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Santigold — is talking to Rolling Stone about what she calls a “cultural crisis.” As she was preparing to tour on the heels of her new album, Spirituals, Santigold came to the sound realization that the trek was unsustainable, both financially and for her mental health. She made the difficult decision to cancel the run, and she was far from alone.

There are a slew of factors taking their toll on artists, she says, from the monetary and emotional costs of being on the road to the pressure to get back to the way things functioned before pandemic lockdowns. And the burnout has followed in a big way.

[Touring is] literally crisis management. It’s all day, every day of crisis aversion. It’s literally like, “Oh, just pulled up to this show, and I lost my voice ‘cause I’m so fucking tired.” And then I have to disappoint all these people. “Oh, somebody’s plane didn’t arrive with our tour manager and all of our costumes” — it’s just literally nonstop. Everything’s fucked up. Then you go onstage, and you’re like, [screaming] “Hello!” to 30,000 people. … It’s a very different requirement energetically, spiritually, mentally to have to carry that night after night after night, five shows a week, at least.

if you’re not doing enough shows in your tour, then you’re not able to pay for the tour.

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Santigold on Why Musicians Are Burning Out Like Never Before

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Santigold tells Rolling Stone about the mental-health and burnout challenges plaguing artists today, and how it led to her canceling her tour.

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"telling people about problems you're having means admitting you're less than perfect which is what we're striving for in performance.

To me this means that the followers of musicians need to understand that the artists are people too

Musicians are expected to preform consistently at the highest standard, 75% reported experiencing performance anxienty, 48% had a repetitive strain injury at some point, and 47% reported hearing problems. all of these have a serious impact on a musicians ability to work and earn. (jnnyg brace)

Many found it difficult to find help that was catered to their specific needs SO mental help needs to be more advertised and accessible.

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Help Musicians UK Health and Wellbeing Survey 2014

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While many may envisage the life of a touring musician to be that of a glorified jetsetter, the reality is far from idyllic. A recent study by charity Help Musicians UK found that over 60% of musicians have suffered from depression or other psychological issues, with touring an issue for 71% of respondents.

“The classic image of a touring musician would seem counterintuitive to all we know about well-being,” says Isabella Goldie of the Mental Health Foundation. “Drinking in moderation, avoiding drugs, getting sufficient amounts of sleep, and having a support base of close friends and family nearby. These are the bonds that help keep you grounded ... It’s no surprise that some musicians struggle.”

"It's easy to let your mind and body slip into decay. For those with anxiety, hotel rooms are like prison cells

Mat Zo"

For many, the contrast between the highs of a successful show and the anti-climactic low that often follows can be hard to adjust to, a phenomenon that has been termed “post-performance depression’, or PPD. Mental health professional John C Buckner writes: “When the body experiences major shifts in mood, it is flooded with several different neurotransmitters, resulting in a biochemical release that leads to a feeling of ecstasy. After these moments the nervous system needs time to recalibrate itself to prepare for another release. After an exciting performance the body starts to balance out the level of neurotransmitters, and therefore it is not releasing the same level that caused the exciting feelings, resulting in the lingering sadness. In normal day-to-day life, biochemicals are released and rest/recovery follow, causing the typical ups and downs of life. In the case of PPD, the process is more extreme with higher highs and lower lows.”

Many of those surveyed by Help Musicians were reluctant to seek help. One anonymous artist said: “I feel guilty asking for help with something I should be able to deal with given the issues in question are part and parcel of the career path I’ve chosen.” But Nash says it’s important to know when to take a break. “I think I was probably overworked,” she says, reflecting on her early career. “I was doing huge tours and having two days off and then going out again. It burned me out.”

Is it viable, however, for an artist that isn’t Daft Punk to simply not tour? Beal, for one, thinks not. “If I could just stay home and record, I would, but it’s not financially feasible for a musician to do so these days.”

“When you’re young, people tell you that if you don’t do something it’s the end of your career. But it’s not. People are fragile. Our brains are fragile and you can only abuse them for so long. The sad thing is that some people can’t take themselves out of these situations. That’s when it is a manager’s responsibility to go ‘Hey, I think we need to take a break.’”

Nash says that the internet has had a positive effect, in giving younger musicians more control of their own careers. I suggest that social media also means today’s audiences see artists more as human beings – and are therefore more understanding when they cancel a show. Nash agrees: “I’ve seen fans be really loving if that happens, saying, ‘The most important thing is your health. We just want you to get better.’

“I would like to think that an artist’s mental health is taken into consideration more now,” says Nash. “We’ve had enough people die, quite frankly.”

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While many may envisage the life of a touring musician to be that of a glorified jetsetter, the reality is far from idyllic. A recent study by charity Help Musicians UK found that over 60% of musicians have suffered from depression or other psychological issues, with touring an issue for 71% of respondents.

Singer Alanna McArdle recently announced her departure from Cardiff punk band Joanna Gruesome for mental health reasons, her statement hinting that the strain of touring may have been a factor in her decision to quit.And when Zayn Malik broke the hearts of millions by pulling out of One Direction's tour of Asia - leaving the boy band shortly after - a source close to the band told the tabloid press: "Zayn went because he'd had enough. Have you ever been on the road for four years? "

"The classic image of a touring musician would seem counterintuitive to all we know about well-being," says Isabella Goldie of the Mental Health Foundation. "Drinking in moderation, avoiding drugs, getting sufficient amounts of sleep, and having a support base of close friends and family nearby. These are the bonds that help keep you grounded ... It's no surprise that some musicians struggle."

It's easy to let your mind and body slip into decay. For those with anxiety, hotel rooms are like prison cells

"Ninety-nine per cent of touring is the airports, the hotels, sitting in a metal tube for up to 16 hours at a time," says Grammy-nominated producer Mat Zo (real name Matan Zohar). "It's easy to let your mind and body slip into decay, even for a person with a healthy emotional state. For those with anxiety, hotel rooms are like prison cells."

Meredith Graves, of Syracuse punk outfit Perfect Pussy, agrees: "We're the luckiest people in the world to be able to do this; but that doesn't mean it's not hard. It's psychologically taxing," she says. "Being confined to the van for a 10-hour drive ... You can't sleep, you can't move, you can't do anything. It's like a recipe for a breakdown for me."

For many, the contrast between the highs of a successful show and the anti-climactic low that often follows can be hard to adjust to, a phenomenon that has been termed "post-performance depression', or PPD. Mental health professional John C Buckner writes: "When the body experiences major shifts in mood, it is flooded with several different neurotransmitters, resulting in a biochemical release that leads to a feeling of ecstasy. After these moments the nervous system needs time to recalibrate itself to prepare for another release. After an exciting performance the body starts to balance out the level of neurotransmitters, and therefore it is not releasing the same level that caused the exciting feelings, resulting in the lingering sadness. In normal day-to-day life, biochemicals are released and rest/recovery follow, causing the typical ups and downs of life. In the case of PPD, the process is more extreme with higher highs and lower lows."

Goldie agrees: "Musicianship remains one of the most exalted job roles and each live performance can provide a real high which can be hard to adjust to - especially when the elevated status that musicians receive is suddenly lost."

'Touring was destructive on me, that's for sure' ... US singer Willis Earl Beal on stage at The Falls festival in Australia, 2012. Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images

"Touring can be destructive on a musician, it was destructive on me, that's for sure," former XL Recordings artist Willis Earl Beal tells meover the phone from his home in Washington State. "I'd come home from tour, and I'm back to feeding the cat. My wife at the time - I don't have a wife now - worked 12-hour shifts , so I was cooking the dinner all that sort of shit. There was a lot of tension, because I'm thinking to myself, 'I don't deserve this, I'm a big star' and that was one of the contributing factors in ending my marriage. This fucking career, the striving towards something that never existed and doesn't exist."

A breakdown of personal relationships is common, with many musicians feeling alienated from loved ones back home. Kate Nash, who rose to fame while still in her teens, says that the contrast between her life and that of her friends was hard to get her head around. "I was still living in a tiny bedroom at my parent's house. Your friends are studying and you're doing something very different. Even though that's exciting, you can feel lost. You're young and you're not taking a normal path."

Zohar agrees: "Relationships are compromised, partly because it becomes difficult to relate to people with a more stable lifestyle. Your problems and cares become radically different to the other people in your life."

For some, however stressful and chaotic touring can be, it is preferable to daily life at home. "Touring institutionalises you and it can make normal life feel mundane," says Vaccines singer Justin Young, recently returned from a handful of dates in the US. "You end up with a lot of expectations from life that aren't always fulfilled in everyday tasks like going down the shops for a pint of milk or even going for dinner with friends. It's hard to replace all that adrenaline."

These sentiments are echoed by Nash: "When you're on tour, you know exactly what you're doing and what's required of you. There's a routine. It's tangible what you stand for because it's right in front of you. You come off tour and you're like, 'Fucking hell what is the point? What am I doing with my life?'"

But is treating touring as escapism healthy in the long-term? Isabella Goldiesays: "Life on the road can be exhilarating but it is vital that the musician has a place to call home, a place where he or she belongs."

'You're young and you're not taking a normal path' ... Kate Nash performs in San Francisco in 2013. Photograph: Tim Mosenfelder/Getty Images

Some people can't take themselves out of these situations. Then it's a manager's responsibility to say 'take a break'

Many of those surveyed by Help Musicians were reluctant to seek help. One anonymous artist said: "I feel guilty asking for help with something I should be able to deal with given the issues in question are part and parcel of the career path I've chosen." But Nash says it's important to know when to take a break. "I think I was probably overworked," she says, reflecting on her early career. "I was doing huge tours and having two days off and then going out again. It burned me out."

Is it viable, however, for an artist that isn't Daft Punk to simply not tour? Beal, for one, thinks not. "If I could just stay home and record, I would, but it's not financially feasible for a musician to do so these days."

A cruel reality then, but is the music industry waking up to the strain it may be inflicting on its own artists? "I hope so," says Nash. "When you're young, people tell you that if you don't do something it's the end of your career. But it's not. People are fragile. Our brains are fragile and you can only abuse them for so long. The sad thing is that some people can't take themselves out of these situations. That's when it is a manager's responsibility to go 'Hey, I think we need to take a break.'"

Nash says that the internet has had a positive effect, in giving younger musicians more control of their own careers. I suggest that social media also means today's audiences see artists more as human beings - and are therefore more understanding when they cancel a show. Nash agrees: "I've seen fans be really loving if that happens, saying, 'The most important thing is your health. We just want you to get better.'

"I would like to think that an artist's mental health is taken into consideration more now," says Nash. "We've had enough people die, quite frankly."

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Insomnia, anxiety, break-ups ... musicians on the dark side of touring

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Long hours in vans and solitary hotel rooms. Screaming fans when you're on stage, then back home to feed the cat. Musicians talk about the psychological dangers of life on tour

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expected to keep pushing through, and as they did, it destroyed the band

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Popular musicians are often viewed through the trope of the “tormented artist,” a narrative that romanticizes and glorifies psychological distress. Through this narrative, substance abuse, unstable interpersonal relationships, and volatile mood swings are normalized in musicians. In fact, many believe that these psychological struggles facilitate great art.

In the wake of these tragic events, there seems to be an increased focus on mental health in music. Other popular musicians, such as Billie Eilish, Bruce Springsteen, Katy Perry, and Kendrick Lamar, among others, have openly discussed their personal struggles with mental health in efforts to raise awareness and decrease stigmatization.

Further, several nonprofit organizations (i.e. MusiCares, Backline, Music Minds Matter) were founded to provide resources to musicians and crew members struggling with their mental health. These resources include referrals to mental health professionals, online support groups, and psychoeducational materials on the importance of sleep, diet, and exercise.

Pathological accommodation is a way of being that occurs when an individual is organized around the needs of another. This occurs in relational systems in which caregivers are unable to provide an attuned response, or misattune, to an individual’s affective needs. With repeated misattunements, the individual begins to adhere to their caregiver’s needs to maintain necessary attachment ties and, in doing so, neglecting their own needs. This way of being limits emotional experiencing as the individual has learned that certain needs and emotions are unwelcome. This results in increased psychological distress.

With this transition [amateur to professional] comes intense demand and pressure from the industry. Professional musicians are at the mercy of grueling tour schedules where they spend months away from loved ones, must be “on” at every performance to win over audiences, and are harshly judged on their creative output. All of this occurs within a notoriously fickle and competitive industry that often leaves the musician powerless. If you aren’t willing to do all the “right” things, the industry will find someone else that will. What’s more, even if you do all the “right” things, there is still no guarantee of success. This relational dynamic between musicians and the music industry, which refers to the ways in which industry personnel behave when they have power over musicians, is fertile ground for pathological accommodation and psychological struggle.

It is important to note that the dynamics of pathological accommodation in the music industry are not entirely unique to that industry. Across a variety of professional settings, employees navigate similar struggles in negotiating the competing drives of individual authenticity with organizational belonging. (LIKE INTELLIGENT DISOBEDIENCE!!!!!!!!)

Prior to streaming, musicians would make a significant portion of their income from sales of recorded

music (i.e., CDs, LPs). However, streaming platforms pay musicians very little for their music

(Prior, 2018) and have led to steep declines in musicians’ income (McKinna, 2014). Thus, we

may find ourselves wondering how today’s musicians are able to make a living from music? The

answer: live performance and touring.

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"Intelligent disobedience requires refusing to follow orders that are either unlawful or will produce harm. While this often takes courage to do so, failure to find and act on that courage often does more damage to a career and life than the risk that would be taken by disobeying."

"Knowing when and how to disobey is a higher order skill than to just obey."

"It took moral courage and an act of intelligent disobedience to go around the hierarchy to the press to report the misuse of power coercing them to lie and alter reports. Compared to Snowden, though they blew the whistle, they did so largely within the system. Their actions were vindicated by society. At the time, it took moral courage to risk losing their job and status, and it took intelligent disobedience to get results in a moral and legal manner."

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"Leaders set the standard in what they enforce, reward, punish, and how they act personally. Followers then reinforce the culture or develop a subculture counter to the espoused culture."

"the military has “created an environment where it is literally impossible to execute to standard all that is required.” Their solution to changing the culture is to recognize the Army has a problem, exercise restraint, prioritize what can
be done instead of lying about what was done, and lead truthfully. This requires moral courage of the leadership to step forward, risking loss of job and status by going against the culture."

"Those who are just obeying orders and conforming to the culture are just as culpable as those giving the orders. More people need to come forward to decry and stand against
immoral, unethical, or illegal behavior, or just plain wrong orders that will cause avoidable failures and harm. Corporate culture has a tremendous influence on corporate
behavior. New employees to an organization quickly determine the business norms."

"The organizational culture becomes the standard to which their behavior is held and whether they are retained, promoted, fired, or voluntarily leave. Thus, many employees will follow a separate set of ethical standards at work than they will at home, thereby living a form of corporate cultural
ethical relativism"

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Sports’ culture dictates that Biles was supposed to power through the doubt, face the anxiety and deliver us a moment for which we can endow her with that special honor we bequeath to the courageous. But what Biles did was look right in the face of a foe we all know well and don’t like to acknowledge

she understood that telling the truth would get her labeled a quitter. She knew she was bucking against the ingrained culture and the condemnation would come because she’s dealt with this dynamic her whole career.

Absolutely nothing is wrong with the athletes who power through. They deserve the glory. Nothing is quite so stirring of the spirit as watching one beat the odds, conquer the obstacles and come out victorious.

At the same time, the difficulty of what Biles did is not lost. The valley where one finds their frailty is low. But she didn’t run. Instead, she went toe-to-toe. With disappointment. With frustration. With failure. With the frightening prospect of being transparent. With the reality that, on this occasion, she was not that one. She endured it all and did what she thought was the right thing.

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Expectations to persevere through extreme hardships

^ Physically impossible to meet expectations

Inability or purposeful failure

Breaking the chain

27 club ?

strict policies

Suicide rates due to expectations

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May represents the month of peak suicide risk across the year in the northern hemisphere. In fact, since the original finding in 1897 [6], this seasonal spring peak in suicides has been replicated in dozens of studies in both the northern (May) and the southern (November) hemispheres [7]. The primary cause of this notorious seasonal spring peak in suicides remains unknown, but it cannot easily be explained by seasonal rhythms in either preventable (e.g., family or vocational loss, substance abuse, and access to weapons) or nonpreventable (e.g., genetics, age, and male gender) risk factors. Although some recent studies suggest that the amplitude of this seasonal rhythm in suicides may be decreasing in some countries [8], suicide data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that this is far from the case in the USA [9, 10]. Thus, in an analysis of the trends in US suicides from 1971 to 2000, the seasons emerged as an increasingly significant suicide risk factor over those 3 decades [9]. Further, from 1999 to 2016, there has continued to be an alarming and statistically significant increase in the amplitude of this seasonally varying suicide risk factor that exerts its maximum effect in May and that could easily account for nearly 10% of all US suicides, i.e., roughly 3,500 suicides in 2016 alone [10] (Fig. 1, 2). This increasingly significant seasonal risk factor in the USA by any account could be considered a public health epidemic.

Through his life and music, Cornell exhibited and corroborated 3 separate fundamental axioms of suicidology [7]: first, May is the peak month for suicide in the northern hemisphere; second, mixed mood states carry a greatly increased risk of suicide; and third, the suicide risk is greatly increased when recovering from depression and mood turns mixed. Taken together, Cornell has left us with an inescapable, novel, important, and memorable hypothesis about suicide: the yearly suicide risk is greatest when winter turns to spring and there emerges a deadly coincidence of a mixed depressive state and a May photoperiod, i.e., the yearly suicide risk is greatest when a Black Hole Sun occurs in May.

In addition to illuminating the month of May as the peak of the seasonal suicide risk rhythm, Cornell also illuminates important aspects about mixed depressive states, which, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-Fifth Edition (DSM-5) [16], are characterized by a full major depressive syndrome in conjunction with 3 or more manic symptoms (e.g., euphoria, insomnia, and agitation), and are well known to be associated with a greatly increased risk of suicide [7]. Controversy exists, however, regarding how many and what kind of depressive and manic symptoms may combine to constitute a nosologically and pathophysiologically meaningful entity of the mixed mood state [17-19]. Interestingly, mixed mood states are also most likely to occur in the spring, at the height of the seasonal suicide risk rhythm [20-23]. Thus, while it is unknown whether Cornell’s depressions were ever formally diagnosed as mixed mood states, his description of the mixed mood state and its associated warping of one’s attitude towards suicide could not be more explicit in his not-so-vaguely suicidal song “Follow My Way” from his album with the undisguised and undoubtedly mixed title “Euphoria Mourning”

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Chris Cornell, the Black Hole Sun, and the Seasonality of Suicide

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Abstract. Purpose: Seattle-inspired rock and roll superstar Chris Cornell died by suicide in May 2017. In the northern hemisphere, May represents the peak of the widely replicated but still unexplained seasonal spring rhythm in suicide.

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The 27 club is "one of the most elusive and remarkably tragic coincidences in rock & roll history." The term became widely known after Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, with rock fans connecting his age to that of other high profile musicians who had died around that age. (rolling stone) The 27 club accounts for various types of deaths, not just suicide.

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The 27 Club has become one of the most elusive and remarkably tragic coincidences in rock & roll history. The term became widely known after Kurt Cobain's death in 1994, with rock fans connecting his age to that of Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix - though it was notable to fans in the early 1970s when those four visionaries died within just two years of each other. When Amy Winehouse passed away at age 27 in 2011, it attracted even more attention to the significance of the age. While the club has been largely connected to musicians, it has expanded since, as many young actors and artists have lost their lives due to everything from addiction to suicide to freak accidents. Here are some of the unfortunate and untimely losses connected to the club.

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The 27 Club has become one of the most elusive and remarkably tragic coincidences in rock & roll history. The term became widely known after Kurt Cobain's death in 1994, with rock fans connecting his age to that of Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones and Jimi Hendrix - though it was notable to fans in the early 1970s when those four visionaries died within just two years of each other.

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many artists' main source of income is from touring so they cant just not tour

Many found it difficult to find help that was catered to their specific needs SO mental help needs to be more advertised and accessible. (issuu.com)

struggling with drugs for mental health reasons OR because they felt uncreative (thom yorke)

MBCT (Mindfulness based cognitave therapy)

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that success sent Thom over the edge. How did it impact on you?

It’s when I went into a deep depression. I knew that we had to get through the touring of OK Computer in order to take a break, so I was really down. I was depressed at the time but my focus wasn’t on me. Thom was like that [also], so it was about getting Thom through it, being there for him.

When that finished I went home to Oxford. I was single, on my own, World Cup ​’98 summer… I was the lowest I’ve ever been. It was the irony as well – you’re at the top, that old cliché. Did loads of drugs [and] went full on into all the wrong things. And then that went through to Kid A.

It was hard, because I felt like my job was to keep everything going. I felt like being the mum of the band, making sure Thom was alright, but I was fucked. Thankfully I didn’t realise how depressed I was until we finished.

Were you on antidepressants?

No. I tried to have some therapy, but therapy was great for two days, then I’d feel shit for the next five. I could see how you could get into the dependency thing.

The thing I did get into around Kid A was this stuff called St John’s Wort [a herbal anti-depressant], which is fucking strong. Things were scary enough as it was. I was feeling so shit and in order to get through the day I would take St John’s Wort and smoke loads of cigarettes.

Kid A and Amnesiac were the paired albums where Radiohead ripped it up and started again. In reductive terms, that meant much less guitar. As one of the guitarists in the band, did you come close to thinking, ​“I need to walk away from this”?

Not really, no. The band was everything. I didn’t have a family, didn’t have kids. This was the be-all and end-all and had been since 1985, when we were at school together. It was the most important thing. But it was a whole period of supreme un-confidence. Feeling shit about myself, feeling unworthy, guilt… All that stuff.

What’s the closest the band has ever come to ending?

I don’t know whether there has been a closest time. I think [doing] the tracklisting of Kid A was really fraught. That felt like it could go either way, it could break. Like it would snap and that would be it. But we came in the next day and it was resolved.

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When I met Thom at school, he'd probably been writing songs for about five years. He was an incredible songwriter. There was [space to contribute to] the odd b‑side or whatever. The writing process, pretty much off and on until In Rainbows, was Thom coming in to the band with a demo. [Or] he might have worked on it with Jonny, chords and stuff, then brought it to the band.

Then, with The Bends, OK Computer, we rehearsed massively and arranged... We always kind of wrote our own parts, there was a creative outlet for that. But that's the way Radiohead was set up. I'm not comparing us to The Beatles, but John Lennon put it beautifully when someone asked about George Harrison songs: ​"The empire was carved up between me and Paul."

That's the way that certain groups work, and that's the dynamic. My role in Radiohead was always to service these songs. They started off as Thom's songs and sometimes they became our songs, but other times they stayed as Thom's songs. It was incredibly satisfying.
How would you describe you and Thom's relationship very early on?
I've always been like his older brother. Not anymore, but that was my role. I always say that he was like the dad of the band and I'm the mum. My job was to always put my arm around him, and his job was to be Thom.
Vocally in Radiohead you've always done brilliant harmonies with Thom. But how challenging was it for you finding the confidence to do a lead vocal?
Initially when I wrote these songs I thought I'd get someone else to sing them. I thought maybe Thom would be up for it. But the week before we started, I was demo-ing the songs and it was literally a case of: I don't hate what I'm hearing on playback.

And the big thing for me was getting Flood on board. [He's used to] doing vocals all day with Bono, 13 hours in his underpants! And he was so certain that I could do it. So having that backing, that assuredness, helped me step up.

But I remember what Thom's voice was like in the early days. It's not what you see now. Radiohead in the early days, that first album was pretty shit apart from one song!
Which one?
[Smiles and gives silent ​"dur"] Well, Creep, right? That's the standout track. We weren't that good but we worked hard and became good. That's one of the things I've held onto: you don't have to have all the answers straight away. People forget that the guy who wrote No Surprises, which was only a few years after that, maybe three or four years, how he evolved.
As did Radiohead.
[Nods] We weren't like The Stone Roses. We were crap compared to Blur, all those types. And, after all that touring on Pablo Honey, then the songs that Thom was writing were so much better. Over a period of a year-and-a-half, suddenly, bang.
, indeed - into 1995's , and then 1997's OK Computer. Radiohead went from Pablo Honey that ​"pretty shit" 1993 debut, to back-to-back classic albums, and to becoming one of the biggest bands in the world. But as is now well-established rock lore - and as was painfully captured in can-we-go-home-yet? tour doc Were you on antidepressants? Meeting People Is Easy - that success sent Thom over the edge. How did it impact on you? And you met Johnny Mar...
It's when I went into a deep depression. I knew that we had to get through the touring of OK Computer in order to take a break, so I was really down. I was depressed at the time but my focus wasn't on me. Thom was like that [also], so it was about getting Thom through it, being there for him.

When that finished I went home to Oxford. I was single, on my own, World Cup ​'98 summer... I was the lowest I've ever been. It was the irony as well - you're at the top, that old cliché. Did loads of drugs [and] went full on into all the wrong things. And then that went through to Kid A.

It was hard, because I felt like my job was to keep everything going. I felt like being the mum of the band, making sure Thom was alright, but I was fucked. Thankfully I didn't realise how depressed I was until we finished.

No. I tried to have some therapy, but therapy was great for two days, then I'd feel shit for the next five. I could see how you could get into the dependency thing.

The thing I did get into around Kid A was this stuff called St John's Wort [a herbal anti-depressant], which is fucking strong. Things were scary enough as it was. I was feeling so shit and in order to get through the day I would take St John's Wort and smoke loads of cigarettes.

Yeah. Him, The Edge, Will Sergeant from The Bunnymen were my guitar heroes. And Johnny was on a spiritual, healing thing at the time, he gave me this Aldous Huxley book called The Perennial Philosophy. It's existential stuff. That really helped. It helps me stay rooted to being a human being on this planet. [Before that] I think I was slightly, rudderless, meaningless.

The moment I met Johnny, I felt like I was in a safe space. Like, I can say anything I want and he will listen. He's wise. And it was interesting - he said it was the first time he could talk about The Smiths, to me, because he knew what a fan I was. He helped me find a place where I could start again, give up on booze and drugs and all that stuff.

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Ready for his close-up, with solo project EOB and his first ever solo interview.

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delving into drugs for creative reasons, not lifestyle reasons; music as a lifetime commitment.

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RADIOHEAD SINGER THOM YORKE CAN tell you exactly when and where he hit rock-bottom: November 19th, 1997, the moment he walked offstage after a concert at the NEC Arena in Birmingham, England.
Yorke, guitarist Ed O'Brien, drummer Phil Selway, bassist Colin Greenwood and guitarist Jonny Greenwood, Colin's younger brother, had been touring Europe and America for seven months on behalf of their third album, OK Computer. They had five months to go. But Yorke was already toast -- exhausted by the explosive neurosis of his performances, gagging on the backstage circus of plastic love and promo.
"I came off at the end of that show," he remembers, "sat in the dressing room and couldn't speak. I actually couldn't speak. People were saying, 'You all right?' I knew people were speaking to me. But I couldn't hear them. And I couldn't talk. I'd just so had enough. And I was bored with saying I'd had enough. I was beyond that.
"You can fall very easily into the mind-set of being the victim," admits Yorke, 32, talking over the roar of lunch-hour traffic at an outdoor cafe in Radiohead's hometown of Oxford. "It only takes a few times for you to give into things that you shouldn't have. The easiest thing to do is resent it.

THAT SEALED-IN FEELING nearly blew the band apart. Yorke came off the OK Computer tour convinced that Radiohead were in a gilded rut. He wanted extreme change at any price. O'Brien believes that included personal relationships.

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Rolling Stone #874, august 2nd 2001

RADIOHEAD : MAKING MUSIC THAT MATTERS

HOW ONE OF THE BEST BANDS IN ROCK TURNED ITS BACK ON STARDOM AND ONLY GOT BETTER

by David Fricke / Photographs by Lee Jenkins

RADIOHEAD SINGER THOM YORKE CAN tell you exactly when and where he hit rock-bottom: November 19th, 1997, the moment he walked offstage after a concert at the NEC Arena in Birmingham, England.
Yorke, guitarist Ed O'Brien, drummer Phil Selway, bassist Colin Greenwood and guitarist Jonny Greenwood, Colin's younger brother, had been touring Europe and America for seven months on behalf of their third album, OK Computer. They had five months to go. But Yorke was already toast -- exhausted by the explosive neurosis of his performances, gagging on the backstage circus of plastic love and promo.
"I came off at the end of that show," he remembers, "sat in the dressing room and couldn't speak. I actually couldn't speak. People were saying, 'You all right?' I knew people were speaking to me. But I couldn't hear them. And I couldn't talk. I'd just so had enough. And I was bored with saying I'd had enough. I was beyond that.
"You can fall very easily into the mind-set of being the victim," admits Yorke, 32, talking over the roar of lunch-hour traffic at an outdoor cafe in Radiohead's hometown of Oxford. "It only takes a few times for you to give into things that you shouldn't have. The easiest thing to do is resent it.
"And I was incredibly good at being the victim. You can abdicate responsibility, f*ck things up whenever you choose and not have to explain yourself."
He then cites a line from "Everything in Its Right Place," the quietly tortured opener of Radiohead's fourth album, Kid A: "Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon." "Lots of people say that song is gibberish," Yorke says irritably. "It's not. It's totally about that" -- the mute, vengeful paralysis he felt in Birmingham, which stayed with Yorke deep into the strange, simultaneous recording of Radiohead's twin hits, Kid A and the just-released Amnesiac.
In England, Yorke explains, "sucking a lemon" refers to "the face you pull because a lemon is so tart." He twists his sharp features into a ferocious grimace.
"That's the face I had for three years."

THOSE THREE YEARS ARE UP. Radiohead, the most inventive British rock group of the last decade, are now one of the most successful and uncompromising bands in the world.
"What they have done seems to be very clear and smart," says R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe, an avowed Radiohead fan and close friend of Yorke's since the two groups toured together in 1995. "Which is, with the number of hits they've had, they are simply staking their claim as their own band, making music they want to make - no one's lapdogs, whether it's an audience, a record company or their peers.
"And f*cking kudos for that," Stipe raves. "It's not easy to listen only to yourself and to react accordingly."
Radiohead were poised for greatness all through the 1990s. "Creep," Yorke's scathingly funny song about self-loathing on the 1993 album Pablo Honey, established the band as modern-rock radio stars. The futurist nerve and vintage guitar drama of 1995's The Bends and the '97 million-seller OK Computer put Radiohead in a direct line of succession to the Beatles, Pink Floyd and U2 as classic-rock gods, a band that mattered with sales to match.
But Radiohead chose to test the creative and commercial license that came with the prize. Last October, Kid A became Radiohead's first Number One album in America, despite its dark, largely guitarless temper and a lack of accompanying singles and videos. The equally enigmatic Amnesiac recently entered Billboard's album chart at Number Two, held back by Staind's Break the Cycle but actually beating Kid A's first-week sales by nearly 25,000 copies. And on a late-May afternoon at Bray Studios, a film-production complex on the Thames River outside London, Radiohead are rehearsing for a summer tour that includes their first extended U.S. visit since that '97-'98 death march.
"It feels good to have that whole period over," Yorke says brightly. He is wearing a denim jacket, very baggy jeans and a few days' growth of reddish-brown beard. "And it's nice," he adds, "to feel that there was a reason for it."
The relief in his voice is huge enough to fill the hangarlike soundstage where Radiohead run through nearly thirty songs from their last four albums. "Thom has this amazing ability to affect the environment of emotions around him," says Colin Greenwood, 32, who has known Yorke since they were both twelve, taking classical-guitar lessons at Abingdon School near Oxford. Chris Hufford, one of Radiohead's three managers, agrees. He describes Yorke as "incredibly charismatic. In the old days, when he entered a room and he was pissed off, everybody knew it. And he didn't have to say anything."
At Bray, Yorke is happy in his work - singing right into the sound hole of his acoustic guitar during "Airbag," from OK Computer, his head so close to the instrument he seems about to dive inside; intoning the final lines of "Street Spirit (Fade Out)," from The Bends, with the haunting sustain of a medieval hymn. Selway, O'Brien and the Greenwoods pick up on that electricity, turning the liquid hum of Amnesiac's "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box" into surging funk, a 1970s German-rock groove shuddering with Rolling Stones-guitar clang.
Later, O'Brien, 33, points out his favorite part of the day, when the group finishes with "The Tourist," the yearning climax of OK Computer: "The thing that always makes me smile is at the end, where we huddle around Phil's kit, playing together. Everybody is drawn in there, feeling it."
That magnetism comes naturally. Radiohead issued their first record, the EP Drill, in 1992, but they have been a band since the mid-1980s, when they began writing and rehearsing together as students at Abingdon under the awkward name On a Friday. Jonny Greenwood, the youngest, was thirteen when he first played with the others. The older four scattered in their college years - Yorke to Exeter, Colin to Cambridge, O'Brien to Manchester, Selway to Liverpool - but met on weekends and holidays with Jonny to compose and make tapes. All five still live in the Oxford area (Jonny, Colin and O'Brien also have places in London), and they recorded most of Kid A and Amnesiac in their new studio, a converted barn, not far from Abingdon School.
"Hermetic is a very good word for us," says Colin. Yorke notes that when Radiohead brought in the Orchestra of St. John's to play on Amnesiac, a woman in the string section expressed concern about the Radiohead setup of mixing business and fraternity. "Five boys together for over ten years - that is extraordinarily unhealthy," she told Yorke. "It's fine for women to do it. But men, no."

THAT SEALED-IN FEELING nearly blew the band apart. Yorke came off the OK Computer tour convinced that Radiohead were in a gilded rut. He wanted extreme change at any price. O'Brien believes that included personal relationships.
"I've always maintained that our friendship is absolutely crucial," he says. "I think Thom has thought it hasn't been crucial - at times. That says a lot about us as people. Thom's got that drive: 'I've got to tame that thing, at whatever cost.' I'm a softie." Left to his own devices, O'Brien says with a sheepish grin, "I probably wouldn't achieve anything."
Yorke insists that making Kid A and Amnesiac was "a lesson in not being personal about things. A lot of the time, it was me getting too impatient about things. But it's all stuff that had to happen. We had to get a lot of garbage out of the way.
"It would have been really sad to have just done what people said we were doing, which was go all electronic and weird," he argues. "It wasn't like that at all."

RADIOHEAD WORK LIKE THIS: "When all five of them say, 'This is great,' then it's great," says Chris Hufford. "If just two of them - say, Ed and Phil - say it's great and the other three say it's rubbish, then it's not going anywhere. And Thom definitely has the veto." Hufford knows this from long experience. He first saw the band play, as On a Friday, at an Oxford pub in 1991, and produced the demos that led to the group's signing with EMI that year.
"Normally, our approach as managers is when all five of them are green-lighting something, then it's a go-er," Hufford says, referring to his partners Bryce Edge and Brian Message. "If it's just Thom, proceed with caution."
Yorke himself is not a cautious man. He is quick and direct in conversation and walks with brisk purpose. Although he stands quite still at the microphone in concert, Yorke's head bobs violently from side to side as he sings, as if he is physically shaking the words out of his mouth. He was a fighter in school, too, unwilling to tolerate hazing despite his bantam size. "There were times," Yorke says, "when the person concerned didn't come back for more."
He was all battle stations when the Kid A/Amnesiac sessions commenced in Paris, then Copenhagen, in February and March 1999. On the second day in Copenhagen, Radiohead laid down three songs: "Knives Out," "Dollars and Cents" and the Kid A version of "Morning Bell," a song so good they cut it again for Amnesiac. "Pyramid Song" was done either that day or the next - Selway can't remember which. But the drummer recalls feeling good about the results. Briefly.
"That first day was remarkably good," says Selway, at thirty-four the oldest member of Radiohead. "At the same time, we were relying on our old methods, of playing in the studio live." OK Computer was made that way at St. Catherine's Court, a fifteenth-century manor near Bath, owned by actress Jane Seymour. The group recorded the basic tracks live in the gargantuan ballroom, and Yorke nailed many of his vocals in first takes.
This time around, he had other ideas. "I thought chords were boring," he snaps. "If anyone was playing a straight beat on a snare drum, I was like, 'F*ck this.' " After the band took an early stab at Kid A's "How to Disappear Completely," Yorke said, "That sounds great, but it sounds like old Radiohead."
Yorke concedes that he was all commitment and no map. "There is a certain state of mind I'm in when I write songs - it's like a bad virus," he says with a pained smile. "Everything is the wrong way up and inside out." Yorke was so disoriented by the mass and chaos of what he was writing, mostly extended poems and nonlinear fragments, that he pinned computer printouts of his lyrics to the studio walls "to see what other people thought."
The singer knows he put his band mates and Radiohead's engineer/co-producer, Nigel Godrich, through protracted hell. "It wasn't huge f*cking rows," Yorke protests, then laughs. "No, there were. That's a lie. Completely."
"Thom is constantly testing us," O'Brien says without rancor. "You think, 'Do I have to keep proving myself?' Yeah, you do. That's why he's such a great bandleader. He keeps you on your toes. But it is a band. I have no doubt that Thom would make amazing music on his own. But we give him the soul." On the group's records, all songwriting and production are credited collectively to Radiohead.
Yorke was a pusher from the beginning. "The first time I met Thom," says Jonny Greenwood, now twenty-nine, "he was in the drum room at school, drumming. Or rather, I was - and he came in to take over. He told me to play the double bass. I said, 'I can't.' He said, 'Just do this' - he showed me something. 'It'll be fine, just attack it.' He had that attitude that you can just go for it.
"There is this idea of Thom sitting in a corner, being apathetic and annoying," says Jonny, actually a gifted multi-instrumentalist (viola, recorder, keyboards, electronics) who played in the Thames Valley Youth Orchestra and now writes Radiohead's string arrangements. "It does not square with the enthusiastic, hungry, musically buzzing person Thom is. Some of his ideas aren't very good" - Jonny grins devilishly from under a sweeping curtain of long, dark bangs - "but he wants to see them through to the end. That's typical of Thom. He's the last to give up."
The weirdest thing about Kid A and Amnesiac is how honest, and human, they are. The combative and self-mocking song titles ("Knives Out," "You and Whose Army?," "Everything In Its Right Place") plainly indicate a band in crisis. And much of what you hear is real rock singing and chops, altered beyond easy recognition. Selway is playing drums somewhere inside the robotic "Kid A." Amnesiac's "Like Spinning Plates" is the track from another, unreleased song, "I Will," run in reverse. "Thom learned to sing the backward melody forward," says Colin. "You can hear what the words are, but they sound like they're backward.
"I don't think either of those records is entirely different from what we had done before," Colin claims. "But everyone expected us to become this U2 type of band, with that stadium credibility. It was our time to inherit the mantle."
Radiohead have paid for their deviance. In The New Yorker last fall, Nick Hornby - who wrote the definitive rock-geek novel, High Fidelity - nuked Kid A, likening it to such icons of perversity as Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music and Bob Dylan's Self Portrait. The review was "a most eloquent display of betrayal," Colin says with a sort of admiration. "He was looking for something else."
So is Jon Clews, an 18-year-old Radiohead fan from Rugby, England. He is one of three devotees - the others are Mark Higgenson, 21, from Manchester and 16-year-old Amy Garrick from the Shetland Islands in Scotland - seated across from Yorke, Colin and O'Brien in a London radio studio. The fans won a Radiohead trivia contest on the Evening Session, a BBC program hosted by DJ Steve Lamacq. The grand prize: a chance to interview the band.
Clews gets right to the point. He tells Yorke that he liked "the electronic flirtation" on Kid A but misses the songs and sound of The Bends, "the best album ever made. I'd really like to see [you] go back to that."
Yorke's comeback is cordial but firm: "That's like saying to a painter, 'Can you just paint that again?' " But Yorke owns up that the negative reviews of Kid A were "a real shock to the system... I couldn't understand what we'd done to deserve it."
The hour, moderated by Lamacq, passes swiftly. Yorke, Colin and O'Brien are impressed by the fans' knowledge and repay their ardor with autographs, snapshots and warm banter. Yorke commends Higgenson, a graphics student, on a portfolio of Radiohead CD art that he designed as a personal project. O'Brien is amazed when Garrick says Kid A is her favorite Radiohead album. "Can you imagine listening to all that electronics," he exclaims, "in the dark, wet cold of Scotland?"
Clews, Garrick and Higgenson are, in turn, thrilled to be this close to their heroes and to discover that Radiohead are not arty, high-strung cranks. "Do you think we get up our own arses?" O'Brien asks during the interview, turning the tables.
Clews answers immediately: "Having met you now, no, I wouldn't say that."

THE BEST WAY I CAN DESCRIBE Oxford is what Thomas Hardy wrote in Jude the Obscure: You're either on one side of the wall or the other," Yorke says one morning over coffee. He gestures past the high, vanilla-colored stone lining the patio of the Old Parsonage Hotel in central Oxford to the majestic ramparts, spires and iron gates of the warren of colleges collectively known as Oxford University. "There's a certain elitism to Britain that is accentuated in a place like Oxford."
"Everything that is worth seeing, that is beautiful and traditional, is behind a very tall wall," Jonny agrees, "designed to keep the students in and to keep you out." That siege mentality - a compound of paranoia, distress and impending violence - courses through Radiohead's music, especially in lyrics like Yorke's chorus to "Karma Police," on OK Computer: "This is what you get when you mess with us." But Jonny denies that Radiohead's outcast temper has much to do with growing up on the wrong side of Oxford's walls: "Our world was very small, centered around going to school and rehearsing with the band."
Jonny, Colin and O'Brien were all born in Oxford, although the Greenwoods, whose father was a British army major, moved throughout Germany and England before settling in nearby Abingdon. Selway arrived in Abingdon from Cambridgeshire. The son of a chemical-equipment supplier, Yorke is a native of Northamptonshire. Born with a paralyzed left eye that was partially corrected in a series of operations, he lived in Scotland until he was seven and was nine when his family came to the Oxford area.
Yorke declares that he knew, at the age of eight, that he would be a rock star. He is not being facetious. "I decided that," he says, "when I saw [Queen guitarist] Brian May for the first time on TV." When Colin and Yorke met at Abingdon School, the latter was already composing songs. "The National Anthem," on Kid A, is based on a riff that Yorke wrote when he was sixteen. And O'Brien reveals that amid Radiohead's oldest demos lurks a Yorke solo album, a tape called Dearest that the singer made by himself in the late 1980s. "It was really good," O'Brien says, "quite Jesus and Mary Chain-ish, with delays and reverb."
Still, Yorke took the time to complete his studies in art and literature at Exeter University, leaving with a bachelor of arts degree. He also made his vinyl debut there, recording a song with a local group, Headless Chickens, that appeared on an indie compilation EP. "My principal thing was still music," Yorke says, dismissing his degree as "bloody useless for anything. But if all I learned the whole time I was there was to keep working when you're stuck, well, that's all I need to know."
Colin, Selway and O'Brien graduated from their respective schools as well. Jonny left Oxford Polytechnic in his first year when the band signed to EMI in late '91, at which point the group wisely changed its name from On a Friday to Radiohead, after a song on the 1986 Talking Heads album True Stories."There was always a plan to get back together after university," Yorke notes. "I also wonder what would have happened if we hadn't gone off to college like good little boys. I think we would have freaked if we'd gone straight into the Radiohead thing."
But Yorke's borderline psychosis onstage was, at the time, painfully real, according to Hufford: "It was a young man's energy - very angry, demanding attention. When it worked, it was electrifying. But I know he found it emotionally draining" - Radiohead played more than 130 shows in 1992 alone - "because he meant everything he was doing."
The delayed success of "Creep" in the U.S. in 1993 - a year after the single flopped on its initial British release - complicated Yorke's struggle to control and direct his intensity. His comic snarl in the chorus ("You're so fucking special/I wish I was special") was mistaken for literal sourness. After shows, people came backstage looking for Yorke, asking - O'Brien swears this is true - "Where's the 'Creep' guy?" "Thom didn't want all that attention," Colin says. "He wanted respect, the kind that people give to artists like Lou Reed and Neil Young."
Yorke has that respect now. He is also stuck with a public image - immortalized in Meeting People Is Easy, Grant Gee's unflinching 1999 documentary of the OK Computer tour - as a brilliant grouch, up to his scalp in a misery of his own device. "He's not like that at all," swears Michael Stipe. "Maybe he thinks too much. But part of growing into success is becoming more comfortable with people wanting to know more about you, when that doesn't have a whole lot to do with the music you're making. And I think he's more comfortable with it now."
Smiling broadly, talking freely about the band, himself and fatherhood, Yorke does not look or sound like the prisoner of war of Meeting People. He became a first-time father in February when his girlfriend, Rachel Owens, gave birth to a son, Noah. (Selway also has two children.) Yorke says he had the name picked out long before the boy's arrival: "It's a strong name. It was perfect. He came out all rough and tumble, ready to go at the world." Much like his father.
"It's a record of where we were at, rather than a celebration," Yorke says of Meeting People."I reject it now. And I find it very weird when other bands pick up on that state of mind, trying to imitate it.
"Look, it's not cool," Yorke says of his bad old self. "That's just where I was at."

AT THE END OF JUNE, RADIOHEAD completed the West Coast leg of their current U.S. tour. They will be back at the end of July to cover the East Coast. There are concerts in Europe and Japan going into October, then nothing. "Everything stops," says Hufford. "The calendar is completely empty.
"Our plans go, maximum, about six months in advance," he says. Radiohead "don't want to think much further down the line. And it's fine. There's no problem, once you get away from the industry mind-set, which has gotten worse and worse, where you're in this dreadful sausage factory, churning out nicely bundled packages for the marketplace.
"We represent them," Hufford says of his partners and charges. "We don't represent the industry. We have to do what is best for the band." That means a little at a time.
Yorke, Selway, O'Brien and the Greenwood brothers all say they feel better about the future of Radiohead than they have in years. Jonny says the group will never give up touring: "If we stopped playing live, we'd lose half of what we are." Yorke is invigorated by the way the Kid A and Amnesiac songs bloom with thick-guitar muscle in performance.
"The other times we'd recorded, in the back of your mind was, 'How are we going to do this live?' " he says. "Now we do the version in the studio." For the gig, "it's like learning a cover." He laughs. "We're a Radiohead cover band."
There are new songs too. At Bray Studios, they tested one called "The Reckoner," and Colin says Yorke has another new corker, "Bring On the New Blood," about "these multiplatinum artists hooking up with the latest French disco producer to do their new record." Regardless of what anyone thinks of Kid A or Amnesiac, Colin says Radiohead never were, or ever will be, that desperate.
"If you sell enough records to carry on making records, that's all that matters," Colin claims. "We've projected our lives into this since we were in our early teens. That's where the genuine nature of it comes from - we've played together since we were kids." He then mentions something he calls "castles in Spain" - a kind of showbiz disease in which "some big, old rock band goes on a megatour. You know they've paid off the mortgage on the house and have enough money to raise a family. But they also have the obligations of the yacht and the castle in Spain.
"It won't happen to us," Colin declares, "because we're very successful at keeping a certain level of sanity," which he illustrates with a story about Radiohead's appearance last year on Saturday Night Live, the week Kid A busted into the Billboard chart at Number One. After the show, as the band members left the NBC studios at New York's Rockefeller Center, they found three limousines and a Jeep Cherokee lined up in the garage. All five guys piled into the Cherokee. "Somebody from the record company said, 'Oh, these limos are for you. Have your pick,'" Colin recalls.
To which Yorke responded, "Fucking typical Radiohead: We're all still getting into the same car."

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Rolling Stone #874, august 2nd 2001 RADIOHEAD : MAKING MUSIC THAT MATTERS HOW ONE OF THE BEST BANDS IN ROCK TURNED ITS BACK ON STARDOM AND ONLY GOT BETTER by David Fricke / Photographs by Lee Jenkins RADIOHEAD SINGER THOM YORKE CAN tell you exactly when and where he hit rock-bottom: November 19th, 1997, the moment he walked offstage after a concert at the NEC Arena in Birmingham, England.

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Yorke was shown as a shell-shocked musician whose life had been sucked from him by the endless interviews and other demands on the group.
He was still so fragile by the time of the "Kid A" release that he left the interviews to other band members. When he did comment, he frequently did so by e-mail.
"It was horrible for a while watching the misery that he was going through," the band's co-manager, Chris Hufford, says. "It was a misery that was self-inflicted, part of the classic English disease. At the same time you are enjoying all the praise and attention, you feel you don't deserve it and that you should be doing a million times better."

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L.A. Times, june 3rd 2001

[Click images for full size.]

Operating on His Own Frequency

Radiohead's Thom Yorke didn't take a detour into electronica. He headed down a new path in the name of self-preservation.

OXFORD, England-There's something exhilarating about walking in the footsteps of history, which is why the streets of this historic university town are usually crowded with tourists. Oscar Wilde, Graham Greene, Lewis Carroll, Roger Bacon and Shelley are among the hundreds of famous figures who studied here.
As a teen, Radiohead's Thom Yorke was fascinated by the class differences he observed-the students who came here to prepare for positions of power and wealth, and the ordinary residents who most likely would never have a chance at either.
"There was a massive gap between those inside the high walls and those outside," Yorke, 32, says now. "I knew some people who went to university and it was an incredible life of privilege. If they drank too much, someone would come behind them and wipe their vomit from the floor.
"To the tourists, it looks like an idyllic little town, but there is so much resentment that students are always getting beaten up. The class thing has always been a bit of an agonizing point for me, and it is something that has come out quite a lot on the last two records. The disheartening thing is the gap seems to be growing."
Don't, however, expect political diatribes on Radiohead's albums. Yorke's concerns are presented in lonely, haunting soundscapes that depend more on delicate mood than words to express disillusionment and helplessness. At its most fragile, the music approximates the beeps and squeaks of an intensive care unit's monitoring devices.
The quintet's 1997 album, "OK Computer," was such a strikingly original work that taste-makers began talking of Radiohead as the group that would finally wrest the title of best rock band in the world away from U2.
But since "OK Computer," the only thing this stylish and demanding group has generated more than acclaim is confusion.
Most commonly, bands are willing to do anything for maximum sales-from sticking with a successful musical formula to putting so much pressure on themselves by constant touring and promotional activities that they self-destruct. That's the story shown night after night on VH1's "Behind the Music."
But Radiohead's story is one of self-preservation. By focusing on the music rather than sales, Radiohead not only has won respect, but Yorke-the band's de facto leader- has also come out of the process with a renewed optimism about the band's future. Yorke summarizes his position of power in the group colorfully-and accurately-when he says, "We operate like the U.N. and I'm America."
Rather than continue in the accessible path of "OK Computer," which sold nearly 5 million copies worldwide, Radiohead shifted direction dramatically on its follow-up album, last year's "Kid A."
Gone were traditional verse-chorus-verse song structures and the band's guitar-dominated sound. Lyrics were mostly disjointed references. The album relied chiefly on esoteric sounds from computers and other devices employed by the electronica movement.
When the band didn't tour extensively or release videos in support of the album, the assumption in the rock world was that "Kid A" was a deliberate career sidestep, part of a cooling-off process to bring things back to normal after the pressures and expectations generated by "OK Computer."
That's what Bruce Springsteen did in the '80s by releasing the stark, brooding "Nebraska" after the commercial explosion of "The River," and it's what U2 did to a lesser degree with "Achtung Baby!" in the '90s after the superstardom of "The Joshua Tree."
Respect for Radiohead was so great that "Kid A" entered the U.S. chart at No. 1, but the word of mouth (and lack of radio airplay) soon slowed sales. Its U.S. total was about 840,000, compared with 1.4 million for "OK Computer." Critics, however, mostly continued to talk about Radiohead in glowing terms. Spin named "Kid A" album of the year, declaring it "the most emotive down tempo electronica ever."
Those Radiohead fans who found "Kid A" too distant turned their thoughts to the group's next album, hoping for a return to a more commercial and accessible path-just as Springsteen followed "Nebraska" with "Born in the U.S.A" and U2 returned to its familiar sound with last year's "All That You Can't Leave Behind."
The surprise in the new Radiohead album, "Amnesiac," which arrives in stores Tuesday, is that it's as esoteric and electronica-driven as "Kid A."
To outsiders ready to anoint Radiohead, the question is: Don't they want to be No. 1?
The answer is no-at least, not at any cost.
"The big fright after 'OK Computer' was that I didn't feel love for what we were doing anymore musically," he finally says. "If we had kept on the path of 'OK Computer,' it would have just been to satisfy others. I was totally burned out. I couldn't have done it. I went around for over a year with this creative block that was so bad I felt like I was dead.
"I think a lot of people think the last two albums were a sort of tokenism that we were just dabbling in a new style or trying to piss everybody off. But these records are the result of a desperate attempt to keep the band together-and we've done that. Everybody wants to be loved, but there are lots of things more important than being No. 1-starting with your sanity."

The Oxford tourist information center tempts you with all sorts of walking and bus tours, but there isn't any rock 'n' roll itinerary-yet.
On a recent weekday morning, young fans at the Virgin Records store in the center of town said people are always asking about Radiohead, whose other members are brothers Colin and Jonny Greenwood (bass and guitar, respectively), Ed O'Brien (guitar) and Phil Selway (drums). They all grew up here and maintain ties.
A few lucky fans might even spot various band members ducking into stores on the town's busy pedestrian shopping street.
One favourite stop for visitors is the Jericho Tavern, where the band-then known as On a Friday-played its earliest shows in the late '80s. Although the building still stands, it is under new ownership and has little of the feel of the old days.
The most likely place to find Radiohead-named after a Talking Heads song-is the band's management company, located in a nondescript office complex in a village on the edge of town-not that anyone thinks they'd be lucky enough to find Yorke.
The band's lead singer and primary songwriter has evolved into one of rock's most celebrated recluses.
In the sarcastically titled "Meeting People Is Easy," a documentary about Radiohead made during the "OK Computer" concert tour, Yorke was shown as a shell-shocked musician whose life had been sucked from him by the endless interviews and other demands on the group.
He was still so fragile by the time of the "Kid A" release that he left the interviews to other band members. When he did comment, he frequently did so by e-mail.
"It was horrible for a while watching the misery that he was going through," the band's co-manager, Chris Hufford, says. "It was a misery that was self-inflicted, part of the classic English disease. At the same time you are enjoying all the praise and attention, you feel you don't deserve it and that you should be doing a million times better."
Even on the 50-minute train ride here from London, you half expect to confront a last-minute change of plans when you arrive. But Yorke not only shows up at the management office on time, but also suggests taking some chairs outside so he can sit in a public courtyard. It's a rare sunny day in Oxford, and his disposition matches the weather.
For all the brooding intensity of his music, Yorke is down to earth and agreeable. He dresses casually and goes into the office to refill his teacup rather than asking a staff member to bring it to him. Like his friend Michael Stipe of R.E.M., he has a winning smile and is quick to make fun of his own obsessiveness. He is proud of Radiohead's accomplishments but seems to view all the acclaim with genuine suspicion.
One reason for his good cheer these days is that Yorke's first child, Noah, was born in February. The youngster has helped make his dad less obsessive.
"It's a joy," Yorke says, sipping his tea. "There was a time when I was working all the time and I thought it was all worthless, just endless tapes and computers filled with crap. My partner, Rachel, would say, 'Do something else. . . . Paint, go for a walk, anything that's not work for a day.'
"But it was hard to break my habits until now. Since Noah has come along, it's like, 'I've got 20 minutes to do a drum edit. Let's get it done.' "
When asked about the changes in Yorke, co-manager Hufford responds, "Having a son definitely helped, but making the last two records also helped . . . .To go through so many self-doubts and come out with music he loved and realizing the band has a future."

No one will ever mistake Thomas E. Yorke for Alfred E. Neuman, the "What, me worry?" cover boy of Mad magazine.
For as long as Yorke can remember, he has worried.
"I function by dwelling on things that aren't normally discussed at the dinner table," Yorke says. "They are the things I find stimulating."
Over the course of two hours, Yorke frets about everything from human cruelty (born with his left eye paralyzed, he was teased mercilessly at various times during his early school years) to the dangers of airplanes (not fear of a crash, but of the harmful effects of recycled air).
That's not to say he's a whiner or a malcontent rocker who is fashionably unhappy about the way life has treated him. Yorke comes from a solidly middle-class family, studied English literature and art at Exeter College (he's not one of the Oxford elite), and is an avid reader. (The other four members of Radiohead also went to colleges outside of Oxford.)
When he talks about social injustice, he is liable to quote linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky. Yorke was part of the rock contingent supporting the Jubilee 2000 crusade to encourage Western powers to forgive billions of dollars in debt owed by the world's poorest countries.
Given his interest in international politics, it doesn't take him long to zero in on President Bush.
"I wonder if most Americans know that the rest of the world is laughing at them over electing Bush-or maybe I should say, they would be laughing if it wasn't so serious," he says. "I think the people in Britain will stop laughing if [Prime Minister] Tony Blair actually agrees to this Star Wars thing.
"Bush reminds me of the character from the film 'Being There,' Chauncy Gardner, the guy who had no real opinions but seemed to be giving people what they wanted. That's the man we have leading the free world-and you wonder why I worry?"
Mostly, though, Yorke worries about his music.
In the early days of Radiohead he worried that no one outside Oxford would pay attention to his group. A few bands, notably Ride, came out of this area, but none developed a global following.
After the band did have an international hit in 1993 with the single "Creep," he worried that Radiohead would be dismissed as a one-hit wonder.
Yorke wrote the song one night during his college days when he was drunk and feeling sorry for himself. He meant such self-deprecating lines as "I wish I was special/But I'm a creep, I'm a weirdo" to be melodramatic and a bit humorous.
When recording "Creep," however, he identified with the underlying issue of low self-esteem and he sang with fierce conviction. The song became huge in America, though it was widely ridiculed by critics who felt it was a blatant attempt to come up with a slacker anthem.
Intent on proving his worth, Yorke and Radiohead fought back with "The Bends," a 1995 album that began to eat away at the scepticism in England. But it was "OK Computer" that turned the band into a sensation.
Stipe and U2's Bono became the band's champions. Radiohead, suddenly fashionable, was now a celebrity favourite. For what it's worth, Brad Pitt has described Radiohead as "the Kafka and the Beckett of our generation."
In a readers' poll last year by Q magazine, roughly the English equivalent of Rolling Stone, "OK Computer" was voted the second-best British rock album ever, behind only the Beatles' "Revolver." Describing the impact of "OK Computer," Q wrote, "Aside from being a tremendously stimulating and evocative listen, [the album] was an encapsulation of what it's like to feel terrified by the times . . . .A work of infinite anguish . . . [that ranks with] all the apocalyptic classics in the rock 'n' roll pantheon."

The 'OK Computer" experience was exhilarating at first, but all this praise-and the looming expectations for the next album-troubled Yorke, who worried that the music wasn't as groundbreaking or profound as critics claimed. He also feared he would become a parody of himself if the band stayed on the same musical path.
He had seen U2 change directions dramatically in "Achtung Baby!' and 1993's "Zooropa," and he wanted to explore his own interests. One private passion was electronic music that relied on exotic, unusual sounds-experimental rock bands such as Can, a German band best known for the work it did in the '70s, and such British dance-world innovators as Aphex Twin and Autechre. Yorke felt dance music was where the real creativity was taking place in pop. He and other band members also listened to such innovative jazz figures as Charles Mingus and Miles Davis.
"I know bands do [repeat themselves] and they sell loads of records, but we couldn't do it," he says when asked about the band's musical shift. "To me, it seems a little bit sad and pathetic to just rely on a guitar and a voice forever more, which is the easiest way to connect with an audience."
The difficulty was getting others in the group to share his vision.
After several months off following the "OK Computer" tour, Radiohead regrouped near the end of 1998 to begin thinking about the new album.
There was some sentiment in the band to move toward a more classic pop-rock sound, one that took advantage of Greenwood and O'Brien's guitar wizardry and the group's feel for melody. But Yorke wanted to head in the opposite direction. Rather than rely on melody, he wanted rhythm-the more exotic the better.
"To me, electronic music is the new folk music 'cause it's that easy to use and generate," he explains. "I find the noises I can get out of my laptop and all the gear that we've got in the studio far more stimulating than [conventional] rock instrumentation."
But the transition wasn't easy. They spent several months moving among four studios, trying to put together music relying on synthesizers and other tools of the electronica movement.
Radiohead ended up with some two dozen tracks. Yorke says the "Kid A" material "chose itself quite easily and 'Amnesiac' was kind of what was left. I know that sounds bizarre because a lot of people say the new album is more coherent or more conceptualized than 'Kid A.'
"But I do think they have their own identities. Something [traumatic] is happening in 'Kid A' and this is looking back at it, trying to piece together what has happened. Go back and listen to 'Kid A' after listening to 'Amnesiac' and I think you'll hear it."
There are lines in some "Amnesia" songs including the "Get off my case" chant in "Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box"-that could be taken as a reaction against all the scrutiny of the band, but Yorke warns against such an interpretation.
"Most of the lyrics are taken from things I saw on television or from conversations I overhear on buses," he says. "That was far more interesting and personal to me than trying to mine my own experiences.
"I think that is one of the reasons people get into electronic music. It takes some of the emphasis off personalities and linear thinking. But there is a side of me that enjoys being at a microphone, so we are trying to find a midpoint between the worlds of rock and electronica."
Andrew Slater, new president and CEO of Capitol Records, is thrilled with "Amnesiac," but he acknowledges that it will present a marketing challenge.
Capitol does have some tools. This time the band will do videos and is planning an extensive U.S. tour, which starts June 18 in Houston. The four-week trek includes stops June 29-30 at the Santa Barbara Bowl and a still unannounced Los Angeles show to follow.
And the album has some tracks that might be more easily accepted by radio than the "Kid A" material. Chief among them: "I Might Be Wrong," a tense, bluesy exercise that carries a sense of danger and uncertainty, and the lovely, ethereal "Pyramid Song," which has a trace of "OK Computer's" melodic feel. But the music still may be considered distant by fans who prefer a strong sense of melody and a clear message.
"There is such respect for the band that I feel there is the same kind of excitement around a new Radiohead record that there was a Prince or a Bob Dylan or a U2 record," Slater said. "That means there will be a large audience that will find this record."

Whatever happens in the music marketplace, Radiohead will probably walk away from the last three years of musical examination with its future bright. The U.S. shows announced so far have been instant sellouts.
But the fervour of the pop world seems far away in the relative quiet of Oxford, which is one reason Yorke continues to live here.
It's late afternoon and the sun has been chased away by clouds and a light shower. But Yorke's mood remains bright. "I haven't felt this good since I was 16 and we were first getting on stage at the Jericho Tavern," he says.
Finally though, he looks at his watch and brings the interview to a close. He's due home-something apparently to do with Noah-and he excuses himself. He's worried about being late.

Radiohead plays June 29-30 at the Santa Barbara Bowl, 1122 N. Milpas St., Santa Barbara, 6:30 p.m. Sold out. (805) 962-7411.

Robert Hilburn, the Times' pop music critic, can be reached at robert.hilburn@latimes.com.

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L.A. Times, june 3rd 2001 [Click images for full size.] Operating on His Own Frequency Radiohead's Thom Yorke didn't take a detour into electronica. He headed down a new path in the name of self-preservation. OXFORD, England-There's something exhilarating about walking in the footsteps of history, which is why the streets of this historic university town are usually crowded with tourists.

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Thom: "I think what we want to do is break the cycle of... band goes on tour for nine months, turns into monsters, has to sort themselves out and piece together the bits in order to make another one,

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Kurt Loder: “Kid A seems to be an album made by people who are totally oblivious to what’s going on in popular music right now. It sounds like the band lost interest in the whole pop-song format.”

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Gideon: "Does America seem different to you... 3 years after the OK Computer tour?

Thom: "*starts laughing*

Ed: "Yeah, very. I think just in terms of how we are as a band. How we viewed things 3 or 4 years ago on tour. I remember it being a really dark time and we really did not enjoy touring America at all. In fact, it was a fucking nightmare. Because we suddenly found ourselves in big arenas at the end of the tour. And we were not in the right frame of mind to be doing that. But we did it. We realised we had to come back and play. But it's frightening. I don't really think any of us enjoyed that last American tour at all. I mean, if I'm honest, there were moments... But now it's so different, we're actually enjoying it.

Gideon: "Did having such a bad experience on the OK Computer tour scare you from touring again?

Thom: "Yeah. Me especially. Just the touring thing, everything. To me, it was a long series of having to deal with these ghosts in my cupboard and they were all coming out one by one. The touring thing especially. I really didn't think that I could deal with it... At all. I just didn't think I could cope. And I can't really explain to you why. Other than, as Ed was saying, at the end of doing OK Computer, and we were doing these really stupidly big gigs. Uhm. It was like, I dunno. Like there was suddenly 40,000 people in here taps head, and I'd left. Haha. And now I don't have that. Now it's like "Hi, nice to meet you, thanks very much.." That's it.

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Gideon Yago: “Okay, I’m really excited you guys agreed to do this. We have a whole lot of material to run through. And we pulled a bunch of questions from your fans, so thank you for sitting down with us and lets get started. Now, you recorded all the songs from Kid A and Amnesiac in one session?

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Cornell recalled his rise from the Seattle grunge scene to worldwide fame. The anxiety that permeated the band’s climb to the top eventually culminated, he said, in an “existential meltdown.”

“The meltdown was when the small indie scene became an international scene,” he said. “We shared [TV] airtime and pages of magazines with what we considered to be the enemy — bands who were presented in a way that we knew we were against when we started out — so it was like, if you’re reading about Soundgarden and you turn the page and it’s Poison, are we the same?”

When asked about the benefits of touring he had this to say,

“I think there’s a benefit to touring a lot. It depends on who you are and what you’re trying to get out of it. Let’s use Metallica as an example. It was presented to Soundgarden that [Metallica] tours for two years off of every album. We always responded with, well we’re not!  The Soundgarden frontman continues, “Like, who would want to tour for two years? Then you look at what that did for them and it created super strong markets everywhere that you can go. But I don’t think the same thing is good for everybody.”

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Chris Cornell Talks Touring and the rise of Soundgarden - NorthWest Music Scene

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"I think there's a benefit to touring a lot. It depends on who you are and what you're trying to get out of it.

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Chris Cornell, Soundgarden’s lead singer, was found dead in his hotel room at MGM Grand Detroit just hours after the group performed at the Fox, with a medical examiner now ruling his death a suicide.

it was clear that something wasn’t right with the 52-year-old Cornell during the Fox performance. He often staggered back-and-forth across the stage, and seemed weak in his movements. Just one or two songs in, it was as if the energy had exited his body, and what was left was a shell of a man scrambling to do his job.

It's not that the nearly two-hour show itself was bad, but it seemed like Cornell wasn’t mentally present.

He missed words, sometimes in entire blocks, letting the crowd sing the parts of the songs he didn’t. Nobody complained; in fact, the audience of about 5,000 seemed to love it.

Cornell was visibly agitated at times. He walked off the stage for several minutes before playing “Been Away Too Long,” causing the band to start over and leaving them playing instrumentals to fill the gap. When he came back onstage, he made a “move it along” motion with his hand.

One line, which at the time seemed innocuous, sticks: “I feel bad for the next city,” Cornell said over the mic. The quote came just after mentioning that nothing could ever top Detroit. Now, it has a much deeper, heartbreaking meaning.

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Last night just seemed like another Soundgarden show - my fifth time seeing the iconic grunge band live, and second time in Detroit. It's hard to pass up a good rock show at downtown Detroit's Fox Theatre, one of the city's architectural gems and a staple in its music history, its stage graced by the likes of Iggy Pop and Prince.

But when I woke up this morning, everything had changed. And the sold-out show suddenly took on a different meaning.

Chris Cornell, Soundgarden's lead singer, was found dead in his hotel room at MGM Grand Detroit just hours after the group performed at the Fox, with a medical examiner now ruling his death a suicide.

Even without the benefit of hindsight from the morning's awful news, it was clear that something wasn't right with the 52-year-old Cornell during the Fox performance. He often staggered back-and-forth across the stage, and seemed weak in his movements. Just one or two songs in, it was as if the energy had exited his body, and what was left was a shell of a man scrambling to do his job.
[Cornell's final tweet was a shout-out to Detroit: Read what he said here.]
It's not that the nearly two-hour show itself was bad, but it seemed like Cornell wasn't mentally present.

He missed words, sometimes in entire blocks, letting the crowd sing the parts of the songs he didn't. Nobody complained; in fact, the audience of about 5,000 seemed to love it.

Cornell was visibly agitated at times. He walked off the stage for several minutes before playing "Been Away Too Long," causing the band to start over and leaving them playing instrumentals to fill the gap. When he came back onstage, he made a "move it along" motion with his hand.

Bandmate and bassist Ben Shepherd laughed it off, but then Cornell took to the mic to complain that he didn't have a backup guitar. "Been Away Too Long," which was Soundgarden's 2012 comeback single from the album "King Animal" after a more than decade-long breakup, was played as a strange, bass-heavy rendition that moved in the wrong direction.
[Chris Cornell played a private concert for WRIF recently. Find out when you can hear it.]
Then there was Cornell's irritability. His vocals were often lagging, not in sync with the music. At times, he stopped singing completely and gave up for several seconds before catching back on with his bandmates.

At the time, I chalked it up to being late in the tour, thinking that his voice might be shot. Maybe he was exhausted. After all, Cornell, who was known for his four-octave vocal range and having one of the most versatile voices in rock 'n' roll, would spend the majority of his time screaming into the mic - naturally, that will take a toll.

Several times throughout the night, he gave brief backstories to songs, regaling the band's work with record label Sub Pop. For "My Wave," he emphasized the importance of doing your own thing, as long as you don't harm anyone in the process.

But then things took a dark turn before the song began. "You can burn crosses on your lawn, I don't give a (profanity). You can burn your house down," he said. "Who cares? I don't. As long as you don't catch someone else's house on fire."
[Watch more from Chris Cornell's final Soundgarden performance here.]
But Cornell spoke fondly of Detroit, over and over. It was the one element of the show he seemed truly excited about. He talked about Detroit Rock City, how the audience was unparalleled. How the band loved playing here. He acknowledged the crowd up in the balcony, asking them to stand. He also asked the crowd in front of the stage to cheer for those people.

One line, which at the time seemed innocuous, sticks: "I feel bad for the next city," Cornell said over the mic. The quote came just after mentioning that nothing could ever top Detroit. Now, it has a much deeper, heartbreaking meaning.
Related: Chris Cornell dies in Detroit, leaves behind rich rock legacy What to look for: Suicide warning signs
Just a handful of songs saw Cornell immersed: "Fell on Black Days" and the show's closer, the second song of the encore "Slaves & Bulldozers." The latter included a refrain from Led Zeppelin's "In My Time of Dying," which the band has covered before. It was written as a spiritual song about death.

In the guitar solo for the "Slaves & Bulldozers"/"In My Time of Dying" fusion, Cornell finally gave his all. He played the guitar backward, hung over his head, and dragged the mic stand along the strings. Caught in a cathartic-like moment, the singer-guitarist let himself shine one last time.

Here was the rock frontman who had so poignantly carved a path in rock 'n' roll, helping propel Seattle to the front of the grunge scene with multiplatinum-selling albums. A shy vocalist, hidden behind a mass of curls that hung over his eyes, connecting with millions through brutally honest, heavy yet also delicate words.

A Detroit-based photographer who walked past Cornell after the show said he didn't think "anything abnormal" in regard to his demeanor. "(The band) thanked a few fans waiting for autographs and got into the vehicle," he said.

But my mind thinks back to watching him onstage at the Fox, doing the refrain to "In My Time of Dying," struggling so hard to send a message - perhaps a hidden goodbye that nobody saw coming.
Ashley Zlatopolsky is a metro Detroit-based writer. Follow her on Twitter @ashley_detroit.

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Chris Cornell's final performance: Something clearly wasn't right

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The Soundgarden singer seemed off or agitated through much of the band's show at Detroit's Fox Theatre, with his vocals often lagging behind the music.

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His suicide was just over 1 month since his final tour.

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need mental health support on tour with them because so many suffer from bad physical and/or mental health ... they take drugs to try to quiet the pain (or for creative reasons..) but in some cases it leads to death.

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In a population of dead musicians spanning 1950 to 2010, for which an accurate age of death could be (out of 11,054), 1.2% died at 26, 1.4% died at 28 and 1.3% died at 27.

there appear to be qualities shared by the 27-ers that stand them apart from many other deceased young pop musicians, which may go some way to understanding how this club entered the pop culture psyche. These qualities include exceptional talent, the contribution of groundbreaking innovations in their musical genre, intense psychological pain, and a squalid death at their peak. Many members have become a "cult figure".

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The 27 Club is a myth: 56 is the bum note for musicians

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I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member. – Groucho Marx Now he’s gone and joined that stupid club. I told him not to … – Kurt Cobain’s mother upon hearing of the death of her son What…

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In professional musical performance artists, performance-related musculoskeletal pain is a common disorder and is associated with depression and music performance anxiety (jnnyg arm brace)

Reasons for starting “drugs of abuse” involve the performance enhancer model (enhance strength and endurance, fight pain, reduce weight) and the abuse and addiction model (reduce stress, boost confidence, relieve craving) [6]. Many of these motives apply to celebrities as they are under constant pressure to perform and to appear healthy and productive. Opioids have a soothing effect on many of these issues. Therefore the risk for developing an addiction may be generally elevated for celebrities, especially in those with an increased prevalence of musculoskeletal pain

Most drug-related celebrity deaths occurred in the age range of 25 to 40 years

Celebrities deserve excellent healthcare, for their own good as well as for the sake of their followers. Physicians that care for celebrities should consider that celebrities may be at increased risk for substance abuse and addiction.

In the case of prescription opioids, the “Center of Diseases Control” guidelines should be complied with. If addiction is present, adequate treatment should be suggested. Facing pain, depression, stage fright and other existential issues is a challenge to many performing in the arts [4]. Doctors should be aware that neither intense suffering nor their intention to help does justify the use of prescription opioids in the absence of a clear medical indication. Thus they can prevent addiction in their celebrity patients and minimize negative public health effects for millions of their followers.

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"Thom doesn't deny he leads an unhealthy life. In Munich it got so bad that he collapsed on stage. He was feeling really ill, but the doctor who was bribed by the promoter declared him fit enough to play."

Thom: "The doctor came round at four o'clock, because every time you don't do a show, you have to get a doctor's certificate saying you are too sick to do a show, just like school, so you have a fucking sicknote. If you don't get the sicknote, you get sued for thousands and thousands and thousands of pounds. I needed this thing, but of course the doctor was paid for by the promoter. So the doctor turns up and he has two bags full of drugs - all with German names that I didn't understand. And he says take this, take that blah blah blah and I said no, no fucking way. I don't know what these things are and I am not taking them, you know. He says 'you're fine, you're fine to do the show' and I was like : I can't fucking speak, let alone sing. He said : 'oh well, I'll just inject you with steroids then and you'll be fine'. Because this is what they do, they inject steroids in you neck and I am not going to do that. So I was like: ok, so it's too late to cancel the show, the doctor won't give me a sicknote, I'm gonna have to go on and do this show, I don't have a choice. I'd gone on and do the show and three songs in, I collapsed. After weeks and weeks of this building up in my head, you know. It happened four times before that during the course of a 4 months tour that I was ill, same thing over and over again. Doctors paid for by promoters. Anyway, I just snapped.

DJ: "What is your worst habit?"

Thom: "My worst habit is drinking until I'm sick all over the bathroom, which I keep doing. You know people do that. Normally people do that every 5 years and go: oh God, I can't believe I did that. I'm still at the stage that you are when you are a teenager. I get so drunk that I can't speak anymore."

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DJ: "OK Computer will be in the shops on Monday - we will play all tracks tomorrow and Sunday between 2 and 6 pm in the show Keinijg, but today we have a guest on our show to talk about the album - it is no other than singer Thom Yorke, but first let's have a listen to the opening track of the album : Airbag [Airbag played] DJ: "Airbag, the opening track from the album OKC, an album for which we have been waiting quite some time.

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DJ: "Where does the magic, when it happens, where does it come from? Who does your lyrics?
Thom: "Mostly drugs.

DJ: "Jonny, I'm noticing your wearing wrist support, too much guitar lately? You have a bandage on your guitar hand.

Jonny: "Yes, I have an injury that usually 40 year old typist get but I have and I'm 22 so there you go...

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On july 2nd 1994 Radiohead played the Roskilde Festival in Denmark. At some point during that day Thom and Jonny played an acoustic set backstage at the Festival for the radio channel P3 and were also interviewed. This is a transcript from an audio recording of the radio broadcast.

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Jonny Greenwood plays his guitar with such teeth-grindingly frantic force that he unknowingly lacerates his fingers. Recently, he has taken to strapping on an arm brace, which could be seen as a unique guitar-hero affectation. However, Greenwood insists he's been order to wear it since it was diagnosed that his playing style was causing repetative strain injury. Similarly, he is keen to point out that the bulky headphones he sported throughout the latter half of The Bends tour are industrial ear shields he was advised to wear after suffering from a dangerously leaky lughole.
'My ear was ringing and bleeding for two weeks on the American tour,' he reveals, with strangely calm detachment. 'There was this terrifying gig in Cleveland, where I was nearly fainting. I was taken to hospital at three in the morning and the doctor said the situation was really grim. I'd love to do without both of them, but the arm brace I'm still going to need.'
'It's conceited to deny there's any affection, but having said that, I enjoy putting on the arm brace before I play. It's like taping up your fingers before a boxing match. It's a ritual.'

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[Click images for full size.]

They are serious men with serious sales. But, cautious, paranoid and in no way The New Pink Floyd, Radiohead have their troubles, and they have a new album to promote. Still, as a singer Thom Yorke tells Tom Doyle, it's not all terrible news: "Murderers have stopped writing to say how much they relate to Creep..."

Tom Doyle | Photographs by Ken Sharp

Brightly early most weekday mornings before 9am, when other rock stars still have at least a good six hours of kip ahead of them-or have yet in fact to go to bed following another night of drunken or chemically induced shenanigans-Radiohead's curiously angular guitarist Jonny Greenwood can usually be found in the middle of a field in the quiet Oxfordshire countryside, flying his kite. If the widescreen possibilities of this undeniably evocative scene has a touch of Pink Floyd-like imagery about it, then that perhaps is no coincidence, since the soundtrack on the rake-thin 25 year-old man's personal stereo is Meddle, an album released in 1971, the year he was born.
This evidence alone may not be enough to suggest that Radiohead are slowly, surely mutating into The New Pink Floyd. But then there are other factors which have to be taken into consideration. Not least the fact that singer Thom Yorke warmly recalls recording parts of their self-produced third album, OK Computer, at their recently acquired studio farmhouse while, outside the window, herds of Jersey cattle lumbered lazily through sunny fields. In the background, an industrial chimney belched acrid smoke into the sky. 'It was the Floyd,' he enthuses before - perhaps typically - feigning vomiting in self-disgust at having been forced to draw this seemingly unthinkable parallel himself. Bassist Colin Greenwood has his own thoughts about his brother's kite-flying plot to turn Radiohead into a progressive rock ensemble.
'Jonny made us all watch Pink Floyd Live In Pompeii and said, "Now this is how we should do videos,"' he offers, grinning, his already frighteningly voluminous eyes widening in mock disbelief. 'I just remember seeing Dave Gilmour sitting on his arse playing guitar and Roger Waters with long greasy hair, sandals and dusty flares, staggers over and picks up this big beater and whacks this gong. Ridiculous.'
Nevertheless, there is no getting away from it: Radiohead's keenly awaited third album is a sprawling, hugely experimental affair that cannot be described without using the words 'out' and 'there'. The return single, Paranoid Android, by way of indication, is a six-and-a-half-minute epic in three movements. Jonny Greenwood admits that during the making of the record, he had found himself becoming involved in a brave, but perhaps futile pursuit: trying to unearth half-decent prog rock albums.
'It's been very disappointing because most of it is awful,' he soft admits in his engagingly posh way. 'I've got it into my head that prog rock albums must be good because it attracted a lot of fans. So far, I've just trawled through fairly tedious Genesis albums.'
Aside from all of this, there has also been the suggestion that Radiohead have been gradually morphing into R.E.M. since the Oxford quintet's extended supporting sojourn on the Monster tour in the summer of 1995. Certainly Thom Yorke's friendship with Michael Stipe-who made the on stage pronouncement that 'Radiohead are so good, they scare me'-has been well documented. In fact, Yorke and Jonny Greenwood have just returned to Oxford from London, where they were collaborating with Stipe on tracks for Velvet Goldmine, the glam rock-scrutanising film that Stipe is currently producing. Notably, on OK Computer, there is evidence that Yorke's approach to lyric-writing has taken on a distinctly more oblique, Stipe-like bent.
Whatever comparisons are being made, it's clear that Radiohead have gone through something of a transitional period. It seems reasonable to declare that toying around with ground-breaking studio techniques and constructing wildly ambitious musical atmospheres now figures heavily in their collective imaginations. Queen for the '90s anyone?
'I've been building up my chest just now so that it looks good in a white vest.,' warns the small and slight-framed Yorke, with his characteristic level of sarcasm. 'Christ, you should've seen the 'tache I had last week.

After coming down from such a high as Radiohead experience when R.E.M. took them under their wing and nursed them through the crucial period when they learned how to get their music across to stadium-proportioned crowds (Yorke claims that his most deep-rooted nightmare is to become Jim Kerr at his worthiest), the band were given carte-blanche to record and self-produce their next album. As a consequence, OK Computer unarguably finds them breaking into new territory, from the looped-up, all-fronts assault of Airbag, through the searingly anthemic Electioneering to the soothingly effective Exit Music (for a film), ostensibly She's Leaving Home retold with a panicky edge.
Preliminary sessions began-in a stroke of magnificent indulgence, at actress Jane Seymour's mansion near Bath-in the spring of last year, the very same place where The Cure initially developed the commercially disastrous Wild Mood Swings. The previous summer, Johnny Cash had rented the house before an appearance at Glastonbury. The flowing-locked English Rose could be reassured that Radiohead were something less of a rock 'n 'roll proposition. Although they did rearrange the furniture.
'We recorded in her library,' Jonny Greenwood explains. 'It was wonderful going somewhere that wasn't designed for recording. Recording studios now tend to be quite scientific and clinical. You can't really impose yourself without getting over the fact that there are fag burns in the carpet and gold discs all around. It's good to go and decide that we'll turn this beautifully furnished sitting room into whatever.'
While they are a five-strong band of self-confessed 'neurotics anonymous', the fact that Radiohead are so keen to guard the rural location of their studio farm headquarters, where the album was completed, is indicative of their growing status as the archetypal art school-grounded English rock band afforded the Imperial Leather-like luxury of creative freedom. This, it would seem, is a direct result of the fact that, throughout their five year existence -while everyone's heads were turned in the directions of initially Blur, then Suede and now Oasis- Radiohead have quietly grown into a formidably successful act. Their second album, The Bends, has now achieved platinum status in Britain, a trend more or less followed in most record buying nations.
When, at the beginning of 1996, Parlophone Records released Street Spirit (Fade Out), the fourth, campaign-closing single from The Bends, its hypnotically languid tone rendered it too dark and sombre to be playlisted on Radio One. It still debuted with a one-fingered salute at Number 5. On the release of War Child's Help album the previous September, Radiohead's magnificently moody contribution, Lucky (oddly included on OK Computer), proved to be the stand-out -although the band had been forced to complete the track in an intensive five-hour period to meet the required deadline, after a day spent posing for a War Child camera crew dispatched to film them pretending to record.
'They were waiting for us to record the song, and we were waiting for them to go,' smiles the unnaturally lofty Ed O'Brien, credited on the group's sleeves for supplying 'polite guitar', as opposed to Jonny Greenwood's 'abusive guitar'. Of the video footage depicting casualties of the Bosnian conflict that was subsequently set to the track, Yorke-never one to understate his emotional reactions-simply says, 'It had me in tears'.

Today the five members of Radiohead, fresh from tramping through the fields of rape for their Q photo session, mill around the management offices close to their recording studio, seemingly a relaxed and quietly polite bunch who enjoy a laugh of wry and knowing variety. O'Brien, lightly stoned this afternoon, since this is effectively a day off for the band-although pockets of them will frequently disappear into the adjoining recording recording room to continue work on B-sides-is charming and affable and has earned a reputation as the band member renowned for his on-stage acts of over exuberance. The band gleefully recall the guitarist once disappearing over the lip of the stage at a theatre gig in North Carolina, tumbling into the orchestra pit and then struggling for ages to clamber back out.
Groomed drummer and, impressively ex-Samaritan Phil Selway proves suitably genial for someone who has had a Japanese fan club - Phil Is Great - set up in his honour. Another of the Phil is Great club's meetings is planned for the following week, when Radiohead make a promotional trip to the Pacific Rim.
The Greenwood brothers, who share no distinctive physical resemblance, are polar opposites. Jonny rarely touches alcohol; Colin can regularly be located in a pub after frenzied searches five minutes before the band are due on stage. Jonny is silent unless coaxed; Colin is effusive when engaged in the topics of books, records, other bands. Jonny was likely described as 'a dreamer' by his teachers, his head seemingly operating at some cloud-high altitude; Colin is sharp and wary and likely the cornerstone of Radiohead. When together, both share an inscrutable look if questioned on any subject. Colin admits to feeling guilty of acting a touch cruelly to his colour-blind younger brother when they were growing up: he would mix up the crayons, which the guitarist claims 'retarded me.'
'We share the same gene pool,' states the elder, directing another meaningful look towards his sibling.
'But I got the shallow end,' adds his toothily blessed younger brother, without any detectable hesitation.
Meanwhile, the boyishly proportioned Thom Yorke pads around barefoot in blue canvas jeans, Radiohead fan club T-shirt and Gaultier shades, his short spiky hair dyed black after extended periods as peroxide blond and retina-damaging orange. Quietly intense, he is a man possessed of a bitingly sharp sense of humour, although an air of brow-beaten cynicism can be detected in his every utterance.
The other simply describe Yorke as 'a bit of a worrier', but it would seem that his enduring reputation as a troubled and overly angsty individual is reasonably well-deserved, despite his claims to having recently 'learned to relax a little'. He talks with his head bowed and eyes closed, covering his face with his hands and peering through his fingers, sometimes curling his limbs up into a tight ball, as if he is under physical attack. The prospect of Radiohead performing this summer to 40,000 people in Ireland as well as headlining a major festival (interestingly, on the same weekend as the strategically unannounced Glastonbury bill) seems to fill him with dread.
'I can't see why we're doing these big gigs,' he shrugs. 'Thing is, whoever it is up there, it's not the person sitting here. It's a completely different state of mind, that you have to spend a long time getting into. I can't switch it on and off. When even the logistics of these big gigs are discussed, I just fucking freeze up. It's not something I'm emotionally capable of dealing with yet. Hopefully I'll get back into a differensical accompaniment - at the Oxford school where Radiohead first met as teenagers.
'There was this tense dress rehearsal,' O'Brien remembers, 'and Thom and this other fella were jamming freeform cod jazz throughout it. The director stopped the play and shouted up to this scaffold tower thing they were playing on, trying to find out what the hell was going on. Thom shouted down, "I don't know what the fuck we're supposed to be playing." And this was to a teacher.'

Born with one eye closed on October 7, 1968, the infant Thom Yorke had already endured five major operations on his paralysed eyelid by the time he was six. Made to wear an eye-patch during his early school years, he was cruelly mocked by his schoolmates. He half-bitterly brushes of suggestions that this may have caused him to have a slight chip on his shoulder.
'Oh no,' he states, sharply. 'I was sweet and lovely and nothing ever happened to me. (cagily) When I was younger, I was in the music room most of the time, anyway. It was great. No-one came down there and there were these tiny rooms with sound-proofed cubicles. I suppose I'm quite an aggressive person. I was a fighter at school, but I never won. I was into the idea of fighting (laughs hysterically). I've had to calm down a bit otherwise I'd go nuts.' Yorke recalls the moment in his younger life when he realised that he was not perhaps quite as handy with his fists as he'd imagined.
'In first year at college, I went through this phase where I was into this granddad hat and coat I had,' he quietly explains. 'They were immaculate and I was into dressing like an old man. But I went out one night and there was these blokes, townie guys, waiting to beat someone up and they found me. They said something, I turned around , blew them a kiss and that was it. They beat the living shit out of me. One was kicking me, one had a stick and the other was smashing me in the face. That put me off fighting a bit.'
Back in mid-'80s Oxford, where Radiohead first bonded and began rehearsing, essentially as the school band, they called themselves On A Friday. Selway was in the sixth form, O'Brien in the fifth year, Yorke and Colin Greenwood in the fourth and Jonny Greenwood - the last to join - in the third.
'We're still in our same classes and years really,' the elder Greenwood grimly decides. 'The thing about having been together for such a long period is that there are some heinously embarrassing group shots from ten years ago when we were in adolescence with varying styles of haircut and demeanour which would now be openly laughed at in the street.'
During this era, of course, the quiff was king (you'd literally take a photograph of Morrissey to the barber and say, I want it like that') and if On A Friday resembled The Smiths visually, they had yet to find a foothold musically. The four others remember tapes of Thom Yorke's early compositions as being 'schizophrenic'.
'One track, Rattlesnake, just had a drum loop that Thom did himself at home on a tape recorder with bad scratching over the top and kind of Prince vocals,' Jonny Greenwood remembers. 'The Chains had viola and was meant to sound like the Waterboys. What Is That You See was a feedback frenzy. After hearing it, I knew Thom was writing great songs and I knew what I wanted to do.'
Nevertheless, the younger Greenwood's ambitions were thwarted by the groups reluctance to let him join. Described to them as 'a precosious talent' who would whip through an assortment of instruments in an attempt to impress his potential bandmates, On A Friday's first gig at Oxford Jericho Tavern in 1987 featured (according to Selway) Jonny sitting on stage 'with a harmonica, waiting for his big moment.'
As each member wandered off to college or university, rehearsals would take place only during their lengthy summer breaks as students. But On A Friday were improving by leagues, and by the summer of 1991, when their first real demo went into circulation (released as the Drill EP in 1992), there were suddenly legions of A&R men cramming into the Jericho Tavern. Within weeks, On A Friday signed to Parlophone and, out of 'sheer embarrassment', changed their name to Radiohead.

As imageless as a police identity parade, and embodying such extremes of stature and build that Ed O'Brien probably towers a whole foot above Thom Yorke, Radiohead initially found it difficult to attract attention during the lifespand of their debut album, Pablo Honey, when other, more fashion-conscious outfits were hogginh the limelight.
On its initial release in the UK, the second, self-hating single, the possibly classic Creep, stiffed. As with The Fixx before them and Bush afterwards, Radiohead suffered the indignity of being rejected by their motherland and embraced by America when Creep became a slacker anthem after an extended period of over-exposure on college radio. By the time Radiohead arrived in America for their first tour, Creep was already in the Billboard Top 40, and for the summer of 1993 its mutant guitar crunch and soaring melody spilled out from car radios and apartment windows all over America.
Its follow-up, the bracing Stop Whispering, failed to maintain the momentum and the band found themselves performing to capacity audience interested in hearing one song. For a time, Yorke re-christened the song Crap.
'At that time the whole so-called alternative rock thing happened there,' remembers Yorke, 'populated by sap programmers from the '80s who didn't have a clue what they were putting on and Creep suffered from that. It was a good song, but afterwards it was, "Well, let's have more like that please because the programmers understand it," and it's like "No, sorry."'
'We didn't know what was normal in America,' Jonny Greenwood muses. 'We went over there and we'd turn on MTV and Creep would be on again. We though, "Oh, that's good."'
'People were being very nice to us over there because Creep was doing so well,' adds Selway. 'Stop Whispering didn't do quite so well, so that opened us up to the more cynical side of it.'
'We were hysterical,' decides O'Brien. 'One moment we'd be giggling, the next we'd be really down. Our reactions were extreme.'
Regretfully, it was around this time that Radiohead, under pressure to visually re-invent themselves, became the tightly trousered, big-haired rock band they felt America expected of them. Jonny Greenwood and Yorke even accepted modelling assignments for American fashion magazines, the latter sporting a hellish tangle of hair extensions atop his cranium.
'I was rock,' winces the frontman with an embarresses laugh. 'There were so many elements to that period, but the hair was the worst. It was such a wierd trip anyway, because suddenly we were seen as this big investment and there was money being thrown at us. It didn't last long enought to mess us up, but then I suppose, for a while, it probably did.'
The most positive knock-on effect of Creep's US success was that on its re-release in the UK, it reached Number 7. On the negative side, Radiohead were in danger of looking like a one-trick pony. Immediately they set to work on The Bends, titled after the dramatic side-effects of emerging from the depths too rapidly. Cutting between Zooropa-fashioned loop collages (Planet Telex), folk rock (Fake Plastic Trees) and hushed atmospherics (Bulletproof), the record manage to distract the listener for long enough to forget that Creep existed. Of course, America couldn't get its head round it.
'There's this assumption, especially over here, that Radiohead are big in America,' O'Brien offers. 'Radiohead are not big in America. We had Fake Plastic Trees as a single and it was played on a radio station. They did a survey of their listeners - 18 to 25-year-old males - who drive four-wheel-drive jeeps - and it came bottom of the list. The thing with Radiohead and America is that we had one pop hit there.'
'And they don't remember it anyway because they've got the attention span of insects,' Yorke mutters darkly. 'Our so called success in America was that it allowed us to do lots of things, but it also meant that somehow we owed somebody something. But I couldn't work out who and I couldn't work out how much.'

Flying in the face of the drug-hoovering, groupie-rogerering rock band image, Radiohead present themselves as Evian-sipping abstainers, content to play a hand of bridge on their tour bus, thank you very much. Nevertheless, the punishing 18-month touring schedule that followed The Bends was not without casualties.
There is an undercurrent of obsessiveness within the group, a matter most evident when they play live.` Jonny Greenwood plays his guitar with such teeth-grindingly frantic force that he unknowingly lacerates his fingers. Recently, he has taken to strapping on an arm brace, which could be seen as a unique guitar-hero affectation. However, Greenwood insists he's been order to wear it since it was diagnosed that his playing style was causing repetative strain injury. Similarly, he is keen to point out that the bulky headphones he sported throughout the latter half of The Bends tour are industrial ear shields he was advised to wear after suffering from a dangerously leaky lughole.
'My ear was ringing and bleeding for two weeks on the American tour,' he reveals, with strangely calm detachment. 'There was this terrifying gig in Cleveland, where I was nearly fainting. I was taken to hospital at three in the morning and the doctor said the situation was really grim. I'd love to do without both of them, but the arm brace I'm still going to need.'
'It's conceited to deny there's any affection, but having said that, I enjoy putting on the arm brace before I play. It's like taping up your fingers before a boxing match. It's a ritual.'
The most memorably grim incident of the tour, however, occured in Munich, when Yorke blacked out and collapsed on stage.
'That had been building up,' he mumbles while wriggleing uncomfortably in his seat, head in his hands. 'There'd been an incident in America where I'd really been as sick as fuck. This cold had got to my throat and whacked me out. It turned into laryngitis. The promoter takes you to the doctor, that's the normal standard thing, and the doctor says, "Oh no, you're fine to play." You argue with them. They say, "No, take these drugs and you'll be fine." Then you realise the promoter is paying the doctor.'
'It got bad again in Germany because we were sleeping on a cold damp tour bus in the middle of winter. This doctor turns up - usual thing, paid by the promoter - with this huge bag of drugs. All sorts of shit man. He offered to inject me with steroids, which I refused. I didn't take anything because I thought I could get through it. We did the sound check, and I was like, "Oh shit, this is really bad." My voice was not there at all. By that point, it's too late, you can't cancel. I go on and third song in, I lost it. I remember hitting the floor and then I wasn't there.'
He pauses and his face contorts into a perverse smile.
'It was great actually.'
Most things about Thom Yorke's burgeoning rock star status seem to trouble him deeply. The word he uses most frequently is 'doomed'. While he claims not to suffer from an acute fear of fame ('It's just that I have no respect for it.'), he admits that his growing friendship with Michael Stipe has involved the R.E.M. singer offering guidance on how Yorke should deal with his concerns, although the Radiohead frontman is protective of their relationship.
'If you don't have any semblance of a normal life, then you won't be able to write,' he muses, 'and if you can't write, then you won't be there. He's helped me deal with most things I couldn't deal with. The rest is not anyone else's business and that's what's great about it. Anyway. Whatever. It sounds like I've been touched by an evangelist or something.'
Why still bother making music then?
'Because I can be very drunk in a club in Oxford on a Monday night and some guy comes up to you and buys you a drink and says that the last record you made changed his life. That means something. It makes you chill about it.'
As a result of the anguished nature of your lyrics, are Radiohead fans obsessive individuals as a whole?
'They were. In the letters they can be, yeah. But when you meet people it's a different thing. People put pen to paper for different reasons, some of them quite weird. It was set up like that from the first record because of Creep and all the hyperbole around that, but actually we lost most of that debris when we brought out The Bends. Murderers have stopped writing to me to say how much they relate to Creep, so that's cool. Now it's just people who're into what we're doing and there's respect on both sides.'
So your motivation is purly and simply the music you make and the reaction you'll get from it?
'(Sarcastically) I know it sounds awful, but, yes. (Changes mood) But y'know, that's probably lies as well...'
You do seem to eat yourself up about everything.
'I'm not eating myself up,' he continues defensively. 'It's just that if I read that last statement, I would think, Wanker. Because whoever's said it isn't being honest.'
There was a certain point at which Nirvana had to pull back because they felt they were getting too big and they couldn't handle it. Can you see yourself doing the same if you get really famous?
'Yeah, I've got the pull-back button ready. You have to have. That hotline back to The President.'
How would you do that? Release a few 17-minute singles?
'No...no there's other ways to do it. There's other shadows you can find. You can still be there. That was the thing I've had to learn recently. But it still gets to me.
Do you ever fear for the ill-effects of increased success on your mental health?
'Oh, yes,' he exclaims, his mood strangely and suddenly lifting. 'Thank you, yes.'
Later that afternoon, as the light begins to fail, Thom Yorke appears to have returned to a more balanced state and almost rhetorically enquires. 'I don't think that this has been about moaning, do you?' Pulling an 'urgh' face when his band mates invite him down to the beer garden of a local pub for some light tea-time refreshment, he wanders off instead in the direction of the studio to continue work on the B-sides for Paranoid Anderoid.
As the others wend their way through the winding country lanes on the way to the hostelry, the talk turns to the fact that their frontman seems to be bearing so much intolerable weight on his shoulders.
'It's weird to see the public representation of Thom,' ventures Jonny Greenwood after a time, 'because it's quite different. I find Thom to be very affectionate and child-like.'
'Yeah,' his brother adds, 'but we don't draw the curtains of our bedrooms at night when we're going to sleep and see all these people staring up at the window. We don't have to deal with that. It's different graduations of stress, I suppose. What's important to him is, if he can have two different personas, it's a way of protecting himself.'
'Well, I shared a room with him for four years,' Selway laughs, before tellingly adding, 'and that's not the man in the interviews.'

Deeply weird bunch, Radiohead. Insular, posh, irrationally paranoid, yet capable of creating achingly beautiful songs resplendent with mind-warping sonic tricks. They might just have the potential to rechisel the granite face of rock music, if their new-found prog rock edge doesn't devour them or they don't disintigrate in the process. God help them if they ever get into proper drugs.
'Us on hard drugs? That would be horrible,' Thom Yorke had stated earlier, in a lighter mood. 'We'd probably end up sounding like Bryan Adams.'

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Click images for full size.] They are serious men with serious sales. But, cautious, paranoid and in no way The New Pink Floyd, Radiohead have their troubles, and they have a new album to promote. Still, as a singer Thom Yorke tells Tom Doyle, it's not all terrible news: "Murderers have stopped writing to say how much they relate to Creep..."

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Suicidal ideation has been shown to be a major risk factor for suicidal behaviour and is associated with depression.

dozens of studies have clearly shown that mental disorders, particularly depressive disorders, are among the strongest risk factors for suicide attempts and suicide deaths

A prominent variant of the so-called third-wave approaches to psychotherapy is mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT). Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy is a group-based 8-week meditation exercise combined with cognitive behavioural techniques

it aims at focusing on the “here and now” in order to engage with momentary experience and to redirect attention whenever it has switched to distracting thoughts and worries.

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy has been proven to significantly reduce relapse risk after remission of a depressive episode [22], [23], and also appears effective for acute phase treatment of various severity levels of current depression

Although MBCT originally was developed to prevent depressive relapse, it may be also suitable for patients with suicidal ideation and behaviour [31]. Williams and colleagues [32] propose that MBCT may help prevent recurrence of suicidal crises by targeting cognitive reactivity to sad mood in periods of remission. Cognitive reactivity is assumed to be a process by which small deteriorations in mood may reactivate cognitive patterns that were active in past episodes but hidden in remission [33]. Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy may target cognitive reactivity by enabling people to adopt a different, more decentred relationship with their own thoughts, feelings and body sensations, thus preventing these experiences from launching a downward mood spiral that would otherwise have led to another suicidal crisis

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It is essential to recognize that the music industry is not a uniform entity that thinks with one brain and actively encourages or promotes drug use across the board. Many artists and industry professionals actively speak out against substance abuse and advocate for mental health awareness. For example, the MusiCares Foundation, established by the Recording Academy, offers support and resources for musicians struggling with addiction and other mental health issues.

The music industry reflects society and culture at large. Artists often draw inspiration from their personal experiences, including struggles with substance abuse. In this sense, the music industry may not be promoting drug use but rather providing a platform for artists to express their experiences and, in some cases, raise awareness about the dangers of addiction.

According to a report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), there were over 70,000 drug-related overdose deaths in 2020 alone. Of those, nearly 10% involved musicians or other people working in the music industry.

The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) reports that opioid abuse is particularly rampant among musicians and other members of the music industry. NIDA estimates that up to 40% of musicians struggle with opioid addiction at any time.

The unique pressures of being a musician can make it difficult to seek help for addiction. Addiction can be especially hard on musicians due to their hectic lifestyle and frequent travel.

Motivation for change is key in addressing substance misuse. Musicians may feel pressure from their peers or fans to continue using drugs or alcohol as part of their creative process or lifestyle.

Relapse is one of the biggest challenges those in recovery face during and after rehab. Cravings, stress, anxiety, and old acquaintances can all contribute to relapse.

Musicians who are not celebrities may experience financial constraints if they do not have health insurance or sufficient funds to pay for treatment out of pocket.

For these reasons and many more, musicians struggle alone without getting help — sometimes until it’s too late.

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MUSIC

Par Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada - Minibus with Kurt Cobain Portrait - Bhaktapur - Nepal, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115399798

Kurt Cobain was one of the most influential and successful musicians of the 1990s. His band, Nirvana, pioneered the grunge genre and changed the face of rock music. But behind the scenes, Cobain was a troubled and tormented soul who battled with addiction, mental illness and the pressures of fame. He died by suicide on April 5, 1994, leaving behind a legacy of music and a mystery of what could have been.

Cobain was born on February 20, 1967, in Aberdeen, Washington. He had a happy childhood until his parents divorced when he was nine. He became rebellious and withdrawn, and developed an interest in music. He started playing guitar at 14 and formed his first band, Fecal Matter, at 16. He dropped out of high school and moved to Olympia, where he met bassist Krist Novoselic. They formed Nirvana in 1987 and recruited drummer Dave Grohl in 1990.

Nirvana's breakthrough came in 1991 with their second album, Nevermind, which featured the hit single "Smells Like Teen Spirit". The song captured the angst and alienation of a generation and catapulted...

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The Dark Side of Nirvana: How Kurt Cobain Struggled with Fame, Drugs and Depression

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Kurt Cobain was one of the most influential and successful musicians of the 1990s. He pioneered the grunge genre and changed the face of rock music.