Radiohead / Thom Yorke

Thomas Edward Yorke was born on 7 October 1968 in Wellingborough. He was born with a paralysed left eye and had five operations before he was six; the last was botched and left him with the drooping eyelid he later described as a badge of pride. He formed a band with schoolmates at Abingdon School in Oxfordshire in 1985, named On a Friday because Friday was the only day the school allowed them to rehearse, and they became Radiohead on signing to EMI in 1991.

Creep, released in 1993, made them internationally famous, and Yorke's relationship with it curdled fast; he told Rolling Stone it felt like they were performing a cover, because the song had stopped belonging to them.

What happened between OK Computer and Kid A?

A collapse. OK Computer in 1997 established Radiohead as one of the most important bands in the world, and the touring and attention that followed produced a breakdown. Yorke moved to Cornwall, stopped listening to guitar music, and immersed himself in the electronic work coming out of Warp - Aphex Twin above all. Kid A, released in 2000, has almost no conventional rock structure in it, and was widely predicted to end their commercial career. It went to number one in both Britain and America. He has since made solo records including The Eraser in 2006 and Anima in 2019, formed Atoms for Peace with Nigel Godrich and Flea, and since 2021 has played in The Smile with Jonny Greenwood. His voice covers an unusually wide range and he treats it electronically as often as not, using it as a texture rather than as a lead instrument.

Yorke is dominant Fi, and the Creep story is the cleanest illustration. A song makes a band famous, the audience wants it every night, and the singer stops performing it because it no longer feels true to him. That is not a career calculation - it cost them enormously - it is an internal standard refusing to be overridden by an external verdict, which is what this function does when it is dominant and unmanageable.

The auxiliary Ne is why the refusal produced Kid A rather than silence. Presented with a form he could no longer inhabit, he went looking for another one - electronics, jazz horns, ondes Martenot, cut-up lyrics drawn out of a hat - and assembled a way of working that had no precedent in the band's own catalogue. Fi decides that the old thing is dead and Ne supplies the alternatives.

Why is Thom Yorke so uncomfortable with fame?

Because inferior Te means the machinery around a band of that size is the least manageable thing in his stack, and because Fi experiences a public identity as a distortion rather than as an asset. Colin Greenwood described a hundred-yard stare on stage in the 1990s, which is what it looks like when someone is performing while their evaluative function is telling them the situation is false. The tertiary Si is audible in how the band actually works - the same five people since school, the same producer since 1994, a set of accumulated relationships he has protected for forty years.

INFJ is the most common alternative, given the apparent bleakness of vision and the political material. The difference is direction. An Ni-Fe writer builds toward a listener with a purpose; Yorke's lyrics are frequently private to the point of opacity and he has been openly indifferent to whether they are understood, which is Fi refusing to translate itself.

INTP is occasionally suggested because of the technical experimentation and the interest in production systems. But the experiments serve an emotional requirement rather than an analytical one - he did not want to know what electronics could do, he wanted a form that did not feel like a lie.