Radiohead wouldn’t be Radiohead without the eerie falsetto of Thom Yorke, but he didn’t become one of popular music’s most recognizable voices overnight. In an excerpt from Jason Thomas Gordon’s upcoming book The Singers Talk (via Rolling Stone), Yorke discussed how Neil Young and Jeff Buckley helped him hone in on his signature sound, the perks of bringing a chiropractor on tour, and the time he got so stoned he forgot his lyrics onstage.
Despite briefly taking vocal lessons in school, Yorke said he he used to think that his voice was “uncomfortably high or awkward.” Thankfully, that didn’t keep him from sending off a demo tape to a music magazine when he was 18, which earned him a pretty glowing review in response: “‘Who is this guy? He sounds just like Neil Young!’”
“I went, ‘Who’s Neil Young?'” Yorke recalled. “I’d never even heard Neil Young, so I went out and bought After the Gold Rush and was like, ‘Wow! It’s OK to sound like that?’ Because he’s slightly higher than me, but there was a softness and a naiveté in the voice which I was always trying to hide. Then, it was like, ‘Oh, maybe I don’t need to hide it.'”
Still, it took Yorke some time to get comfortable with his voice in Radiohead’s early years: “When we were doing the second record [The Bends], I went to see Jeff Buckley before he died,” he went on. “Again, that was one of those, ‘It’s OK to do that?’ And it reminded me of this vulnerable part of me that I was choosing to hide. I remember I recorded ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ on my own to begin with. Then, when we came together to listen to it, the others said, ‘We’ll use that!’ and I was, ‘No, no, we can’t use that, it’s too vulnerable. That’s too much me.'”
Now, nearly 30 years later, Yorke is focused on keeping his voice in shape. Beyond some expected pre-show rituals — running scales, a meditation session — he also brings a chiropractor on tour with him to re-align his spine when his voice feels stiff. “It’s quite an amazing feeling when your voice just opens up like that,” he said. “It’s mental. But this is what happens when you’re touring a lot, you have to have someone fix you up if you throw yourself around like I do.”
But even the most thorough of warm-ups couldn’t have saved Yorke from what he said was his “most embarrassing vocal mishap ever,” which happened at the end of a great San Fransisco show: “Before the final encore, I smoked a blunt with Jonny [Greenwood],” he said. “I went back on and started playing ‘Everything in Its Right Place’ and got completely lost. I think I sang the second verse first, and then I was looking at the keyboard going, ‘What’s this?'”
Yorke went on: “Then, I went to sing the next verse, and I realized, I’ve just sung that, and I looked at the others, and they were all going ‘Get us out of this one.’ I’m just going around the riff, looking at the audience, and they’re all singing the words, and I’m going, ‘What?’ I was so high, I just got up from the piano and walked off.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Yorke revealed the singer he’d most like to duet with, his favorite singers of all time, the performance he’s most proud of, and more. The Singers Talk: The Greatest Singers of Our Time Discuss the One Thing They’re Never Asked About: Their Voices is out later this year.
Earlier this year, Yorke’s other band The Smile shared the new single “Bending Hectic.” Meanwhile, his son Noah has been flexing pipes of his own on his recent EP Cerebral Key.
