Background

Born on October 7, 1968, in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, England, Thomas Edward Yorke, better known as Thom Yorke, picked up at a guitar at the age of 7 and formed his first band at the age of 10. Born with an abnormality in his left eye, Yorke underwent multiple surgeries as a youngster and was often teased by his peers.

Education

At the Abingdon School for Boys, Yorke teamed up with guitarist Ed O'Brien and bassist Colin Greenwood to form a band, which they called On a Friday. Yorke was the lead singer and songwriter. They soon added Phil Selway as a drummer and then Greenwood's younger brother, Jonny, as a harmonica player, keyboardist, and guitarist.

When Yorke left to go to the University of Exeter, the group disbanded temporarily, but they reunited to record a series of demo tapes. One of the tapes, Manic Hedgehog, attracted attention from the recording company EMI. On the lookout for the next hit grunge band, EMI signed the group in 1991 to a six-album deal. The next year, On a Friday was renamed Radiohead, after a Talking Heads song.

Career

By late 1991, the band was signed to Parlophone in the U.K. and Capitol in the U.S., as an EP, Drill, came and went without much fanfare. Released in 1993, the band's full-length debut, Pablo Honey, appeared to be suffering the same fate, until American radio/MTV made a surprise hit out of the Nirvana-esque alternative anthem "Creep."

By the time of the release of Radiohead's second album, The Bends (1995), Radiohead had attracted a large fanbase and began to receive critical acclaim. After the album's release, the American rock band R.E.M., a major influence on Radiohead, picked them as their support act for their European tour. Yorke befriended R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe, who gave him advice about how to deal with fame.

During the production of Radiohead's third album, OK Computer (1997), all five members of Radiohead had differing opinions and equal production roles, with Yorke having "the loudest voice", according to O'Brien. OK Computer achieved critical acclaim and strong sales, establishing Radiohead as one of the leading rock acts of the 1990s, but Yorke was ambivalent about success. Following the OK Computer tour, he suffered a mental breakdown and found it impossible to write new music. In 2013, he said: "When I was a kid, I always assumed that [fame] was going to answer something – fill a gap. And it does the absolute opposite. It happens with everybody. I was so driven for so long, like a fucking animal, and then I woke up one day and someone had given me a little gold plate for OK Computer and I couldn’t deal with it for ages."

To recuperate, Yorke moved to Cornwall and spent time walking the cliffs, writing and drawing. He restricted his songwriting to the piano; the first song he wrote was "Everything in Its Right Place". During this period, Yorke listened almost exclusively to the electronic music of artists such as Aphex Twin and Autechre, saying: "It was refreshing because the music was all structures and had no human voices in it. But I felt just as emotional about it as I'd ever felt about guitar music." Radiohead took these influences to their next albums Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001), processing vocals, obscuring lyrics, and using electronic instruments such as synthesizers, drum machines, and samplers. The albums divided fans and critics, but were commercially successful and later attracted critical acclaim; at the turn of the decade, Kid A was named the best album of the 2000s by Rolling Stone and Pitchfork.

In 2003, Radiohead released their sixth album, Hail to the Thief, a blend of rock and electronic music; Yorke wrote many of its lyrics in response to the War on Terror and the resurgence of right-wing politics in the west after the turn of the millennium, and his shifting worldview after becoming a father. It was the final album recorded under Radiohead's contract with EMI. In 2007, Radiohead independently released their seventh album, In Rainbows, as a pay-what-you-want download, the first for a major act; the release made headlines worldwide and sparked debate about the implications for the music industry. In 2011, Radiohead self-released their eighth album, The King of Limbs, which Yorke described as "an expression of physical movements and wildness". The music video for the track "Lotus Flower", featuring Yorke's erratic dancing, became an internet meme. Radiohead released their ninth album, A Moon Shaped Pool, on 8 May 2016. Radiohead have sold over 30 million albums.

While Radiohead remained his top priority during the '90s, Yorke also found the time to guest on other bands' recordings as well. Some of these cameo appearances included the songs "El President" by Drugstore (off the album White Magic for Lovers), a cover of Pink Floyd's "Wish You Were Here" with Sparklehorse, "Rabbit in Your Headlights" by UNKLE (Psyence Fiction), Björk's "I've Seen It All" (Selmasongs), and PJ Harvey's "This Mess We're In" (Stories from the Cities). Yorke also appeared as part of the ad hoc alternative supergroup Venus in Furs for the soundtrack to the 1998 glam rock film Velvet Goldmine, lending his vocals to the tracks "2HB," "Ladytron," and "Bitter-Sweet."

In May 2006, Yorke announced an imminent solo album on Radiohead's blog. The Eraser, made with extensive assistance from Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, was released on XL in July. It debuted inside the Top Ten in the U.K. and U.S. and was also nominated for Britain's Mercury Prize and a Grammy Award in the category of Best Alternative Music Album. Radiohead also surprised fans with a new album when they announced the making of In Rainbows roughly a week before it was released in 2007.

A few years later, Yorke formed the band Atoms for Peace, recruiting Godrich on keyboards and production, Flea of Red Hot Chili Peppers on bass, Joey Waronker on drums, and Mauro Refosco on percussion. The band played several live dates around the U.S. during 2009 and 2010, and began recording for an album, Amok, that eventually appeared in 2013 (but not before another surprise Radiohead album, 2011's King of Limbs). Upon release, Amok performed well on charts across the world, although the members' more pressing commitments meant that a successor was not immediately forthcoming. Yorke also provided vocals for tracks by Flying Lotus and Modeselektor, and collaborated on recordings with Burial, Four Tet, and SBTRKT.

Yorke's second solo album arrived as a surprise, much like the first. Following a series of cryptic clues dispersed through social media, Yorke released Tomorrow's Modern Boxes in September 2014. Initially, it was distributed through the torrent service BitTorrent, and then it was made available on vinyl. The eight-song set was another concise, subdued, yet tense set from the Radiohead frontman. In 2015, Yorke performed with audiovisual artist Tarik Barri and Godrich at the Summer Sonic Festival in Japan and the Latitude Festival in the U.K. 2016 saw Yorke and Radiohead surprise fans with their ninth LP, A Moon Shaped Pool after dropping cryptic hints across social media tied into elements featured in lead singles "Burn the Witch" and "Daydreaming." The band promoted the record with an international tour throughout 2016 and 2017. During the latter year, it was announced that the songwriter would be composing his first film score for Luca Guadagnino's remake of Dario Argento's 1977 horror classic Suspiria. Yorke revealed that during the writing process he had been inspired by various aspects of Krautrock as well as Vangelis' score for Blade Runner. The movie and the soundtrack arrived in late 2018 with the album led by the track "Suspirium."

Achievements

• Thom Yorke is known for his falsetto vocals; in 2005, readers of Blender and MTV2 voted Yorke the 18th greatest singer of all time. In 2008, Rolling Stone ranked him the 66th, writing that "by the turn of the century ... Yorke's voice had made him one of the most influential singers of his generation," influencing bands including Muse, Coldplay, Travis, and Elbow. Three of Radiohead's singles have appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 charts: "Creep", which peaked at number 34; "High and Dry", which peaked at number 78; and "Nude", which peaked at number 37.
  
  The band has received sixteen Brit Awards nominations, but have yet to win one. Radiohead has received the Best Alternative Music Album award three times at the Grammy Awards, for OK Computer in 1998, Kid A in 2001, and In Rainbows in 2009. At the MTV Video Music Awards, the band received the award for Best Art Direction for "There There" in 2003. Radiohead has also received the Best Act In The World Today award three times at the Q Awards, in 2001, 2002, and 2003. Overall, Radiohead has received 22 awards from 79 nominations.

Works

More photos

• music

  • Pablo Honey 1993
  • The Bends 1995
  • OK Computer 1997
  • Kid A 2000
  • Amnesiac 2001
  • Hail To the Thief 2003
  • The Eraser 2006
  • In Rainbows 2007
  • The King Of Limbs 2011
  • Tomorrow's Modern Boxes 2011
  • A Moon Shaped Pool 2016

Religion

Yorke seems non-religious, though he did attend church as a child and has expressed some interest in Buddhism. He was asked once if he put any merit in the Bible, to which he responded: "No, not really, no. To me, it has too much baggage."

Politics

Yorke is an activist on behalf of human rights, environmentalist, fair trade and anti-war causes. He said reading Manufacturing Consent (1988) by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky after the university was a "formative moment."

In 1999, Yorke travelled to the G8 summit to support the Jubilee 2000 movement calling for cancellation of third-world debt. In a 2003 Guardian article criticising the World Trade Organization, Yorke wrote: "The west is creating an extremely dangerous economic, environmental and humanitarian timebomb. We are living beyond our means." In the same year, he was a key speaker at the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament rally in Yorkshire, protesting the British government's support of the American "Star Wars" Strategic Defense Initiative. In 2005, he joined an all-night vigil for the Trade Justice Movement. To celebrate the 2008 election of US President Barack Obama, Yorke released a remixed version of his single "Harrowdown Hill" as a free download.

In 2009, Yorke performed via Skype at the premier of the environmentalist documentary The Age of Stupid. In December that year, he gained access to the COP 15 climate change talks in Copenhagen by posing as a journalist. In 2010, he performed a benefit concert at the Cambridge Corn Exchange for the British Green party, and supported the 10:10 campaign for climate change mitigation. In 2011, he joined the maiden voyage of Rainbow Warrior III, a yacht used by Greenpeace to monitor damage to the environment. Yorke was one of several celebrities who endorsed the parliamentary candidacy of the Green party's Caroline Lucas at the United Kingdom 2015 general election. In December 2015, he performed during the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris at a benefit concert in aid of 350.org, an environmental organisation raising awareness about climate change. His performance and others from the event were released on the Pathway to Paris live album in July 2016. He contributed a new electronic track, "Hands Off the Antarctic," for use in a 2018 Greenpeace campaign.

In 2006, Yorke refused an invitation from Friends of the Earth to meet prime minister Tony Blair to discuss climate change. Yorke wrote on Radiohead's site that "I have no intention of being used by spider spin doctors to make it look like we make progress when it is just words", and told the NME that Blair had "no environmental credentials as far as I'm concerned". He told the Guardian that Blair's advisers had "wanted pre-meetings. They wanted to know that I was on-side. Also, I was being maneuvered into a position where if I said the wrong thing post-the meeting, Friends of the Earth would lose their access. Which normally would be called blackmail."

Views

Yorke's early lyrics were personal, but from Kid A he experimented with cutting up words and phrases and assembling them at random. Pitchfork wrote that Yorke has deliberately used everyday clichés "to suggest a mind consumed by meaningless data"; the Kid A lyrics, for example, "alternate between honeyed violence" and "hum-drum observations twisted into panic attacks". On Radiohead's ninth album, A Moon Shaped Pool, Pitchfork felt his lyrics were less cynical, conveying wonder and amazement. Many critics felt the album's lyrics might address Yorke's separation from Rachel Owen, his partner of more than 20 years.

A typical Radiohead song begins with a sketch from Yorke, which is harmonically developed by Jonny Greenwood before the other band members develop their parts. Yorke is a multi-instrumentalist; his main instruments are guitar and piano, though he also uses instruments including Rhodes piano, bass guitar, and drums.

Yorke works extensively with electronic instruments such as synthesizers, drum machines, and sequencers, and techniques including programming, sampling, and looping. In 2015 he said: "Really I just enjoy writing words sitting at a piano. I tend to lose interest in the drum machine."

Yorke has been critical of the music industry and has pioneered alternative release platforms with Radiohead and his solo work. Following Radiohead's 1993 Pablo Honey tour of America, he became disenchanted with being "right at the sharp end of the sexy, sassy, MTV eye-candy lifestyle" he felt he was helping sell. The 1998 documentary Meeting People Is Easy portrays Yorke's disaffection with the music industry and press during Radiohead's OK Computer tour. After Radiohead's fourth album, Kid A (2000), was leaked via the peer-to-peer filesharing software Napster weeks before release, Yorke told Time he felt Napster "encourages enthusiasm for music in a way that the music industry has long forgotten to do. I think anybody sticking two fingers up at the whole fucking thing is wonderful as far as I'm concerned."

After Radiohead's six-album record contract with EMI ended with the release of Hail to the Thief (2003), Yorke told Time: "I like the people at our record company, but the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs one. And, yes, it probably would give us some perverse pleasure to say 'Fuck you' to this decaying business model." In 2006, he called major record labels "stupid little boys' games – especially really high up". Radiohead independently released their 2007 album In Rainbows as a download for which listeners could choose their price; Yorke said the "most exciting" part of the release was the removal of the barrier between artist and audience. However, in 2013, Yorke told the Guardian he feared the In Rainbows release had instead played into the hands of content providers such as Apple and Google: "They have to keep commodifying things to keep the share price up, but in doing so they have made all content, including music and newspapers, worthless, in order to make their billions. And this is what we want? In 2015, he criticized YouTube for "seizing control" of contributor content, likening the company to Nazis stealing art during World War II.

In 2013, Yorke and Godrich made headlines for their criticism of the music streaming service Spotify, and removed Atoms for Peace and Yorke's solo music from the service. In a series of tweets, Yorke wrote: "Make no mistake, new artists you discover on Spotify will not get paid. Meanwhile, shareholders will shortly be rolling in it ... New artists get paid fuck-all with this model." Yorke called Spotify "the last gasp of the old industry", accusing it of only benefiting major labels with large back catalogs, and encouraged artists to build their own "direct connections" with audiences instead. Yorke's solo work and Atoms for Peace were re-added to Spotify in December 2017.

For Yorke's album 2014 Tomorrow's Modern Boxes, released via BitTorrent, he and Godrich expressed their hope to "hand some control of internet back to people who are creating the work ... bypassing the self-elected gatekeepers". Asked if the release had been a success, Yorke said: "No, not exactly ... I wanted to show that, in theory, today one could follow the entire chain of record production, from start to finish, on his own. But in practice it is very different. We cannot be burdened with all of the responsibilities of the record label."

Personality

Yorke is vegetarian and has criticised the meat industry. In a 2005 film for the animal rights foundation Animal Aid, he said: "Society deems it necessary to create this level of suffering in order for [people] to eat food that they don't need ... you should at least be aware of what you're doing rather than assuming that that's your right as a human being to do it."

Physical Characteristics: Based on his recorded works, Yorke has a vocal range spanning E2 to E6. He is known for his falsetto, which Paste described as "sweet", "cautious" and "haunting". Rolling Stone described his voice as a "broad, emotive sweep" with a "high, keening sound". The Guardian described it as "instrument-like" and "spectral", and wrote that it "transcends the egocentric posturing of the indie rock singer stereotype". In 2006, Yorke said: "It annoys me how pretty my voice is. That sounds incredibly immodest, but it annoys me how polite it can sound when perhaps what I'm singing is deeply acidic."

Quotes from others about the person

• Dave Matthews: "Yorke's lyrics make me want to give up. I could never in my wildest dreams find something as beautiful as they find for a single song - let alone album after album."

Interests

• painting

• Politicians

  Noam Chomsky

• Writers

  Jay Griffiths, George Orwell, Thomas Pynchon,

• Artists

  Michael Stipe

• Sport & Clubs

  football

• Athletes

  Manchester United

• Music & Bands

  Vince Staples, The Pixies, Girl Band, Frank Ocean, Death Grips, The Gaslamp Killer, Sampha

Connections

Yorke is in a relationship with Italian actress Dajana Roncione. He was previously in a 23-year relationship with artist and lecturer Rachel Owen, whom he met while studying at the University of Exeter. They had a son named Noah (born 2001) and a daughter named Agnes (born 2004). According to The Times, Yorke and Owen married in a secret ceremony in May 2003 in Oxfordshire. In August 2015, the couple announced they had separated amicably "after 23 highly creative and happy years".

Wife:

Rachel Owen

Son:

Noah Yorke

Daughter:

Agnes Yorke

girlfriend:

Dajana Roncione

colleague:

Jonny Greenwood

Jonathan Richard Guy Greenwood is an English musician and composer. He is the lead guitarist and keyboardist of the alternative rock band Radiohead, and has written a number of film scores.

colleague:

Ed O'Brien

Edward John O'Brien is an English guitarist and member of the alternative rock band Radiohead. He makes extensive use of effects units to create atmospheric sounds and textures, and provides backing vocals.

colleague:

Colin Greenwood

Colin Charles Greenwood is an English musician and the bassist for the alternative rock band Radiohead.

colleague:

Philip Selway

Philip James Selway is an English musician, singer, and songwriter best known as the drummer of English rock group Radiohead.

References

• Thom Yorke
• Focus On: 100 Most Popular English Activists
• Focus On: 30 Most Popular Countertenors
• SPIN Magazine August 2006 Thom Yorke of Radiohead
• Spin Magazine July 2003 Radiohead