Exploring Thom Yorke’s peculiar theme of car crashes
From the moment he picked up a guitar, Thom Yorke set about finding beauty in destruction. While the vast majority of first songs are fumbling ditties about girls, Thom’s was called ‘Mushroom Cloud’, about the strange beauty of one of the most horrifying images humanity every produced. He was about 9 when he wrote it, so at least he was starting as he meant to go on.
This would be followed by songs about everything from romantic rejection to the inherent fakeness of modern life, along with, surprisingly enough, a number of songs about cars. Despite Yorke’s childhood love of Queen, we’re not talking about ‘I’m In Love With My Car’ either. Several of Yorke’s tracks are directed squarely at cars with the kind of venom not seen since Steve Martin growled that he needed “four fucking wheels and a seat” at the rental operator in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.
It began in ‘Stupid Car’ off Radiohead’s debut album Pablo Honey, which is a little on the nose but for all their musical genius, Yorke’s lyricism has never been one for subtlety. As if to prove that fact, it continued with ‘Killer Car’ a b-side on the High & Dry/Planet Telex single. This is when we get to the real classics that are inspired by Yorke’s hatred for the horseless carriage.
In fact, if you’ve spent any time listening to Radiohead’s 1997 magnum opus OK Computer, you know exactly where we’re going with this. Album opener ‘Airbag’ is all about the exhilaration of surviving a near-death experience and knowing just how lucky you are to be alive. You might not know that this is something that Yorke himself has a personal experience with.
When he was a teenager, he barely survived a serious car crash, with his girlfriend in the passenger seat. It’s clear that he’s carried this trauma with him his entire life, because reckoning with death at 70 miles per hour is the basis of another song for another band entirely, nearly 40 years after the event itself. In the second album by his side project, The Smile, is a song called ‘Bending Hectic’. Another song inspired by the dangers of cars, but in this case, it’s blessedly fictional.
The song portrays a man taking a vintage sports car through the Italian countryside. Before this can get too James Bond, though, he skids out of control on a hairpin bend. If ‘Airbag’ is about the feeling after a crash, ‘Bending Hectic’ is about the stillness and silence one feels the moment it happens. “Time is kind of frozen / As you’re gazing at the view / And I swear I’m seeing double” he sings in his inimitable croon, before the end of the song roars into life and Tom howls “Despite these slings / Despite these arrows / I’ll force myself to turn.”
As loathe as Yorke would be to saddle one of his songs with something as base as a single meaning, This could read as a song about never forgetting you have the ability to change your life, no matter how out of control it may feel. Which would dovetail nicely with the meaning of ‘Airbag’, and reflect the overall humanity inherent in Yorke’s work. It’s something which often gets ignored among all his doom and gloom, that no matter how bad it gets, true empathy and true beauty can always be found.
