Thom Yorke by Trevor Baker

were so popular, it was becoming very clear that, as he kept practising, Thom was beginning to stand out even among his talented peer group. At the end of Thom’s first year at Exeter, Laura Forrest-Hay and Martin Brooks graduated and left the band, which carried on by recruiting a new drummer Lindsey Moore and a new bass player Andy Hills. Thom was starting to have a greater input.
    “I just thought he was an incredibly talented musician,” John says. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been in the same room as him playing the guitar, but it’s quite an awesome experience, really. A lot of the tracks that are on [Radiohead’s debut album] Pablo Honey he would play at parties on acoustic guitar.”
    Among other songs, he would also play ‘Stop Whispering’, a particular favourite among his peer group. But it was at Exeter that he first came up with an even later Radiohead song ‘High And Dry’. “At the time everything was flowing between all sorts of different projects and bands and things,” says John Matthias. “They were just songs. Sometimes he’d say, ‘This is a song I wrote with Jonny’, or ‘This is a song I wrote with my band at home’. We’d basically rehearse once and then do a gig at a party or a ball or something like that. Then we wouldn’t see each other for ages and then we’d rehearse in a student house and do another gig. It was very ad hoc. But, for example, we played ‘High And Dry’ in the Headless Chickens.
    This caused some confusion for fans of Headless Chickens when The Bends came out. “When I first heard ‘High And Dry’ I loved it and thought it sounded really familiar,” says one Exeter contemporary of Thom’s, Eileen Doran, “but I thought it was just one of those songs that strike a chord straight away. Then I realised that I had heard it many times! I’ve got a video of them doing it and it’s a really interesting version. It was slightly faster and they had this black girl singing backing vocals and that added a different sound to Headless Chickens. When they did ‘High And Dry’ it had this really lovely backing vocal to it.”
    Increasingly Thom believed that pop music, with its directness and endless possibilities, had a lot more to offer than the elitist world of fine art. Although he would still diligently study his English Literature texts, he wondered what he was doing in his art class. Apart from anything else he just didn’t have enough time. “That’s the amazing thing,” says Shaun. “He had his course and Headless Chickens and he was going back to Oxford to do On A Friday as well.”
    He’d always known that he wasn’t a great artist technically. “He wasn’t good at drawing,” says Shaun. “He wasn’t an academic, traditional artist. He was interested in outsider art. Art done by insane people, or people who are not conventionally trained. And all that comes through in the artwork he does with Stanley Donwood. It’s ‘badly drawn’, scratchy stuff but it’s wonderful. He was just interested in his own style. He was one of the few people who started to use computers in his art.”
    “They told me I couldn’t draw at art college,” Thom said to Q .“At least I’m honest about it. My whole argument at art college was, ‘What’s the fucking point in painting or drawing this thing in this way when I can go and buy a camera for two quid and do it like that? Why should I bother drawing it?’ I could never quite work out how I blagged my way into art college anyway.”
    Although he’d always had a strong sense of self, and of where he was going, at Exeter Thom’s ideas about the world crystallised. He became disillusioned with the art scene, seeing it as an elitist, phoney playground for pseuds and their rich backers.
    “I did a few things on computer,” he said. “But I spent most of the time bragging about my future as a pop star.”
    This is no exaggeration.
    “With Thom it was literally, ‘What are you going to do when you