people like Jeff Buckley coming to the forefront with his own ethereal version of rock and roll on Grace when the group were making The Bends. After Pablo Honey felt like the bad aftertaste of grunge rock, though, the band found themselves accidentally competing with another genre.
Since the group were hailing from England, everyone had already begun jumping on the Britpop hype train as soon as Oasis hit it big. After all, the whole point behind Nirvana was about talking about the horrors of everyday life, so seeing Noel Gallagher write songs that swung all the way back the other way by talking about living forever and being a rock and roll star was enough to satiate the masses.
That wasn’t even the only genre being brought back at the time. Green Day had made the more sophomoric move by inventing pop-punk on Dookie, and Weezer had turned in the kind of alt-rock record that The Beach Boys would have made on their debut, but if those bands had merit, Yorke had nothing but disdain for the age of Cool Brittania.
There was a lot to be proud of knowing that the biggest names in the world came from England, but there were also too many retro sounds to go around. Yorke was interested in making something that no one had ever heard before, and yet the biggest names in the country were suddenly making songs that were pulling from The Beatles’ songbook and acts like Blur making their own take on The Kinks’ greatest hits.
“The whole Britpop thing made me fucking angry”
thom yorke
Yorke may have been directly in the middle of it all, but he wasn’t about to roll over and say that he was all for the retro angle, saying, “The whole Britpop thing made me fucking angry. I hated it. It was backwards-looking, and I didn’t want any part of it.” Even when Greenwood was asked about it, he thought there was no real point in Britpop, thinking that it was the equivalent of bringing back Dixieland jazz for no reason.
If Radiohead was going to play the game, though, Yorke was going to make sure he was making the rules. If Suede was considered the Britpop Bowie and Oasis were the Britpop Beatles, Yorke made sure that anyone’s preconceptions of them being the Britpop U2 were stamped out the minute that Kid A came out, which pretty much put a line in the sand in terms of what they were going to be doing from then on.
And the band have never really looked back from that record, either, always trying to make something fresh and only looking to the past when it doesn’t feel forced. While that has made for their production schedule coming to a screeching halt, its all for the right reasons when you know they are focused on their artistry rather than the screaming fans.
