Yes, we went over Thom's car ownership history. but even better is taking a closer look at Thom's thoughts on cars, and how they've changed with the years...
(because RH has so many car-centric lyrics, I'm just going to have two sections; one for songs, the next for quotes. Many thanks to citizeninsane.eu; much of these quotes were already compiled in the info pages for songs like Airbag and Killer Cars.)
(ADDENDUM: this post now has an images section dedicated to car imagery on the Radiohead sites.)
Songs
Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box, 2001
"Pop culture will always exist," Thom continues, squinting at the sun. "What I was thinking about when I wrote ’Pop Is Dead’ is that pop music has a very marginal part to plan in pop culture. So that whereas you had programmes like 'The Tube’ and 'Whistle Test’ that were purely music based, you've now got 'The Word’. That says it all."
What do you mean? Lots of people watch 'The Word’. Doesn't that indicate some kind of success?
"Not really," sighs Thom. "People like to watch car crashes as well. The producers of 'The Word’ are delighted because it's the most talked-about programme in the country As if that's a criterion for success. People should be talking about 'The Word’ because it's good"
Thom: "This is a song I wrote recently, called killer cars. This is a song about waking up one morning, convinced that, err, my partner had been killed in a car accident. You know, it's one of those dreams where you're totally convinced it's happened. This is all the cheery guy I am."
Thom's got into books so intensely that he becomes completely wired by them. When Radiohead were mixing their new songs at Abbey Road recently, they were commuting a lot along London's Westway. Thom was reading JG Ballard's 'Crash' — about the sexuality of cars mashing each other up, and «the million ways that a gear stick can damage a woman's womb». He was crapping himself.
"There was a summons", he begins, "it felt like that. I was at university. You have been chosen to attend The Greatest Party Ever, held by, erm, this guy. All meet at such and such a place. Bring a sleeping bag. So I toddled along, breathlessly, anticipation building, and met a fair-sized crowd. The agenda was carefully set. We all had to get in this car, and let it roll down a hill with the lights on. I think there were a few crashes. Then we built huge fires to see by, as it was right at this point, and starting taking the car apart, and made musical instruments out of the various components. With what was left of the car, we made a huge Chinese dragon, which we danced around in. These shamanic drumbeats started up from somewhere, and we all started twitching and gyrating until daybreak. It was pretty pagan. Then we crashed out in the open in our sleeping bags, and I was awoken at 7 am by the smell of bacon and some loon with a megaphone shouting "Wake up ! Time to die !". That was pretty cool".
If you were the prime minister what's the first thing you'd do?
Ban all cars. I do own a car, but only cos I have to. Public transport is the only answer. I'd also electronic hate mail for Jacques Chirac and that Milosevic bloke, and try to expel the USA from the UN, because the UN ceased to be any use since they decided it was all theirs. I'm sure they would be able to veto it, but its worth a try.
Thom: Oh, OK. Why are there so many references to cars? Well, I'll tell you why. It's because when I was younger, my parents moved to this house, which was a long long way from Oxford, and I was just at the age where I wanted to go out the whole time. 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. Anyway, eventually, my dad bought me another car, a Morris Minor, you know, and when you drove around corners in it, the driver door used to fly open. Um, and I'd only do 50 miles an hour, and on the road that went from my house to Oxford, there was fucking maniacs all the time, people who would drive 100 miles an hour to work, and I was in the Morris Minor, and it was like standing in the middle of the road with no protection at all. So I just gradually became emotionally tied up in this whole thing.
Yorke's interest in gruesome subject matter surfaces on other songs on the record as well, but the references are rarely gratuitous. "I've been in two accidents myself. One was serious, and I could have died. I was really young, and I had just got a car and spun it off the road, and was very near to being hit by two other cars coming the other way. I missed them by inches. Then you have that thing where you walk away from the car and you just ask yourself, 'Well, why am I lucky? Why am I allowed to walk away from this?' when you constantly hear of friends who die in car accidents for no reason. It fucks with my head completely. The day we have to stop getting in cars will be a very good day."
Whether he's talking about accidents, religion, or politics, Yorke's wisdom is generally unconventional. He seems to believe that the world is populated primarily by deaf, dumb, and blind sheep who lack the willpower to decide anything for themselves, and eagerly lop up the useless absurdity fed to them by the powers that be. "So much of the public's perception revolves around illusion," he says. "That's what 'Airbag' is about, the illusion of safety. In reality, airbags don't really work and they go off at random." Yorke straightens up in his seat and becomes progressively more emotional. "It's exactly the same as when you're on a plane. Everyone should really sit backwards. It's the safest way possible to face the back of the plane as you take of. But because people don't like the idea, and they feel a bit sick, airplanes have always been done the other way around, which is fucked. Anyway, if you're plummeting down to earth at 1,000 miles per hour, there's no way you're going to stand a hope if you sit there with your head between your legs with your seatbelt on. In the end, we're all just fucking bits of meat."
Thom: "Has an airbag saved my life? Nah...but I tell you something, every time you have a near accident, instead of just sighing and carrying on, you should pull over, get out of the car and run down the street screaming, 'I'm BACK! I'm ALIVE! My life has started again today!'. In fact, you should do that every time you get out of a car. We're just riding on those things - we're not really in control of them."
Key Lyric: "In a jack-knifed juggernaut, I am born again."
Thom: "Airbags go off spontaneously, so researchers claim. I think that's a cool judgement, don't you? Driving along in your Mercedes."
Colin: "They're actually quite dangerous things. They can kill."
Ed: "What would you know about it? You can't even drive!"
Airbag: "It's about fear of machinery and is very ambivalent. It's a song for luddites, but it's also very hopeful. Like, we aren't scared. Life goes on everywhere, even in a neon sign."
[...]
Lucky: "Maybe all the machinery like aeroplanes and cars, etc, function because of collective will. There is no way it would get off the ground or move forward otherwise."
But as with much of the album, concerns soon return to the feeling of
powerlessness many feel in an age dominated by computers, global
conglomerates and media-induced shallowness. "Exit Music" is a suicide
tale, "Let Down" tells of "disappointed people...crushed like a bug on
the ground," while "Airbag" seems to describe an alien crash-landing to
earth. "To actually start singing about aliens is a very charged image,"
says Yorke, pausing to stare out the window into Manhattan rush hour
traffic. "For me, all the crap TV shows, like X-Files, are
symptomatic of people trying to find angels. The crash thing is me
obsessing about the idea that when we get in a car or a plane we don't
know if we're going to get out again. You're constantly aware of your
own death, man. [laughs] It represents the emotional, psychological
limbo that we're in all the time. You get in a car thinking you're safe,
yet you're this far away from hurtling around a corner and having a
juggernaut slam into you."
(Details Magazine, September 1997; no link, source attached)
It's five minutes after midnight in Cambridgeshire, England, some three hours north of London, and Thom Yorke is standing in the middle of an empty field. Five seven, rail thin, and balding rapidly, Yorke is an unlikely rock star; save for his leather jacket and Pan-Cake makeup, the lead singer of Radiohead looks more like a monk from the local cathedral. Suddenly, a pair of headlights appear in the fog. A big Chrysler New Yorker pulls up beside Yorke. Shivering, he slides into the backseat. Then the driver gets out and leaves him alone in the still-idling vehicle. "A car driving itself," Yorke says with a shrug. "Story of my life."
[...]
Yorke's nailed the take, but now there's a new problem: Fumes from the engine are irritating the singer's lungs. "You can smell it, can't you?" the soundman says. A technician pokes his head into the vehicle: "Smell it? You can see it! " The British press have long pegged Yorke as a solitary, tortured soul, but neither of these qualities is evident during this long, cold night. A slightly dazed Yorke appears unconcerned. "Ah, well," he says, "at least I'll be warm when I die."
But the bus is survivable?
Yes. Although, every time it judders it reminds me you're asleep in a sort of coffin. Last night I was having visions of how you could be asleep and drive off a cliff and not even wake up.
Is Airbag off OK Computer about that kind of feeling?
Mmm, Airbag is more about the idea that whenever you go out on the road you could be killed. Every age has its crazy idiosyncracies, crazy double-think. To me, for our era it's cars. I always get told off for being obsessed about it, but every time I get in my car I have to say to myself that I might never get out again. Or I might get out but I won't be able to walk.
That's a very, uh, acute awareness.
I suppose it just comes from being a worrier. But Airbag is also about how, the way I've been brought up and most of us are brought up, we are never given time to think about our own death.
In fact everything you do stems from trying to offset that fear with the idea of immortality. Especially doing what I do. If you're a pop star, all you're trying to do is search for immortality. Or that's the cliche at least. Yet you're constantly a knife-edge away from being killed in a car accident. (Smiles) It's great!
[...]
My mother has always said that I was a very quiet, happy kid who just worked all the time. Using my hands. Building stuff out of Lego, taking care of my bike - I was obsessed with my bike - designing and drawing cars. Then when I discovered rock'n'roll it was designing and drawing guitars.
After the band's performance at L.A.'s Wiltern Theater the following evening, Yorke jumps into a car and crawls into the back, slouching down low. "You're probably going to be followed", he informs the driver. "You know how to lose people, don't you?"
‘Nothing scares me more than driving,’ he explains, ‘I hate it. With a fucking passion. I hate it because it’s the most dangerous thing you do in your life. And because driving up the M4, half the people have got their mobile phones on when they’re driving. It’s like you’re forced to play fucking Russian Roulette every time you have to travel somewhere. Your average expensive fast German car gives you the idea that you can’t die. And that’s a fraud. Really, when you think about it, every time you get home, you should run down the street screaming “I’M BACK! I’M ALIVE”.’
When you were explaining some of the things you were singing about on 'OK Computer', you talked about surveying the headlines and feeling wildly impotent, and a deep frustration with the political system. Since when we've had a mild cultural evolution...
Do you mean the Labour Party? [loud mocking laughter] For three hours when the Labour Party got in, people were nice to each other. That was it. It's been bullshit ever since. I didn't watch it happening. It was so obvious they were going to win. I won't be going to 10 Downing Street, put it that way.
What was far more important was the Princess Di thing. That was when the people got to see the people. People got to see themselves grieving. This woman had died in a car accident, and she was quite famous, but that's not really what was going on, I don't think.
It didn't really affect me at all - people die in car accidents every day. She just happens to be famous and unfortunate. But what was shocking was seeing all those people lined up along the motorway, and people in the Hyde Park crying their eyes out.
Of course, because of his job, Yorke has to ride around in cars all the time. He even got inside one with a remote-control driver to shoot the video for Radiohead's latest single, "Karma Police." And as he sat in the backseat, lip synching, something went wrong, and carbon monoxide fumes began pouring into the car. Yorke was terrified. And as he started to feel faint, he thought, "This is my life...."
As to lyrical content, Yorke did concede to Q that autobiography enters into Airbag and Lucky. They touch on his morbid fear of car or plane crashes, while also apparently asserting a cheery faith that he would emerge unscathed.
Thom: "I think it’s going to have to be this one. This is Neu!... (says "Neu!" a few times in silly voice)... anyway German accent. First track. I don’t even know what it’s called now. It’s the first track on the Neu!, you’ll know the one... ah here we go. Okay, this is one we just listened to constantly when we were on tour in Europe. It has a very strange effect, I mean if you are listening to this in a car, and you are driving along fast, you should turn this really up as loud as it possibly goes, even so it’s distorting. It’s called Hallogallo and it’s ten minutes long."
Thom: That's what the "I am born again' lyric was about in "Airbag," was me lifting all the things that I simply can't handle day to day, you know I'm utterly obsessed by people dying in car accidents; I'm utterly obsessed by the way that people will worry about smoking or they'll worry about fucking what's in the water or how much cholesterol, yet they'll get in the car everyday and drive to work, and how many people just get killed or paralyzed and everyone just takes it as, "Oh well, you know, you can't think about it.' Well I can't not think about it, it absolutely does my head in, I can't get away from it, and 'Airbag' was a way of putting it into music to make it feel alright. And the, 'I am born again' thing was sort of -- you're gonna die, there's a million different ways to go, and you have to have a sense of humor.
"I feel compelled to do it because I want something positive to come out of the celebrity thing for me. I was finding it very difficult to sort of deal with the fact that I was a celebrity in a society that chooses to basically enslave the rest of the world in the name of blah, blah, blah - I’m a bit like that, really. And Jubilee 2000 is a way of using my position", he explains.
"If I die tomorrow in a car crash I’ll know I’ll have used it for something positive. To be honest this is a way for me to address issues outside of Radiohead that I’ve wanted to address for a long time, that I’ve always had a problem with".
start by working on 'lost at sea'. thom thinks weve already recorded the definitive version whilst in paris. not sure about that, mind you he admits that thats because of the way hes singing it (which hes only done with a tape alone whilst driving). i really like this new version, as much as anything for its relentlessness and energy. anyhow move onto a new song 'cuttooth' - its got a 'neu' thing about it - long and hypnotic.... finish with attempting to rescue 'you and whose army'...
"in a open topped sports car greenmaybeblue possibly california
in the ctawaykillledage32"
"...bodies floating down the muddy rivver in bits and pieces. the steering wheel through the ribs. the shadows swallowing my soul..."
In fact no one was expecting what OK Computer turned into – a woozy and intoxicating slide into Radiohead’s messed up world of euphoria and escape, paranoia and panic. Jonny: “there's lots of stuff about speed, about things happening too quickly. I know Thom is quite obsessed about people climbing into cars every morning and going to work, and not necessarily getting there."
"It really is, uh, best heard driving through the night very very fast across open landscapes... dangerously fast, so it's not at all peace-y and free."
Someone gets hit by a car in Radiohead's "Karma Police" video, as well as in U.N.K.L.E.'s "Rabbit In Your Headlights" (you sing on that one). And then there's the track "Airbag". Is death by auto a recurring nightmare of yours or something? PIPER SCHULHOFF, NEW YORK
Isn't it for everybody? The idea of dying unprepared like that is very frightening. Not having time to say goodbye. It seems just insane. Cars have lost the romance we grew up swallowing. Now they are just personal protection spaces, somewhere to sit in traffic and wait or play with death against complete strangers. I used to be really, really bad about saying goodbye to people when they got in their cars. I still insist that my friends ring me when they get home to tell me they're safe. But I used to be much worse. I would be frantic if someone was unusually late. The absolute worst thing about touring is insane taxi drivers with no seat belts in busy cities. I also find it very difficult to accept lifts from somebody. Just like Mummy told me.
And how do you feel onstage?
The ideal mental state for me to perform live is when it feels as if I'm driving through the night. You know that feeling: driving through the woods, you're on automatic pilot, but tense because your vision is limited in the darkness. I perform best when I sort of feel as if I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just doing it, It's like an emotional automatic pilot.
"Airbag," "Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box": the stench of death, the claustrophobia of cars. Are you preoccupied with dying as it relates to the supposed control/protection level of inanimate objects?
I think a lot about the Buddhist thing, about objects weighing you down so it is very hard for you to rise up and leave when you die.
"Yeah. Oh, yeah, because fright was what I [heard/had] anyway. And it was sort of like, you know, I needed, you need to hear something—there's something you need to hear, like with The Smiths, or... you know. You needed to hear The Smiths in order to make it alright; to feel that thing that you were feeling in that particular moment, that you couldn't make coherent, they managed to do it, and therefore it's alright. Same (with) Joy Division or Sibelius or, you know, something makes you just go, ‘Fuck! It's alright!' [Laughs]. You know? Um—and that's what I had with that tune. It's sort of—it's okay to, to—to want to drive this car off the side of the motorway at a hundred miles an hour."
Thom Yorke, Radiohead’s singer, nods in agreement and can see his point. But when he thinks about Hail To The Thief, he thinks about driving in his car, at dusk, down country lanes. It was here, after all, that he first began to notice it. He doesn’t want to sound like a lunatic or anything, but as he drove, as he would do most night during Radiohead’s last six-month break, he found that he was entering a dream-like state. It quire tripped him out, actually.
“I was totally hooked on Radio 4. And it coincided with Noah’s times to get up [for feeding]. We were staying in our house on the coast, and in the evening I used to go driving. I’d go into this weird dreamstate. There was something about the colours of the headlights, the twilight and the animals running into the bushes for cover. It had this ominous nature that stuck with me. It was all wrapped up with the fact that I found it incredibly difficult to come to terms with the fact that maybe we were leaving our children with no future at all. This imminent state of moving into the dark ages again. The rise of all this Right-wing bigotry, stupidity, fear and ignorance.”
Thom: I went through this phase of driving around in twilight for various reasons, down endless country roads on my own. Listening to loud music. And uh... the highlight of my day, as you can imagine. And (uh) I always, I would just think about the, what I've heard on the radio. And what I was hearing on the radio and blah blah blah. And there's something that happens within that light and the way it mixed with the head lights from my car, which is something I had tried to get into a painting for ages, and, gave up because i basically can't paint. But, it just sort of, that thing stuck with me, it's quite a difficult.... That's the best way I can explain it. I think most records that we do have certain colours. And those are the colours for me. If you know what I mean."
Although he's usually polite and affable in conversation, occasionally Yorke will roll his eyes if he doesn't agree with you, then mock you by saying what he thinks you want to hear. Other times he makes absurd comments to see what kind of reaction he can get. Case in point: During a recent interview in London, the shy, politically minded vegan made some pretty uncharacteristic statements when talking about the time the band spent in Los Angeles working on its new album, Hail to the Thief.
"We felt really glamorous being in Hollywood," he began with a smirk. "We went to glamorous parties, and we had matching Minis with Union Jacks. I chose the Range Rover because it was the most polluting car I could find — 4.6 liters of pure gluttony. Disgusting."
[...]
"I'm just enjoying the fact that I haven't been hit by a car yet and I'm still doing this," he said when asked about the benefits of stardom. "It's not easy. If you crack up, then that's it. And it's pretty easy to crack up because suddenly people start talking to you like you're from another planet and you just think that's normal. I really worry about other people like Coldplay and the Strokes, 'cause the sort of success they've had really screws with your head. It's like, what do you do next?"
There is that. I was playing it [Penderecki's cello concerto] on a cassette in
the car. It's absolutely terrifying. It makes The Shining soundtrack
sound mild. A whole orchestra scored by telling a bunch of guys who'd
never played their instruments before to make as much noise as possible.
It's the equivalent of a wall of amplifiers feeding back — but
with that fragile sound of the cello in the middle. And I'd listen to
that, driving around watching the animals run for cover from the headlights.
And that got me back to music. It didn't really translate on the record
but it clicked the switch back in.
GB Do you think that nature is a higher form of beauty than man-made things?
TY They are too different to be compared. I reckon some of our ideas of beauty from the man-made world could be too self-referential and do us no favours. Too much time spent in cities you know? Surrounded by our own image, and our own intentions, our edifices to our brilliance. Having said that, the other thing I was going to suggest for a thing of beauty was a sports car.
Images
(From Site 4; OKC/Kid A-era)
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