NOTE: This entry was not written with the intent to armchair-diagnose Thom with anything. However, these quotes all relate to Thom and (self-)described experiences with mania or hypomania.
(The Guardian, December 20th 1997)
CHRIS HUFFORD (RH's manager)
There's a strange kind of emotional honesty which is always there in their shows. Thom cannot stand going through the motions, and when he catches himself doing it he gets furious with himself. Thom is a highly strung, emotional person. He's also incredibly shy, and he can go off one when he feels something's been put the wrong way, so people immediately say he's a manic depressive. That's understandable because they only see him in his public role when he's highly stressed, but he's not like that at all.
(Snoozer #037, June 2003, translated from Japanese)
Thom: Yeah, my role model is Spike Milligan, (a legendary comedian/comedy writer in the UK, who died last year and is credited on this album). He's my role model not only because he is a funny guy, but because he suffered from mania all his life and it was really bad. And yet, he kept on living. He still got up in the morning. I think it's very human to do that.
The more commonly known term for such periods of frenetic activity is hypomania. When a person is in a hypomanic state, they may not appear outwardly depressed. Indeed, the world may appear to make more sense to them than it has done for a long time. Guilford pinpoints the role of hypomania in the creative process by alighting on two terms: "spontaneous flexibility (the ability to produce a rich variety of ideas and to switch from one area of interest to another) and adaptive flexibility (the ability to come up with unusual ideas or solutions)."
Anthony Clare adds, "There is more than a suggestion that they can be heightened or facilitated by the quickening of cognitive processes and the surges of mental energy that are a feature of hypomania." At its most extreme, hypomania can precipitate a depression that can - although in Thom's case, did not - result in paranoid schizophrenia. He expresses momentary surprise when the term is mentioned. "Hypomania. Yes, that's exactly what it was. And then I went through a period of deep depression."
It was another two years before the discovery of Clare and Milligan's book would reveal to Thom not only that his activity had a name - but that actually it was common among people who created for a living. In the meantime, he decided that if being in Radiohead was to be bearable, they had to fundamentally change the way they worked. The Thom Yorke that entered into the Kid A/Amnesiac sessions was a walking contradiction: on the one hand throwing his hypomanic writings open to public scrutiny (although ironically no one outside their circle of fans happened upon them); on the other hand, desperate to eschew the soul-baring role which he felt had made him so vulnerable.
(Sydney Morning Herald, April 23rd 2004)
"I was reading this book that [Milligan] did, Depression and How to Survive It. He suffered very, very badly from depression and he was manic," says Yorke.
"I don't have anything like the problems he had - not clinical depression at all - but there was lots about mania and creativity that made me feel better about how I work: this is normal.
"Well not normal, but the upside of this feeling is the energy you have when you are in the mania stage and [this book] was a really important thing for me at the time."
[...]
What some saw as a kind of madness afflicting Yorke when the band returned home - scrapping dozens of songs; rejecting anything that smacked of repeating patterns from the band's musical past; talking publicly of razing the band's collective ego to the ground - was one way of dealing with depression. Depression spawned by "months and months of seeing your own image projected and the echoes coming back at you, so you get to this level of detachment."
"[The depression] is debilitating and sort of destructive but I don't consider that I'm in any way unusual," he says. "I consider that I'm very lucky because I have a way of dealing with it, which is working. [Using the] highs and the lows too. The lows are when you are like litmus paper: you absorb more when everything is twice as loud and everything is twice as bright."
Thom: “I have this thing – just before I get really sick I’ll have this 12-hour hyperactive mania, and that song was recorded during one of those. I felt genuinely out of it when we did that. The vocal is one take and we didn’t do anything to it afterwards. We tidied up my guitar because I was so out of it, my guitar-playing was rubbish. My best vocals are always the ones that happen there and then.”
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