But for now, Thom Yorke hasn’t been fully Bono-ified yet. Radiohead is still in its pre-imperial period. Popular enough to whip thousands of people into a frenzy while torches are lit aflame in the distance, à la U2’s Under a Blood Red Sky era in the early ’80s, but not truly massive in the stadium-rock sense.
And yet, on that train, the chances that Thom won’t be recognized are close to nil. He is traveling in the vicinity of a rock show—his rock show—not long before showtime. Who does he expect to be riding a train at that hour? He has not thought that far ahead.
Before long, he realizes that he is surrounded by Radiohead fans. All he can do is hide as the train whisks him back to the place he just tried to escape. He has found his metaphor for fame—a closed loop of omnipresent discomfort, perpetual awkwardness, and inescapable impotency.
I’m not here. This isn’t happening.
This is breakdown number one, the “lesser” one. The major breakdown, the one where “it” begins, occurs later that night, after a six-song encore that culminates with the climactic tracks from the two most recent Radiohead albums, “Street Spirit (Fade Out),” from The Bends, and “The Tourist,” from OK Computer.
After wailing “hey maaaaan, slow dooooown!” for several minutes to a worshipful audience, Yorke walks with his bandmates to their dressing room. They should feel triumphant, but Thom is tired. Radiohead has been touring almost constantly for six months, and they have another five months to go. By the time the promotional march finally wraps in the middle of 1998, they will have performed nearly 700 concerts in the past seven years. In 1995 alone, they lodged 179 shows—essentially a gig every other day, somewhere in the world, flogging “Fake Plastic Trees” at the local neighborhood House of Blues, over and over again.
Something inside of Thom Yorke finally snaps. He can’t speak. His bandmates, Ed, Jonny, Colin, Phil—all of his mates from long before the time that he was “MTV famous”—ask if he’s all right. Yorke can tell they are speaking to him, but he can’t hear what they’re saying or respond. For a moment he’s just… blank, like a catastrophically malfunctioning hard drive.
This might seem like a melodramatic, even ridiculous, reaction to being thrust to the top of the rock’n’roll heap. But consider how others have reacted in similar circumstances. Bob Dylan crashed his motorcycle, rock–conspiracy theorists believe, in order to escape the endless, drug-fueled touring of his Blonde on Blonde period in 1966. David Bowie killed off Ziggy Stardust at a “retirement” show in 1973. Kurt Cobain tried to actually kill himself while in the midst of a miserable European tour in 1994, before finally finishing the awful deed that spring back home in Seattle. Relative to those rock stars, Yorke affecting catatonia seems reasonable.
I have seen too much. I haven’t seen enough. You haven’t seen it.
He hates being on the road. He hates himself for hating being on the road. He hates that he worked so hard and for so long to put himself in exactly this position and yet he can’t enjoy it. When Thom Yorke was a boy, he saw Queen guitarist Brian May on television and decided that he was going to be a rockstar. By age 11, he joined his first band and started writing songs. By 1985, he was leading On a Friday, the band that became Radiohead. And he just kept on going, straight to that dressing room backstage at NEC Arena, where he finally realizes that he got what he wanted but lost what he had.
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