Thom Yorke – Radiohead & Trading Solo

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THE ALL-SEEING EYE

Sometimes it seems like Thom Yorke’s story begins with his eye. The ‘lazy’ one that, according to music magazine folklore, snaps to attention whenever he’s feeling particularly riled or passionate about something. It’s been used as the symbol of his strangeness, his ‘creepiness’ even at one point, but also, maybe, of his ability to see things differently to other people.
Thom is not the first such example. It’s why so many villains and anti-heroes, from Shakespeare to Dickens, have some form of visible affliction; however, it’s striking that this prejudice is still so powerful today. It’s perhaps led some people to think that Thom Yorke is ‘weird’. It’s also meant that he’s been battling against, or sometimes revelling in, a perception of his own weirdness for most of his life.
When he was born in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire on October 7, 1968, his left eye was completely paralysed. Initially, doctors told his parents that he’d never be able to see out of it. However, surgical techniques were moving on quickly and they took him to a specialist who suggested he could graft a whole new muscle on to the eyelid.
It was a highly complicated procedure and so in between his second birthday and the age of six, Thom underwent five separate operations. When he had the first one he’d just learned to talk and, as he came round from the anaesthetic, he doubled over and started crying. On later occasions he would lie there in his hospital bed hearing old men in the geriatric ward next door talking to themselves or, on one occasion, somebody vomiting violently outside. “Hospitals are fucking horrifying places,” he said later.
At first, the operations were relatively successful. They managed to open the eye and save his sight but the last operation went wrong and he was left half-blind. The doctors told him that his eye had simply grown lazy from lack of use. Their solution was that he should wear a patch. A patch on his good eye.
“The most annoying bit was bumping into things really, because it didn’t work,” Thom told Hot Press. “They had this theory in the late 1970s, that if you had a lazy eye, they put a patch over the other one to make this one work harder, which was actually complete bullshit as they later found out. You have a kid bumping into things for a year, being miserable.”
It didn’t help that Thom’s father had a job as a salesman and, in a six-month period after Thom started wearing the patch, the family moved twice. Each time Thom was forced to explain again to a new set of curious children just why it was he always came to school looking like a pirate. One child nicknamed him “salamander” and the thin-skinned Thom ended up getting into a fight with him. But the taunts didn’t stop.
“If you think about it, if I had a kid and he had to wear a patch on his eye for a year, I’d be worried about what he’d be like at the end of that year. You know what I mean?” Thom continued.
Despite this, he wasn’t some kind of emotional wreck. He had a girlfriend. He had his first kiss at the age of seven. Typically he still remembered the girl’s name, years later, Kate Ganson. More surprisingly, considering his later views on drivers, he also remembered that her dad had, “a great Lotus car.”
His mum described him later as a quiet, happy child who would spend all his time in a corner making things with Lego. She was the creative one in the family while his dad was an energetic hard worker and amateur boxer who tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to teach his older son to box, too.
“One of the first things he ever bought me was a pair of boxing gloves,” Thom said to Rolling Stone’s Jon Wiederhorn. “He used to try to teach me … but whenever he hit me, I’d fall flat on my ass.”
He picked up a guitar for the first time when he was four years old but, when he cut his fingers on the sharp strings, he threw it against the wall and broke it. The first, but not the last guitar to die that way. By the time he was seven, this indiscretion had obviously been forgotten because he was given a Spanish guitar as a present and promptly decided that he was going to be just like his new hero – Brian May of Queen. Instead, his guitar teacher had him plucking away, learning to play ‘Kumbaya’. Nevertheless he stuck with it and, when he was ten-years-old, he formed his first band. They were a duo. Thom played the guitar and his co-writer would make as much noise as possible, on one occasion by rewiring a TV so that it exploded. This went well with the subject matter of their songs. The first one was called ‘Mushroom Cloud’ and, Thom said later, “it was more about how they looked than how terrible they were.”
But things went downhill when the family moved again, this time to Oxfordshire. Thom’s brother Andy once said of their hometown of Abingdon that it was, “quite horrible … Abingdon swims around in this sea of cultural emptiness.”
And the public school of the same name was even worse. Although it had a highly musical ethos, which in many ways was great for Thom, it was also deeply conservative and old-fashioned. And the fact that Thom went to a fee-paying school meant that he’d decisively stepped over an invisible line in Britain’s class divide. His new schoolmates didn’t think much of him and his old friends rejected him, too.
“They blanked me out,” he said in an interview with Blender magazine. “I used to cycle around, and one of them once got his older brother to kick the shit out of me and throw me in the river, just because I’d gone to that school.”
By then he’d become the kind of person who constantly feels the glare of the world’s attention and finds it frightening but also gratifying. His nascent feeling that everybody was watching him was, at that point, probably justified, or else it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. He stood out

This went well with the subject matter of their songs.