Thom Yorke by Trevor Baker

Author:Trevor Baker [Trevor Baker]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784189495
Publisher: John Blake Publishing
Published: 2015-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

And get past it they did. And they were still as ambitious as ever. Following the release of The Bends, they headed back to America for an astonishing five tours. When asked why they did it, Thom said, “Don’t fucking ask me, it wasn’t my idea!” In the USA, The Bends was a definite flop in comparison with Pablo Honey for the first couple of months, yet they were determined to prove themselves all over again. In the summer of 1995, they had their best chance when REM invited them on tour. It had been a running joke that the only bands they would support were U2 or REM. When they got the call from Michael Stipe’s band, Thom couldn’t believe it. Stipe had been one of his biggest heroes since he was at school.

“I was absolutely terrified of meeting him,” he said later, “because I projected so much stuff onto him when I was a kid.” But when they met it was Michael who was more effusive. “I’m really glad you could do this,” he told Thom. “I’m a very big fan.” Thom was stupefied. “I’ve never believed in hero worship,” he wrote in his tour diary, “but I have to admit to myself that I’m fighting for breath.”

REM acted like a crash course in ‘how to be a big band’ to Thom. He was astonished at how good they were at schmoozing without losing the plot. “It seems you have to be nice to people forever,” he mused. “I may as well get used to my cracked smile.”

But it didn’t take long before he realised that REM were just ordinary people. It helped him realise what other people felt when they approached him for an autograph. “Now Michael and I have quite a good relationship,” he said to Alex Ross in the New Yorker. “Making friends with your idol makes you realise how fucking important it is to stay on this side and never go to that side.”

It helped that REM were so supportive. Michael Stipe declared one night on tour that Radiohead were so good “it’s frightening”. On another date, Thom was mortified when a girl approached their table in a restaurant when the two bands were eating and asked for his autograph and not the REM front man’s.

He’d never liked supporting other bands as much as playing headline shows. He kept having to tell himself that he couldn’t expect the same reaction from the audience. As long as they were facing the right direction and they “had their eyes open” it was OK. But the REM tour was different. Everything seemed to be going well. After one show in Norway, he played the rest of the band a new demo he’d written on the acoustic guitar. It was called, he said in a tour diary at the time, ‘No Surprises Please’. Colin, he reported, “went nuts.”

By then the sheer effort they were making was starting to pay off. The Bends eventually went Top Ten in the UK and was selling steadily, by word of mouth, around the world.

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