introduced to new art movements, he became increasingly politicised and he wrote dozens of songs on the acoustic guitar. Jonny wasn’t the only person who thought that many of them would stand up even now.
“He’s probably got about twenty other songs that he wrote that will be on the next album,” says John Matthias. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all. He’s got hundreds and hundreds of songs stored up and most of them are absolute classics. One of my favourites was ‘Stop Whispering’. He used to play that a lot but I think they ended up ruining that song in the end. Or it wasn’t as good a song as I thought it was when I was eighteen!”
He also, incidentally, passed both Art and English with reasonable ease. His early press releases with Radiohead seemed to imply that he’d failed art, perhaps to suggest he was that classic rock archetype, the “art school drop-out “. In fact he got a 2:1. For his degree show, he cleverly scanned a picture of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling into his computer and changed all the colours.
But the most important thing that happened at Exeter was his meeting with Rachel Owen. He would still be going out with her 20 years later and they would have two children. Almost every reference to her he’s made in interviews has been to the fact that she has encouraged him on the frequent occasions when he’s suffered a crisis of confidence. Intriguingly he met her at around, or not long after, the time he wrote ‘Creep’ – the second most important thing that happened during his time at Exeter. He’d written the song after a long obsession with a girl from Oxford. She used to hang around with the beautiful people who frequented the town’s fashionable Clarendon Street quarter of Oxford.
“When I wrote it,” he said to John Harris of NME later, “I was in the middle of a really, really serious obsession that got completely out of hand. It lasted about eight months. And it was unsuccessful, which made it even worse. She knows who she is.”
He felt simultaneously attracted and repulsed by her, by her life and by her friends. “I feel tremendous guilt for any sexual feelings I have,” he said to Rolling Stone , “so I end up spending my entire life feeling sorry for fancying somebody. Even in school I thought girls were so wonderful that I was scared to death of them. I masturbate a lot. That’s how I deal with it!”
“I don’t think he would have thought of himself as a creep then,” says John Matthias. “But I think he could access a part of himself that could be a creep to write that song. I don’t think it was a kind of: ‘I’m a loser, so why don’t you fucking kill me’ kind of thing.”
One legend has it that the song was written in a toilet cubicle at the Lemon Grove. This may or may not be true. Shaun definitely remembers him working on it at their shared house in Exeter. “He was singing at the top of his voice way down in the basement and I was on the top floor,” he says. “I went down and asked him, ‘Can you be a bit quieter? I’m trying to read up here!’”
Wherever and exactly whenever ‘Creep’ was written, it does seem like the song’s genesis laid to rest the feelings of inadequacy that Thom had had since Abingdon. By his last year at Exeter, he was a successful DJ, had a girlfriend he’d be with for decades and his musical talent had reached new heights. He said later that admitting ‘Creep’ was about a real person got him in “a lot of trouble.” By the time the song was finished, the ‘obsession’ was already history.
Yet that one song would soon blast Thom and his band into the stratosphere.
5
BACK ON A FRIDAY
Radiohead once said that their debut album, Pablo Honey , was a ‘Greatest Hits’ of their unsigned years. Throughout the period when they were at university and despite the distance between the band members, they’d continued to add to their stockpile of new songs. But, with so few opportunities to play live,
“He’s probably got about twenty other songs that he wrote that will be on the next album,” says John Matthias. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all. He’s got hundreds and hundreds of songs stored up and most of them are absolute classics. One of my favourites was ‘Stop Whispering’. He used to play that a lot but I think they ended up ruining that song in the end. Or it wasn’t as good a song as I thought it was when I was eighteen!”
He also, incidentally, passed both Art and English with reasonable ease. His early press releases with Radiohead seemed to imply that he’d failed art, perhaps to suggest he was that classic rock archetype, the “art school drop-out “. In fact he got a 2:1. For his degree show, he cleverly scanned a picture of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling into his computer and changed all the colours.
But the most important thing that happened at Exeter was his meeting with Rachel Owen. He would still be going out with her 20 years later and they would have two children. Almost every reference to her he’s made in interviews has been to the fact that she has encouraged him on the frequent occasions when he’s suffered a crisis of confidence. Intriguingly he met her at around, or not long after, the time he wrote ‘Creep’ – the second most important thing that happened during his time at Exeter. He’d written the song after a long obsession with a girl from Oxford. She used to hang around with the beautiful people who frequented the town’s fashionable Clarendon Street quarter of Oxford.
“When I wrote it,” he said to John Harris of NME later, “I was in the middle of a really, really serious obsession that got completely out of hand. It lasted about eight months. And it was unsuccessful, which made it even worse. She knows who she is.”
He felt simultaneously attracted and repulsed by her, by her life and by her friends. “I feel tremendous guilt for any sexual feelings I have,” he said to Rolling Stone , “so I end up spending my entire life feeling sorry for fancying somebody. Even in school I thought girls were so wonderful that I was scared to death of them. I masturbate a lot. That’s how I deal with it!”
“I don’t think he would have thought of himself as a creep then,” says John Matthias. “But I think he could access a part of himself that could be a creep to write that song. I don’t think it was a kind of: ‘I’m a loser, so why don’t you fucking kill me’ kind of thing.”
One legend has it that the song was written in a toilet cubicle at the Lemon Grove. This may or may not be true. Shaun definitely remembers him working on it at their shared house in Exeter. “He was singing at the top of his voice way down in the basement and I was on the top floor,” he says. “I went down and asked him, ‘Can you be a bit quieter? I’m trying to read up here!’”
Wherever and exactly whenever ‘Creep’ was written, it does seem like the song’s genesis laid to rest the feelings of inadequacy that Thom had had since Abingdon. By his last year at Exeter, he was a successful DJ, had a girlfriend he’d be with for decades and his musical talent had reached new heights. He said later that admitting ‘Creep’ was about a real person got him in “a lot of trouble.” By the time the song was finished, the ‘obsession’ was already history.
Yet that one song would soon blast Thom and his band into the stratosphere.
5
BACK ON A FRIDAY
Radiohead once said that their debut album, Pablo Honey , was a ‘Greatest Hits’ of their unsigned years. Throughout the period when they were at university and despite the distance between the band members, they’d continued to add to their stockpile of new songs. But, with so few opportunities to play live,
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