Misericordas domini in aeternum cantabo
—Abingdon School motto (“I will forever sing praises to the Lord”)

I’m just aggressive and sick.
—Thom Yorke, 1991

Radiohead announced that they weren’t a normal band before any of them had picked up a guitar in anger. Credible, influential rock bands, you see, don’t tend to spring from the loins of the comfortable affluent middle classes; and if they do, they keep quiet about the fact.

But even in a postmodern world where ‘facts’ are simply raw chunks of data to be processed and manipulated by the machinery of media conglomerates, a fact (sometimes) is a fact. And the fact
remains that Thomas Edward Yorke was born on October 7, 1968 in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, a small town with a smaller rock ‘n’ roll tradition. His father’s work took the family around the country; Thom’s early life was also disrupted by numerous spells in hospital for treatment on his partially closed left eye.

An unusual face and small stature (he wouldn’t grow to more than five and a half feet, or 170 centimetres) would have created difficulties for any child. To be thrown into the philistine, conformist, oppressively masculine environment of the British independent school system must have been horrific.

Thom found a degree of solace with an acoustic guitar he’d received for his eighth birthday; an occasion that came just a few weeks after the Sex Pistols’ legendary appearance at the 100 Club punk festival. With numbing inevitability, the young Yorke began devoting himself to the creative pursuit of horrible noise. At the age of 10, he formed a duo with a school friend that coupled his own rudimentary guitar technique with the sound of exploding televisions, and shortly afterwards wrote his first song, the nuclearthemed ‘Mushroom Cloud’.

However, such experimental self-expression was not particularly welcome at Abingdon School, a 13th Century institution that exists to mould the young gentlemen of Oxfordshire into upstanding members of the establishment. Thom inevitably found himself at odds with the school’s focus on apparently meaningless rules and traditions, and the muddy misery of compulsory team sports. He maintained a particular loathing for the headmaster, one Michael St John Parker, whose predilection for dressing up as a Victorian clergyman would later be commemorated on the Radiohead song ‘Bishop’s Robes’, released in 1996 as an extra track on the ‘Street Spirit’ single.

However, Yorke, T.E., does not appear to have troubled the school’s disciplinary system too much. He found refuge in the music department, which was headed by Terence Gilmore-James, a teacher of whom he has fond memories. “I was a sort of leper at the time,” he recalled in 2001, “and he was the only one who was nice to me… [it] was bearable for me because the music department was separate from the rest of the school."

As well as hiding away in the piano booths, Yorke also vented his frustrations on his guitar, at first as the lead singer for a shortlived punk group called TNT. After a few months, a combination of creative differences and boredom led Yorke to jump ship, accompanied by the bass guitarist, a devoted Joy Division fan called Colin Greenwood, who resembled both Oscar Wilde and Christopher Walken at the same time. On the lookout for potential collaborators,
they seized upon the lanky, sporty son of an osteopath,
Edward O’Brien; although the initial attraction was not his basic guitar skills, but the fact that he rather resembled Morrissey, then the fey frontman of The Smiths, and thus a spokesman for everything Abingdon wasn’t.