Free Thom Yorke by Trevor Baker Page B

differences, particularly for the year or so they spent living together. “It was like some nightmare version of The Monkees,” Colin once said. “I wouldn’t recommend it.”
    Different members of the band drifted in and out at different times and, even if they weren’t actually paying rent, they would often be found there anyway. Thom spent one summer sleeping on the floor because he was broke. He’d spent all the money he earned DJing on buying records.
    “He’d blow it all on crap records,” Colin recalled. “He freely admits it. He has the worst record collection … I think he was actually going for quantity over quality. So I had him crashing on my floor!”
    Most of the time it was Phil, Ed and Colin (“the sensible three” according to Colin) who shared the house but Jonny was there part of the time and Nigel remembers Phil moving out fairly quickly because, “he was too mature to muck in like that.”
    As in all shared households, there were domestic tensions. Nigel’s main memory of their early days is the way they seemed able to deal with big things easily but would squabble over the most trivial things. “I just remember that things would sometimes suddenly sour and the atmosphere would get really difficult and there wouldn’t be a good reason,” he says. “It was very public school – somebody not apologising fast enough for spilling somebody’s drink or something like that. Petty things. It would just be like, ‘OK, what happened there?’ Suddenly nobody’s talking to each other.”
    On one occasion, Phil came home for the first time in weeks to find that Colin had eaten all his honey and, so Colin claimed later, he was furious. It was that kind of household. The band spent much of their time ignoring each other when they weren’t rehearsing or writing songs but, despite the squalor, it proved a highly creative environment. The previous tenant had supposedly died there and they enjoyed scaring themselves with stories about what might have happened to her. One day they found a half-eaten pork pie down the back of the sofa and, “being morbid people,” said Colin in aninterview with Select , “we managed to convince ourselves that she’d choked on it.”
    Their experiences in the house were, in some ways, useful training for the long tours later on but they also picked up some bad habits. Rather than having major arguments, one or more of them would simply remove themselves from the house if things got too tense. This might have been why Phil – despite renting a room in the house – was almost never there. Thom had a flair for the grand gesture that was slightly different to the rest of the band. It’s been said that he’s incredibly sensitive, perhaps over-sensitive, but Nigel Powell thinks this is only half-true.
    “In some ways, it’s true, yeah,” he says. “He liked things to be dramatic as well, which is a bad combination. He was fairly sensitive as a person but sometimes he would like things to be extra-dramatic so he’d find a reason to be excited about something if he wanted to. I couldn’t say that he was just over-sensitive because sometimes big things would happen and they would just bounce off him.”
    For example, none of the band were particularly fazed by On A Friday’s increasing popularity and industry interest. To Thom, in particular, it was obvious that they were going to be a successful band. Why not? What else was he going to do with his life? When he arrived back in Oxford, he spent a short time working in an architect’s office but he had absolutely no serious Plan B. Every waking moment was taken up with writing songs, rehearsing or playing gigs. Most nights they would head to the Cold Room rehearsal studios at a fruit farm just outside Oxford and practise for hours while other local bands, often The Candyskins, practised next door.
    “There was us in one room and them in another and we’d have a break and sit and chat and talk about music and