Why Thom Yorke hates Muse for ripping off Radiohead: “They openly slag us off”
While Thom Yorke often seemingly tries his best to stay away from involving himself in petulant feuds with other bands and artists, that hasn’t stopped the Radiohead and The Smile frontman from lashing out with the occasional caustic remarks about his peers. Whether it’s their bland music that aggrieves him the most or if it’s the insipid ways in which they handle themselves in the public eye, there are plenty of things that have irked Yorke about other artists in the past, and his sharp tongue has always had a particularly pointed way of remarking upon it.
From calling Oasis “primitive music” to deriding the Spice Girls as being “the Antichrist”, there are plenty of cutting quips from Yorke that it’s hard to come up with a retort for, and would surely be hard for the recipients to recover from, but there’s one act whose shtick has never sat well with the singer, primarily because of how they’ve actively spent their entire career supposedly aping him only for their attempts at being copycats to come off as a pallid rehash of their ideas.
Formed in 1994, English rock trio Muse were often hailed as being ‘the next Radiohead’ when they first broke into the spotlight with their quasi-progressive and theatrical brand of rock music. Lacking the same emotional depth and socio-political nous in their lyrics as Radiohead, there were still some musical similarities between Muse’s earliest works and Radiohead’s celebrated albums such as The Bends and OK Computer, but the Oxfordshire five-piece always had far more ambition to draw from a broader palette of influences, and were soon pushing far beyond the boundaries that their Devonian counterparts had fenced themselves in with.
Regardless of how Muse retaliated in order to keep up with Radiohead, they would always suffer the fate of having been second place, and without having laid down a marker of their own that scared Radiohead into making their next move, Muse remained artistically in debt to Radiohead’s superiority. What annoyed Yorke the most, however, was how blatant Muse were in their attempts at copying his band, and despite how they never masked these efforts, they were outwardly antagonistic towards their supposed influence.
“I draw the line at Muse,” Yorke said in a backstage interview in 2001, “because they openly slag us off, as well as openly rip us off.” While it might seem rich of the band to openly mimic the style of Radiohead as a blueprint for the music that Muse makes and then openly criticise them, Yorke was having none of it and doubled down on his animosity towards Matt Bellamy and co.
“That’s like, ‘how fucking dare you?’” Yorke continued. “You know, there’s one thing to imitate, and then to slag off the person you are imitating. That’s just not cool, that’s incredibly bad karma.”
The bad karma that Muse received wouldn’t necessarily be a downturn in popularity, as they’ve continued to grow in the years since to become one of the biggest rock groups of their generation, but they have been on the receiving end of constant derision from Radiohead fans. If there’s one faction in rock fandom who aren’t going to hold back on letting their true feelings known, it’s them.
Yorke also hasn’t let up on his hatred of Muse in recent years either, and joked in a 2019 interview with the Sunday Times that he doesn’t pay attention to what the algorithms on streaming platforms tell him to listen to because they all tell him to “listen to Muse”. While this might be infuriating for Yorke, it’s amusing to think that the algorithm has developed its own devilish sense of humour and is simply doing this to wind up the Radiohead frontman and that they’re deliberately prodding him with reminders of his arch-nemesis in order to stoke another retaliation.
