“Just a nightmare”: The one music format Thom Yorke hated more than any other
When you think of rock stars liable to mouth off given a moment’s opportunity, there are several options one would get to before Thom Yorke of Radiohead. The Gallagher brothers arguably made a career out of it, and ditto for Gene Simmons. More recently, Matt Healy of The 1975 has a chronic inability to keep his trap shut. However, Radiohead seem to reside on the more taciturn end of the moody spectrum. But if anyone has the ability to surprise everyone, it would be the lads who made OK Computer.
The whole thing makes a lot of sense when you think about it. After all, it’s not like Radiohead have ever been a group to give off good vibes, peace and love. The album that made them one of the biggest bands of their generation was a despairing, vitriolic scream of confusion and anger at how technology is separating and dehumanising the human race. One that I’m sure none of us can at all relate to in the year 2025, right?
Just a cursory listen to the band’s music shows that you’re in the presence of a group of men very much in favour of a good moan. Most of the time, they’re content to let the music do the mithering, but when the wind’s in the right direction, the normally monosyllabic Yorke may decide to let loose in an interview. He can be known to let a journalist in on his feelings, too.
Case in point, an interview that Yorke conducted with The Believer in 2009. Perhaps the jet lag loosened him up more than he normally would, but the singer is in rare form here. The targets of his ire are varied, ranging from governments trying to kneecap public transport systems to environmental causes, but the core thrust of the interview was the changing nature of the music industry.
Which format does Thom Yorke hate the most?
This is a subject that, at the time, Yorke and Radiohead as a whole were uniquely qualified to talk about. They were a little under two years out from threatening to upend the entire music industry on its head with the release of 2007’s In Rainbows. The album wasn’t just a surprise release, announced basically the same day it was available, but one could also pay whatever they wanted for it, from absolutely nothing at all to £99.99.
This move away from traditional release methods wasn’t just for fun. It turns out Yorke has some strong opinions about industry distribution methods, and, in this interview, for a change, he was more than happy to talk about them. His ire is directed squarely at one place, though. “I always hated CDs. Just a fucking nightmare,” he said, with no small amount of relish, admitting, “I’m happy to see the CD format disappear.”
At the time, this was a pretty wild stance to take. Illegal downloading was in the middle of kneecapping the entire music industry before streaming righted the ship (for record labels and not artists, to be absolutely clear). An artist at the level of Thom Yorke to come out so strongly against the format was a bold stance to take, but he doubled down on it later in the interview.
When asked about the move toward digital, the man rightly pointed out that the industry was in a similar place two decades earlier, saying, “There’s a process of natural selection going on right now. The music business was waiting to die in its current form about 20 years ago. But then, hallelujah, the CD turned up and kept it going for a bit. But basically, it was dead.”
With over a decade and a half of hindsight, it’s clear that Radiohead were absolutely on the right side of history here, trying, in their way, to use the internet to cut out the middleman and make music a direct interaction between a band and its audience. One wonders what they must think of the streaming era, where the middleman seems to be the only person making any money from the music.
