Thom Yorke’s favourite Radiohead song: “The most beautiful thing”
Building a catalogue of work should be the primary focus for every creative starting out in the music industry. To get fame and fortune might well be the aim of some, but a true artist knows that it is their body of work which will leave them in the history books. Thom Yorke has built up a repertoire of material that most credible musicians would envy.
Though wool and steel may no longer be the highest-earning part of Britain’s GDP, Radiohead remains one of the country’s finest exports. A band whose creativity has never slowed down, who have never shied away from pushing the envelope or embracing the experimental, despite thriving for decades within the mainstream. With an eclectic mix of work, there is one song that Yorke deems as his favourite, one of which he is most proud of.
There are countless tracks that Yorke could have chosen as his favourite number, and, unsurprisingly, he didn’t opt to pick out ‘Creep’, a song he has been vocally hostile about over the last few decades. Arguably Radiohead’s most popular song, the group has refused to play the 1992 number live for the majority of their career, but have waned in their resolve in more recent shows. No matter, the track doesn’t come close to the kind of personal connection that would make it Yorke’s favourite.
Rather expectedly, instead of opting for one of the big hit singles as his number one, Yorke stayed true to form and picked out a deep cut when asked about it in a past interview with BBC Two’s The Culture Show. The Radiohead frontman didn’t hesitate slightly before providing his answer in the shape of the Kid A track ‘How To Disappear Completely’.
Kid A may have marked a seismic shift in the world of glitchy electronica and ambient abstraction, but Radiohead didn’t fully sever the thread that tethered them to their alt-rock past. Amidst the alien textures and fractured rhythms, there remained moments of delicate, human vulnerability. Nowhere is that more apparent than on ‘How to Disappear Completely’.
The track floats with Yorke’s ghostly acoustic strums and Colin Greenwood’s quietly aching bassline. It’s not just a holdover from a former Radiohead era; it’s a masterpiece of emotional devastation. It’s this resonance that landed squarely in the heart of Yorke. Delving a little deeper, the interviewer then asks Yorke why he holds this song dearest to his heart, and his answer is suitably moving: “Because it’s the most beautiful thing we ever did, I think,” he said.
Yorke has revealed previously how the inspiration for the track originated from a poignant conversation he shared with REM singer Michael Stipe, the Radiohead man disclosed: “That song is about the whole period of time that OK Computer was happening. We did the Glastonbury Festival and this thing in Ireland. Something snapped in me.”
Faced with the potential of a full meltdown, Yorke sought advice from his famous friend: “I just said, ‘That’s it. I can’t take it anymore.’ And more than a year later, we were still on the road. I hadn’t had time to address things. The lyrics came from something Michael Stipe said to me. I rang him and said, ‘I cannot cope with this.’ And he said, ‘Pull the shutters down and keep saying, ‘I’m not here, this is not happening.'”
He continued: “I dreamt I was floating down the Liffey and there was nothing I could do. I was flying around Dublin and I really was in the Dream. The whole song is my experiences of really floating.”
The track took years for Radiohead to perfect with the first attempt at lyrics for the song dating back all the way to 1997, with early versions of the material being played in soundchecks finding their way online in 1999 whilst the band still were tweaking the song. ‘How To Disappear Completely’ acts as an anomaly on Kid A as it is the only track born out of the OK Computer era.
Watch footage of Radiohead performing the Kid A number in Japan from 2008, below.
