Thom Yorke discusses “one of the proudest moments” of his career
For every aspiring rockstar, there are usually a handful of milestones that stand out as the key turning points in their career. Whether it’s securing a record contract or hitting the top of the charts for the first time, artists will often celebrate achieving the kind of successes that often feel like a pipedream when they’re starting out in their room strumming a guitar. Even though Radiohead may have wanted people to love their music, Thom Yorke had a specific target in mind when he looked back on his proudest musical achievements.
Coming out of the early 1990s grunge rock scene, Radiohead started in a similar place to artists like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden, crafting songs with a slightly ironic edge while sounding like arena rock. While the band would have their first taste of success on their debut album with the song ‘Creep’, they would spend the rest of their career toying with how far they could stretch their sound beyond the norm.
As the band began work on The Bends, their transformation was already beginning to happen. While there were still arena-ready hard rock songs like the title track, songs like ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ and ‘High and Dry’ showed the more delicate side of their sound, all while embracing the sounds of Britpop going on at the same time.
Becoming desensitised to how the band travelled from one gig to the next, Yorke would spend the next album talking about feelings of alienation and the dangers he had begun to see with the rise of technology. While their label may not have had the most faith in the band’s material on OK Computer, the band would create one of the last milestone records of the 1990s, warning fans about what can happen when they lose themselves to technology.
Although songs like ‘Karma Police’ and ‘Exit Music (For a Film)’ fell in line with what fans may have expected from the group, the cornerstone track for the band was ‘Paranoid Android’. Taking the basis of three different songs and putting them together, Radiohead had crafted their 1990s answer to a song like ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, taking the listener on a musical journey across six minutes.
Even though the song was one of the most unlikely singles for the group to release, they were adamant about turning the song into a smash, including a colourful music video that was as eye-catching as it was disturbing. While Yorke was happy to see the song climbing the charts, he felt that the true moment they arrived was when they performed the song on television.
When discussing the band’s press circuit, Yorke remembered the great feeling of getting such a piece on the radio, saying, “I was most proud of the fact we were able to get things slipped through [into the mainstream]. One of the proudest moments for me was getting ‘Paranoid Android’ on Radio 1. The reaction it got was just fucking wicked. Just amazing”.
Given the music being aired on Radio 1 around that time, it’s easy to see how much ‘Paranoid Android’ stood out. Coming at the apex of the boy band movement and various pop ballads, Radiohead demanded attention from the moment they started playing and ended up walking away as the next kings of rock and roll.
