Free Thom Yorke by Trevor Baker Page A

together for five years and yet they were still relative unknowns on the Oxford scene. To many people in the city who saw them play the Jericho Tavern at the time, it must have seemed like they’d just emerged, fully-formed and ready. Thanks to Thom’s prolific songwriting, they already had an extensive back-catalogue. They also had an energy borne of frustration at the years of waiting for this moment.
    When all but Jonny had graduated, they made a decision to move in together. Inevitably they chose Oxford. They were very different to the other bands in the city but they had a growing fan base. In the rock scene, everybody knew everybody else but, unlike in many bigger cities, other bands were highly supportive.
    “Everyone went out drinking and we’d go to [music venue] the Zodiac and various pubs. Everyone went out every night, all the bands, Supergrass and that, we all hung out together,” says Mark Cope of The Candyskins. “Everybody was trying to get better and better. Everybody was trying to outdo each other and the music got better. It wasn’t competitive in a nasty way but it was really nice. I remember listening to people from London and they’d be talking about what clothes somebody was wearing. For us it was about goinground somebody’s house with a guitar. It was all about music. There was a great atmosphere and nice people in Oxford then.”
    On A Friday weren’t exactly cut out to be a ‘scene’ band. At that point it was unlikely that any scene would have accepted them. They’d been changing their style constantly for the previous five years. In retrospect, it was lucky that they hadn’t been around for any of the trends that had caught on then. The bands that had leapt on to the dance rock bandwagon were seen as risible chancers while ‘Shoegazing’ had been and gone in barely a year.
    “When we were off at college, Ride started up and the whole Thames Valley thing happened. By the time we got back it had all finished! That’s called impeccable timing – we completely missed the boat,” Colin quipped to NME . Dance music had taken over most of the charts with DJs commanding massive fees in the new, warehouse-style ‘superclubs’ and, with the success of Nirvana, rock music was back in fashion. Thom knew which way the wind was blowing.
    “Thom was happy to follow fashion for a while, or try and be a little bit ahead of fashion,” says Nigel Powell. “Like a junior Madonna, he’d always be trying to see what would happen next. I think the reason Pablo Honey sounded the way it did was because Thom got in early in seeing that the grunge thing was going to happen. I remember him playing me the first 12-inch that Nirvana released and going, ‘These guys sound really great’ and then, not long after that, their songs started getting noisier. At that point he was very ambitious. It might not have been quite that cynical but he was trying to strike that balance between doing arty stuff and doing stuff that was commercially viable.”
    John Matthias doesn’t entirely agree with this assessment. “Their tastes were always very eclectic,” he says. “A lot of the tracks that are on Pablo Honey he would play at parties on acoustic guitar. It wasn’t like it was a means to an end. It was definitely what they were into at the time.”
    On A Friday couldn’t help but be influenced by the fact that people were now appreciating a grungier sound. Even while Thom was still at university, they were heading that way. But between them they liked a wide variety of music and this was reflected in the kind of stuff they played. Right from the start there were creative differences within the band.
    In contrast to Richard Haines’ thoughts, Nigel Powell says, “I got the impression that there was a tension between the members. Ed and Colin liked stuff that’s a little more straight-ahead where as Thom and Jonny liked stuff that was a little more skew-whiff.” But they had to learn to live with their