![]() ![]() These were very same geezers who kept returning to Oxford at regular intervals throughout their various college careers to rehearse. Far from being forced to hump their equipment around the small club circuit, Yorke and his boyhood jamming friends - then tentatively named On A Friday - had a record deal within months of going at it full time. "My Struggle" wouldn't be a good title for Thom Yorke's autobiography. I get much higher off of it now that I'm better at it." When you're on stage you feel you've got something, but you're not sure that it will last. "It's difficult to remember what it was like before we made records, but I do remember being surprised that people liked it. They bought me amps and shit." I asked him if he got a major buzz out of that early gigging but he seemed nonplussed. But they were pretty good - they could've been a lot worse. "They heard the music all the time coming from above their TV, because that's where my room was. Yorke's earliest musical forays were deconstructive "You always have that 'I can do better than that' impulse, and more specifically you want to find out a way of doing it." But pretty soon he was gigging at weekends, with the support of his parents. "I loved David Sylvian's voice", and the predictable REM. A half-generation too young for Punk, his early influences - he confessed with a wry smile - included naff Japan. Yorke was a musical prodigy of sorts, and by the age of thirteen he was strumming a guitar and composing lyrics. "My parents didn't even have a hi-fi until I got one, they had one of those radio-cassette things." He conceded - albeit uneasily - that his had been a happy - if profoundly unmusical - family. But to me he seemed emotionally grounded and secure. In previous interviews he's waxed disconsolately about his discombobulated childhood, the frequent changes of school, and the bullying at those schools because of his paralysed eye (a congenital defect that's left him with an oddly profound monocular stare). But I was involved a bit, we managed to ban some of the Young Conservatives from the student union, and I was proud of that." His time at university wasn't exactly formative for Yorke, instead I think it probably confirmed him as a stayer more than a goer. I didn't like all the factionalism and the language you have to adopt. I asked him if he was politicised when he was at Exeter University and Yorke displayed his trademark diffidence "On and off. ![]() "He was pushing Hoon hard on the issue of weapons of mass destruction, and basically Hoon didn't have an answer for any of it, couldn't justify why it is that they won't let the UN weapons inspectors back in." "Did you hear John Humphrey's interviewing Geoff Hoon on the radio this morning?" he asked me. Certainly Yorke was concerned to put his seriously bitter credentials on the coffee table.
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