“How dare you”: The band Thom Yorke wanted to “go down in flames”
It can be a dog-eat-dog world whenever an artist hits the big time. It might be considered one of the best gigs someone can have if they get to play music for a living, but the more that people start to look at the competition, it can be easy to grow a little bit of resentment for the people that are making their way up the ladder around the same time that you are making your first artistic steps. But Thom Yorke knew better than to try to make nice when someone tried to take a few cheap shots at Radiohead.
Granted, Radiohead were the last people that most people thought of when it came to being openly hostile. Yorke had his moments where he would fly into a rage like when playing ‘Anyone Can Play Guitar’ for MTV, but a lot of their greatest emotions were reserved for when they started making anguished music, like hearing Yorke soar in the middle of the song ‘Exit Music (For A Film)’.
But somewhere around 1998, the rock world entered into what might be considered the “post-OK Computer period”. The minute that the band made their 1997 epic, every single rock band in existence wanted to have something that sounded like that, and while there were people that tried their best like Coldplay on Parachutes or Travis on The Man Who, there was no way any Radiohead fans were going to fall for the scaled-down version of their favourite band.
Then again, those fans would have to get used to the new bands, because Radiohead weren’t remotely interested in continuing on that path. They had done that part of their career, and Kid A was the moment they left that sound behind and were convinced that electronic music was their next calling when making ‘Idioteque’. So if the band weren’t going to make any new rock and roll, Muse was going to have to suffice.
Although the British power trio were able to put together some fantastic epics across albums like Origin of Symmetry and Absolution, it’s not like the comparisons aren’t staring everyone in the face. It was clear that Matt Bellamy had listened to his fair share of Yorke, but by channelling the power of Jeff Buckley and the gravitas of Freddie Mercury, he had enough originality to get stadiums of people bouncing along to his riffs. But Yorke was less than impressed when he heard what the new kids were doing.
Since Bellamy had taken to airing out his grievances in the press, Yorke had no problem calling them a ripoff, saying, “There’s one band called Muse. I draw the line at Muse because they openly slag us off as well as openly ripping us off. That’s like, How fucking dare you. There’s one thing to imitate and then to slag off the person you’re imitating, well, go down in a ball of flames, you deserve it. That’s just not cool, that’s incredibly bad karma.”
But the comparisons don’t necessarily hold as much water when you look at the way that both of them write material. ‘Paranoid Android’ may have been a fantastic piece of music, but there was no chance that Bellamy was going to write something that cerebral, and given Muse’s penchant for theatrics, Yorke had gone through enough rock and roll posturing to avoid writing a song like ‘Knights of Cydonia’.
And given the fact that Muse were coming up in the mid-2000s, it’s hard to think of albums like Hail to the Thief and In Rainbows as Radiohead’s answer to what they were doing. They may have been considered old farts by some younger kids who weren’t there for OK Computer, but if they were over-the-hill in some respects, these records proved that all of the new whippersnappers needed to stay off their lawn.
