David Bowie: The singer that made Thom Yorke want to be a musician
As the leading member of Radiohead, Thom Yorke has always operated on the peripheries of the mainstream. Despite the Oxfordshire band’s impressive career, somehow managing to remain credible while being wildly commercially successful, there is a good reason why the group is considered an outlier of the rock spectrum.
Never fully leaning into a particular genre, style or motif, Radiohead’s only creative direction is to always move forward. Through experimental lyricism and musicality, the band have managed to put one foot in front of the other for over three decades, evolving with every album they have released. While the quintet can boast a multitude of inspirations, there is perhaps one figure that has operated as their artistic muse.
David Bowe famously noted: “If you feel safe in the area you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth. And when you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.”
This notion would help to confirm Bowie as one of the most daring pop acts of all time. Rarely letting himself stagnate or conform, Bowie pushed himself creatively with every single new project. From his days as a long-haired dandy to the shocking rock alien Ziggy Stardust, through his time as the bleach-blonde pop star all the way through to his poetic final recordings with Blackstar, Bowie was always evolving his unique vision.
The connection between him and Radiohead is easy to detect, especially with the band’s lead singer, Thom Yorke. The musician hasn’t just contributed to pushing Radiohead into new musical spaces but with his solo work, too. It would appear that Bowie’s example was one that connected with Yorke at an early age. He would confirm that watching the ‘Life on Mars’ singer would push him into becoming a musician.
Speaking to the Grammys in 2009, Yorke celebrated his love of Bowie: “Obviously, all music that I listen to inspires me. I remember sitting on a climbing frame in a local play park, and I had just seen the video for ‘Ashes to Ashes’ by David Bowie. It was the craziest thing I’d ever seen, and all the other kids were sort of saying how it was too weird, and I thought, ‘I wanna do that for a living.’”
Being “too weird” is not something Bowie or Yorke ever worried about in their careers. Never afraid to push themselves into new and uncomfortable realms, Yorke’s ability to face such apparent opposition was present when he rejected ‘Creep’ in the mid-1990s and is still present to this day.
