Thom Yorke: Queen and I
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Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke was just seven years old when he decided that he wanted to become a rock star. One song above all others fuelled his dream: Queen's 1975 masterpiece Bohemian Rhapsody.
“I was obsessed with Queen when Bohemian Rhapsody came out,” Yorke revealed during his appearance on BBC Radio 4's long-running Desert Island Discs programme in 2019. “I lay down in front of these big speakers in my friend’s house and we just listened to Bohemian Rhapsody and at that point I decided, Yep this is what I’m doing.”
In an interview conducted for the 2023 book The Singers Talk, Yorke admitted that, initially, he imagined that he might become a guitarist in a band rather than a vocalist.
“I didn’t see myself as the sort of character that could put myself in front of a microphone," he confessed. "I was really into Queen, but I never saw myself as Freddie Mercury. I was always Brian May in my head, surprisingly.”
Yorke spoke more about taking inspiration from Queen's guitarist in a 1997 interview with Ireland's Hot Press magazine.
“I just thought, I want that guitar,” he said with a laugh. “In fact, I met him, and I said, You know, you're the reason I used to spend months and months on end in my garage trying to build a fucking guitar. I didn't have any proper tools, I just had a fucking hacksaw, and brass thingies to smooth the edges.”
“It sort of worked,” he told Lauren Laverne on Desert Island Discs. “It was literally rough cut out with a saw, you know – it was terrible. And then shortly after that my dad felt sorry for me and eventually bought me one.”
Though Queen ultimately didn't prove to be a major influence on Radiohead's sound, the band continued to cast a spell over Yorke when his band were being pursued by record labels in the early '90s. In an interview conducted with James Bond star Daniel Craig for Interview magazine in 2013, the singer admitted that he was initially sceptical about the interest being shown by major labels in the UK.
“But then we met the guys who were running EMI at the time in Britain,” he told Craig, “and walked into the offices of Parlophone and there were gold discs from the Beatles and Queen and everybody, and it was kind of like, Shit, man. This is where we belong...”
Asked by Hot Press in 1997 if he still considered himself a Queen fan, Yorke replied, “Well, yeah, sort of. To an extent.”
“You can't help admiring their... professionalism, or whatever it was,” he added. “I got these amazing Freddie Mercury stories from someone who worked with him when he was alive, and apparently he wouldn't talk to anyone, he never did interviews; and yet when he appeared on stage he was totally, totally focused, and completely rabid - but obviously he was the total opposite of that, totally sensitive and really, really shy. I just thought he was always really bewitching, because of that, he was like two different people.”
Radiohead recently got back together to rehearse in London “just to play the old songs”, according to bassist Colin Greenwood, sparking hope among fans that a new album or live shows might soon be on the horizon. Whether or not the influence of Bohemian Rhapsody still carries weight for the band has not yet been revealed.
