Thom Yorke says he wishes he hadn’t written Radiohead’s ‘High And Dry’
Thom Yorke has admitted that he wishes that he’d never wrote Radiohead‘s classic hit ‘High And Dry’.
The song, which peaked at Number 17 in the UK singles chart when it was released in 1995, is among their greatest songs. It featured on their second LP ‘The Bends’ which was released the same year.
In a new conversation with Harry Styles for Rolling Stone, the former One Direction man recalled how Yorke discussed songwriting in a podcast interview, where he said he likes to think of his voice as one of the instruments in a song.
“Is that something you noticed, when that changed for you?” Styles asked. “Because you say you don’t so much sit and write a song, like, ‘I’m going to sit here, and this is a song and this is how it goes’ – you think of how it sits in the production. But obviously, if you go back to ‘The Bends’, for example, like ‘High And Dry,’ that is a song.”
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Yorke responded: “Yeah, a guy with an acoustic guitar. Singing his song. That particular one I wish I hadn’t [grimaces], but there’s nothing wrong with that.”
He continued: “I don’t listen to a lot of singer-songwriters. I listen to a lot of mad old folk music, or I listen to film music, or I listen to electronic music. The banging away on the guitar thing is sometimes when it really speaks to me, but not a lot. I’m not quite sure why that is – probably because we grew up when there was a real renaissance of that, and ‘The Bends’ was that.”
In the same interview, Yorke also shared that he was already sick of the Radiohead album ‘OK Computer’ by the time that it was first released, and was itching to “move on” from it by the time they heading on tour.
‘OK Computer’ went five-times platinum in the UK, and went on to sell more than 4.5million copies. It contains their two highest-charting singles: ‘Paranoid Android’ and ‘No Surprises’. In NME‘s original album review, we gave it 10/10 and called it “a landmark record of the 1990s”.
The interview with Styles comes following Radiohead announcing their long-awaited live return in September last year, marking their first shows together in over seven years. They went on to play 20 arena dates across Madrid, Bologna, London, Copenhagen and Berlin that November and December.
Also in the new interview, Yorke revealed that their 2025 reunion tour led to a “massive” crash in his self-confidence that took months to recover from.
Earlier this year, Harry Styles presented Yorke with a prestigious Ivor Novello Fellowship and paid tribute to Radiohead as his “favourite band” and made the memorable admission: “I lost my virginity to ‘Talk Show Host’.”
At the event, Yorke debuted new song ‘Space Walk’, and delivered a passionate speech calling for better treatment of artists in the music industry.
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