Thom Yorke wishes he never wrote High And Dry.
The Radiohead star penned the classic 1995 single – which is considered one of the band’s greatest songs – but Thom admitted he regrets writing the track, which features on Radiohead’s second LP The Bends.
In a conversation with Harry Styles for Rolling Stone magazine, Harry asked Thom: “Is that something you noticed, when that changed for you? Because you say you don’t so much sit and write a song, like, ‘I’m going to sit here, and this is a song and this is how it goes’ – you think of how it sits in the production. But obviously, if you go back to The Bends, for example, like High And Dry, that is a song.”
Thom replied: “Yeah, a guy with an acoustic guitar. Singing his song. That particular one I wish I hadn’t, but there’s nothing wrong with that.
“I don’t listen to a lot of singer-songwriters. I listen to a lot of mad old folk music, or I listen to film music, or I listen to electronic music. The banging away on the guitar thing is sometimes when it really speaks to me, but not a lot. I’m not quite sure why that is – probably because we grew up when there was a real renaissance of that, and The Bends was that.”
Thom also admitted he was already sick of the Radiohead album OK Computer by the time it was released and couldn’t wait to “move on” from it but was frustrated by having to tour the record.
He told Harry: “When we finished that record, we’d been already playing those songs too much. I literally begged [management, saying] ‘I can’t, I can’t do it. I need to move on.’
“Two years later, we were still going. That was just really f***** up because the moving on thing is not a luxury. That’s entirely essential. You know? Everybody has their different ways of dealing with this. Personally, I rely on not doing it for too long… I wish I could do it for a long time. I can’t.”