Can't sleep? Neither can Radiohead.
(Thank you to Kurt and Jam for helping me source these quotes!)
(Time Out Magazine, March 13 1995)
Nice Dream sounded very different to what it did when you first started doing it live towards the end of 93. As if the mood in your camp subsequent to that took the wind out of it.
Thom: Totally, I’m sure that air of sleepiness won't be on the next album at all There was this sort of picture of us crawling around, trying to stand up to playing something but having no energy. Being picked off the floor, basically. Nice Dream was written in two places, in a basement flat that I lived in and it was finished off later. The lyrics were written in one of those fucking sad, half-formed ways. I was singing them half asleep and when I get drunk, or whatever, I usually find that I don’t get hangovers. I just don’t sleep at all, I just go into a sort of coma and come out, but my head goes round and round through for hours. The lyric refers to a story of Kurt Vonnegut where this crystal’s been found that turns all water completely solid and someone drops it in the sea. And if you want to kill yourself, you just put your finger in the water. So there’s this image of all these people, just turned into statues.
Thom: "Yeah, the food's revolting but it's a relief to be in Europe again. We had this promo thing in America recently where we were living through pure fucking hell on an average of three hours' sleep a night. We were doing a gig at midnight to 100 people who didn't give a fuck for some radio station who didn't give a fuck, getting to bed at three, getting on a plane at six, getting to the next destination, doing a day of interviews, getting to the soundcheck, something to eat, back onstage at midnight..." His voice trails off in horror as he pushes his slop around the plate in front of him.
"Five nights in a row, man. And people wonder why you moan! The only reason that people could give me for not going home was that in five years' time we might be lucky to find anyone to talk to us.
Colin and Phil are opposites. Colin is the only one in the band who is single. He is hyperactive and suffers from insomnia. In the taxi-limo to the Palladium he devotes two minutes to explain how convenient it is with electronic windowpane openers. Little brother Jonny gets tired of him first and asks him to shut up.
COLIN GREENWOOD POTTERS ABOUT HIS FARMHOUSE kitchen, making tea and crumpets for everyone. He wears a tatty green gardening jumper, intermittently, he makes vague and disinterested attempts to wash up. Colin is regarded as the rock’n’roll element of Radiohead.
When he was younger he used to wear make-up and sneak off to Alien Sex Fiend and Fall concerts, and sleep on station benches. After his degree, for nine months before the band were signed, he worked in Our Price to broaden his musical knowledge. He’s also considered to be “frighteningly intelligent” by both Phil and Thom. He did his thesis on the writing of Raymond Carver. The victim of an over-active mind, he suffers greatly from insomnia.
“I suppose I’m the most gregarious member of the band because I don’t like spending time alone. I like having meals with friends and staying up late drinking. Hardly rock ‘n’ roll. But what is? Pissing in hotel rooms? Doing cocaine? I used to share a room with Ed on tour until he refused to, I kept on waking him up at all hours of the morning. So I had a room to myself, which was a shame because Ed’s very entertaining. He talks in his sleep – actually it’s more like sleep shouting. He starts having conversations that you just wish you could hear the other half of. He sometimes does accents too. He once came out with this thick Irish brogue, started shouting ‘HELP! THE BUILDING’S ON FIRE... AND TERRY WOGAN’S UP THERE’. It was hilarious.”
"It was like that typical Radiohead thing, things had been brewing," Ed continues. "We're not really confrontational with another. Things had been brewing and they basically came to a head. We were all completely knackered on this Mexican tour bus, 12 of us, with six bunks and they were about 5ft 6inches long, so you're getting no sleep. It was just ridiculous."
Thom: I used to have this one car, and I very nearly killed myself in it one morning, and gave my girlfriend at the time really bad whiplash in an accident. I was 17. Hadn't slept the night before.
(radiohead.com, sometime during OKC; Thom's writing)
one of our friends spills a glass of wine over a vacuum packed gucci outfit complete with matching white hand bag. the witch goes crazy, we think it is fuunny. until we see the evil in her eyes. m friend is asked to leave. the gucci creature is the closest thing i have seen to the devil. the woman is possessed. i cannot sleep that night asking what we've got our selves into.
On all the other tracks, however, there's a claustrophobia that flickers and burns; spectral pressure that bends the metallic guitar-lines into wrought iron. "There was a very odd presence in the house we were recording in," Yorke says, his eyes careful neutral. "I just didn't sleep at all. I started seeing things, hearing things. There was a very claustrophobic ghost in the house... I mean, we made jokes about it, but there was fear everywhere, coming out of the walls and floors. It took me by the ankles and shook me until there was nothing left." He laughs. "There was really horrible wallpaper in my room. Maybe it was just that and my imagination."
Oxfordshire 1996, and Radiohead finally begin to record the follow-up to 'The Bends'. Thom Yorke's brain is accelerating. The aforementioned view amplified by the conditions in which he's working. Recording at night, he goes to bed at dawn and wakes at ten to continue the lyrics. His state of mind is sleepless and fractured. Nerve endings are frayed and the atmosphere is intense.
Dave: "OK, so you were telling me about this house, one of Henry's wives dying in childbirth or something... etc., I mean when you came back from the madness of the tour, what was the feel like in a place like that? Was it a happy feeling, or a tranquil feeling, or a scary feeling- I mean you certainly mentioned ghosts in the machine, there was something going on-
Jonny: "Yeah, yeah, there was!
Dave: "It was kind of scary?
Thom: "It was... well he's the sceptic and I'm not, and we joked about it for the first few weeks. I think old places, old stones, they remember things, you know? But none of us saw anything or anything like that. They had nights, most nights I tried to stay up until dawn, I couldn't sleep. That was probably me being paranoid... well maybe it wasn't... I tried going to bed stone-cold sober and it didn't help... it was scary.
Jonny: "I think that's why the songs are all that tempo... Thom kept us awake shouting every night, because he couldn't sleep.
(Les Inrockuptibles #110, June 25th 1997; translated from French)
Thom: Sometimes I'd like to think that the band's musical freedom is also my own. That I've become strong and independent enough to dictate my own rules of life. Unfortunately, I'm aware that I'm prisoner to Radiohead. My body and soul are totally dependent on the band and our music, and I can't live without them. I only have one obligation in life, and that's to serve Radiohead, but it's eating up my whole life... During the recording of OK Computer, there were entire nights when I couldn't sleep, when I was too obsessed with my songs to fall asleep. I'd have to get drunk and pass out at around 6 in the morning... I don't feel like a free man. The freedom I gained was quickly taken away by the band and today I live like an obsessed, neurotic person.
Thom: "We recorded a lot through the night, getting up at five in the afternoon and working until 6am. But then I was getting up at 10am to write the words. Sometimes."
(Dazed & Confused #32, July 1997; written by Thom)
are you paranoid in your sleep?
i am paranoid about looslng time and those i love in my sleep.
i get razors lodged in my skull when i am asleep.
no. i can usually hear what people are saying in my sleep though, you have the ablity to hear many things at once in dreams dont you? i have tile ability to see through people when im asleep, something i dont havenormally. but occasionally this becomes too much to take.
i am paranoid about looslng time and those i love in my sleep.
i get razors lodged in my skull when i am asleep.
no. i can usually hear what people are saying in my sleep though, you have the ablity to hear many things at once in dreams dont you? i have tile ability to see through people when im asleep, something i dont havenormally. but occasionally this becomes too much to take.
Your lyrics and your music are both complex and delicate. Aren't you scared of all the huge success that you are experiencing?
Thom: Every day, when I wake up, I try not to be intimidated by the weird things going on around us. When we finished the record, I didn't sleep for a week. I kept saying to myself "My god, what have we done". I didn't expect such a success.
So sequencing the album tracks was difficult?
That would be an understatement. I got one of those MiniDiscs where you can change the sequence, which was fatal. I was going to sleep at two and getting up at five, because I'd have a sequence in my head. I'd programme it into my MiniDisc and make tapes for everybody, and send them out, and they'd go, 'Thanks very much, Thom.' And then another one - 'Thanks very much, Thom' And they didn't listen to any of them, cos they knew I'd fucking lost it.
Thom: "In retrospect, The Bends had a very obvious and comforting resolution, which was by accident, not by design. But this one didn't. For two weeks before mastering the record and deciding which songs would go on it, I got up every morning at 5am; I've got one of those minidisc machines where you can swap the order of the tracks, take tracks off, put them back on. I couldn't find the resolution that I was expecting to hear once you put the songs together, and I just went into a wild panic for two weeks. I couldn't sleep at all, because I just expected the resolution to be there - and it wasn't. There was all the trouble and no resolution. But that wasn't really true, as I discovered later. When we chose to put 'Tourist' at the end, and I chilled out about it and stopped getting up at five in the morning and driving myself nuts, we did find that it was the only resolution for us - because a lot of the album was about background noise and everything moving too fast and not being able to keep up.
Thom: "Err yeah, it's out of the box... where was I? Oh yeah, the words... but actually the words were supposed to to be basically all the things that actually keep me awake at night, you know, you see I can't sleep at the moment."
Steve: "Yeah."
Thom: "Well these were the things... each line in this song, they're the lines that kept me awake at night for about a month."
Thom: "...[So] I filled up a whole MiniDisc of stuff, of songs and half-formed ramblings or whatever. And then there's a lightning strike and it wiped it all. And I was really upset, because there was really good stuff on it. But that was the general vibe of the house at the time, so I didn't think any of it. Then I forgot it, and six months later, I was in an airplane coming back from Japan or something and I didn't sleep at all. I hadn't slept for ages and ages. Suddenly, I was lying there, and I'd forgotten all the stuff from the MiniDisc, and 'Morning Bell' just came back to me, exactly as I had written it, with all the words and everything. It sounds like it's about a breakup, but it's really not. It's about being in this house. So there you go. You know, things are never that direct with me, unfortunately."
Thom: "It's very, very violent. Extremely violent. The really weird thing about that was I wrote the song with all the words pretty much straight away, which is basically the only one I did that with. I recorded it onto MiniDisc and then there was a lightning storm, and it wiped the MiniDisc and I lost the song. I completely forgot it. Then five months later, I was on a plane, knackered for 24 hours, I was just falling asleep, and I remembered it. It was really weird, I never had that before. It's gone in and took a long time to come out again. The lyrics are really... they're not as dramatic as they sound, you know? Except 'cut the kids in half', which is dramatic no matter which way you read it."
And Yorke, compact, busy, ever so slightly intimidating (is it his drooping eyes, or is he actually angry?), moves lightly in big boots. He’s laughing about the band’s hotel: “We arrived there, 8 in the morning, on three hours’ sleep, and it was like a country club, just heaving with golfers in Pringle sweaters. I took one look and went, ‘Nooooo!’”
THE BIG QUESTION, perhaps, is whether Yorke can play Edvard Munch’s screaming ghoul for much longer. He admits that having Noah has changed him. Getting up after three hours sleep and dealing with a child’s needs have brought him a welcome sense of what’s really important. Noah doesn’t even know what his dad does for a living, he says.
Thom: "(laughs) Umm... We stopped about two and a half years ago, the band I'm in called Radiohead." After the completion of the year-long Hail to the Thief tour, they had flown the 'wrong way round the world', east to west. 'You're not built to do that. It just spun our heads out, man. I don't think anybody really slept for, like, three, four weeks. So that level of sleep deprivation and doing these big shows under lot of pressure... It was just messed up.'
[...]
Thom: "The most sort of fundamental bit of that tune for me is the idea of 'a million engines in neutral'. You know, if you sit in a Tokyo traffic jam, you can't help thinking that perhaps this isn't the best way to proceed... (laughs) And it was written... the initial musical ideas were written in a sleepless night in New York where it absolutely chunked down rain the size of tennis balls all night long. And just listening to that sound all night long with my laptop and not being able to sleep... it sort of came from that..."
Thom Yorke: ...from Channel 4 News in Britain, and he said, "Well, what are you doing personally?" And I'd been up since 7 o'clock and I'd only had three hours sleep, so I said, "Not enough." And it was one of those really awful TV moments where it's silent.
Nick Kent: What exactly has been going on with you and Radiohead over the past two and a half years?
Thom Yorke: We needed to stop- properly stop-for a number of reasons. I wanted to make this record [The Eraser]. It was something I just had to get stuck in. I needed to do something on my own for a bit. There were lots of 'imminent bursts' going on [within the band]. It all just ended on a really weird note. We did this last bout of touring [in April/May'04] that fucked our heads up really badly. We flew the wrong way round the world: we went from Japan to Australia to California and ended up so jet-lagged, we never actually slept. Basically it was three or four weeks of constant sleep deprivation and illness. It was just shite. That tour was our last obligation and... it had stopped being fun. After that, everybody just disappeared. I still saw Colin a lot but everyone else was off on their own, forgetting about it.
THE FLIGHT LAST night was torturous. He didn't sleep—he never sleeps, in fact, no matter what he tries. The herbal pills shut down his body but not his brain, and melatonin gives him wide-awake nightmares that he dubs "the horrors." Sometimes he works on songs on his laptop, but usually, by the time he's halfway through the air, Thom Yorke is silently freaking out. But this morning he woke up, put on a Björk tune, and got a massage.
Steve: "Has becoming a dad for a second time or - obviously watching now the two youngsters grow up - did that effect some lyrically your new album, at all? 'Cause it played into the first one. 'Analyse'..."
Thom: "It always, you know... it's part of, a big part of my life, obviously. I still feel kind of uncomfortable talking about it, just because it's... on the one hand it seems to be the one thing one shouldn't discuss, a) being a man, which I have a problem with anyway, 'cause that's just downright sexist, and b) that it's the most un-rock'n'roll thing, so you should just pretend that you're not a dad, which is what most people seem to do, which I also think's deeply unhealthy. So I guess I will talk about it, because of that. But it does make me feel uncomfortable. Whether it was a formal part of this record... obviously, yeah, I think, not least of which, because of the context of sort of getting involved in Friends Of The Earth and like a lot of people becoming aware of the global warming thing. Obviously you're suddenly presented with a finite... the concept of a finite future. Much as actually we were when we grew up, 'cause we were presented with the concept of the bomb, you know? And grew up with this bizarre scenario. Remember that... what was the name of that movie? Was it.... umm..."
Steve: "I can't remember, it was shown in all the schools..."
Thom: "Yeah, it traumatised us all."
Steve: "Absolutely, it was basically the nuclear bomb was dropped and this is literally the fallout from it."
Thom: "Yeah..."
Steve "It terrified everyone, everyone had nightmares after that."
Thom: "Rather than actually being a threat, this is a reality and it's just a debate about when it occurs and how it happens. So, I don't think it would be too personal to say I didn't sleep very much for a few months until I sort of worked out a way of dealing with it, and one of the ways of dealing with it was to put it into this record."
Thom: For me that was the main inspiration on doing The Eraser thing. It was just finding my way around all this stuff... that you know... I was coming to pretty cold. I was having to learn pretty fast quite a lot of it. 'Cause I didn’t actually... I think I only really started throwing myself into learning about sequences in 2000. Before that I’d never really gone anywhere near them.
In terms of inspiration, I don’t know. I was... it was doing it for me in a way, you know. A lot of it was fragments that where then assembled. Bits and pieces and random stuff that I would just knock off if I couldn’t sleep in the middle of night... and then somewhere within the midst of that there would be 4 bars and I’d be like..."ooh, hello, what’s this?"
Michael: "'94? When you were making The Bends?"
Ed: "Yeah. It was... that whole time was painful. The record we were trying to make, where we were moving, and I think Mexico brought it all out because we were getting less sleep, we had less sleep, and we were tired. And we'd just been in Thailand..."
Gilles: Low End Theory... How was that?
Thom: I did it twice. The first time, they announced it and I hadn't slept for three days, I was having a bad insomnia thing. And Flying Lotus sort of arranged it and I sort of tried to bail out of it. He sent me pictures of the queue outside. And I thought I'd better not [bail out], cuz there'd be a riot. And it was great.
Besides, this idea that ‘Paranoid Android’ was intended as a joke — a sozzled attempt to rewrite Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ - doesn’t quite tally with Yorke’s own of account of how he wrote the lyrics. They came to him at 5am following a hateful night out among coked-up music biz types in Los Angeles.
“I was trying to sleep when I literally heard these voices that wouldn’t leave me alone," he recalled, back in 1997. “Basically, [‘Paranoid Android’] is just about chaos, chaos, utter fucking chaos.”
