Thom Yorke recalls hiding among Radiohead fans on their way to the band’s gig

The Radiohead frontman on how exhaustion got the better of him in 1997.

Thom Yorke has recalled the time he ‘disappeared’ during the ‘OK Computer’ tour, after exhaustion caused him to try and ‘escape’.

The band recently announced the 20th anniversary reissue of their classic album ‘OK Computer’, which will arrive on June 23.

The band toured extensively following the release of the album on 16 June, 1997, with the members only taking one month off between 1993 and 1998.

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“I did have fun sometimes but the public side of it, and the way people talked to me, even on the street, I could not fucking handle it,” Yorke said in a new interview with Rolling Stone.

“David Bowie was able to use these personas that would fuck with his relationship with the fans. He did it all in a very finessed, elegant way. I did not.”

He then explains how in Birmingham in November 1997, the pressure and exhaustion finally got to him. “I walked out of soundcheck, disappeared, lost the security and then was trying to get out of the building,” he explained.

He soon found himself on a train full of Radiohead fans on their way to the gig. “There was nowhere to go, so I hid on the train. And that was the nearest I came to trying to escape.”

Meanwhile, Radiohead have criticised Britpop, with Yorke saying the 90s movement made him “fucking angry”.

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The band’s guitarist Jonny Greenwood said: “To us, Britpop was just a 1960s revival. It just leads to pastiche. It’s you wishing it was another era. But as soon as you go down that route, you might as well be a Dixieland jazz band, really.”

Yorke added: “The whole Britpop thing made me fucking angry. I hated it. It was backwards-looking, and I didn’t want any part of it.”

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