“Talking to Thom Yorke in 2001, there were no high jinks – just one hour to the second (he was counting) in Oxford, which contained, nonetheless, spectacular rock’n’roll attitude. Yorke was built from sarcasm, cynicism and curious mirth, with a demented nasal laugh: “Neheheheh!” He hadn’t talked to NME for five years, a Mexican standoff through OK Computer and Radiohead’s Most Important Band in the World era; withering NME wags routinely captioned their photos with “ugly, ugly, ugly”. By 2001, those people now gone, he had finally capitulated, a man so edgy he was practically disappearing side-on, soon decimating both NME and the prevailing culture, an eerily prescient summation of the paper’s already-approaching spiritual demise, full of advertising for VO5. “NME dot com,” he scoffed. “Fattening themselves up for floating themselves on the international money market. It’s like talking to CNN, innit? Neheheh!” That year, both NME writers and Radiohead fans had expressed disapproving bewilderment at OK Computer’s two seemingly avant-garde followups, Kid A and Amnesiac, which made him furious. I told him about a reader’s letter accusing him of being reluctant to commit himself emotionally. Like a man being shot in the chest, Yorke threw his head back in a flip-top of genuine hysteria, clapping furiously. “Neheheh! Fuck you, whoever you are! Fuck you entirely! I’m not even gonna commit myself emotionally to a response! Next!” Much of Amnesiac, he countered, concerned the death of everything, mostly through economic greed: the planet, culture, humankind, urgent predicaments that “the mainstream media” ignored. “Our culture is fucking desperate,” he carried on. “We’re listening to the most hokey shite on the radio and watching vacuous bullshit celebrities being vacuous bullshit celebrities and desperately trying to forget about everything. I can’t do that.” Contrary, belligerent, unfathomable and therefore a Proper Rock Star, Thom Yorke was a weirdo, all right, though very far from a creep.”
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