The guitarist and band Thom Yorke was always “obsessed” with: “I decided, Yep this is what I’m doing”
Thom Yorke feels like an artist who has always simply been himself. The music he makes across all his projects has such a distinct feel, one that is always distinctly his, that it’s hard to imagine him ever wishing for anything different, or ever turning to anyone else for inspiration.
It’s perhaps part of the reason why he’s come to hate ‘Creep’ so much. Out of their entire discography, that debut single is the one track that feels different. By the time the final chorus hits with a huge, boisterous, sing-along moment of “I’m a creep!” the track feels maximalist in a classic stadium rock type of way, which is not the music the band has made since.
Instead, Radiohead tend to lean towards their own brand of minimalism. I don’t minimal in that these songs are simple at all as there are still big, bold moments, and even still some big rock moments. But they’re more nuanced and understated than the band simply shredding through riffs.
They feel like they exist in their own world, populated only by Yorke’s ideas rather than any outsider influence. But no man is an island, and no one ever turns to start making music without loving music first.
Yorke’s entry to it all feels surprising now though. It’s tough to imagine him as a young boy, standing in his room, doing air guitar in the mirror listening to Queen songs.
“I was obsessed with Queen when ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ came out,” Yorke said. He will have been only seven years old when Queen released their huge and now utterly timeless hit, and as a kid, he was locked in.
It must have been a thrill. To be so young and be listening to music so exciting and groundbreaking, witnessing bands like Queen exist and release music in real time as a kid, it must have been fun but also deeply inspiring. Boundaries were being pushed right there on the radio. The creativity in a song like that is so glaringly obvious that it must have left young listeners feeling wowed, wanting to harness that for themselves.
Yorke definitely did. “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,” he told the BBC, claiming this was really the song that started it all for him.
However, in his fantasies when he listened to the song and imagined himself as a the rockstars, he wasn’t the frontman he is now. “I didn’t see myself as the sort of character that could put myself in front of a microphone,” he later confessed to The Singers Talk. Instead, he saw himself as the guitarist, adding, “I was really into Queen, but I never saw myself as Freddie Mercury. I was always Brian May in my head, surprisingly.”
Perhaps somewhere there is an alternate timeline where Yorke isn’t Thom Yorke of Radiohead, but a guitarist shredding in a theatrical rock band.
