I’ve never believed that pop music is escapist trash. There’s always a darkness in it, even amidst great pop music. – Thom Yorke
One of the interesting things here is that the people who should be shaping the future are politicians. But the political framework itself is so dead and closed that people look to other sources, like artists, because art and music allow people a certain freedom. – Thom Yorke
I think we’re entering a very dangerous time. The West has set itself up, decided it’s in charge, not for good intentions, not for the benefit of mankind. – Thom Yorke
I went to a boys’ school, and I didn’t realize that most guys join bands because they wanted to get girls. I was not really focused on that the way everybody else was. – Thom Yorke
We toyed with the idea of making it a double album, but I think that would only have confused everybody even more, so we decided to stick with the songs we picked. – Thom Yorke
The people in charge, globally, are maniacs. They are maniacs, and unless we do something about it these people are going to deprive us of a future. – Thom Yorke
We didn’t start out to make a protest record at all. That would have been too shallow. As usual, it was simply a case of absorbing what’s going on around us. – Thom Yorke
I don’t see it in terms of changing things, but rather using language and music as weapons for fighting a mainstream media which is predominately right wing, and loyal to the political framework and its corporate interests. – Thom Yorke
My songs are my kids. Some of them stay with me, some others I have to send out, out to the war. It might sound stupid and it might even sound naive, but that’s just the way it is. – Thom Yorke
I grew up under Thatcher. I grew up believing that I was fundamentally powerless. Then gradually over the years it occurred to me that this was actually a very convenient myth for the state. – Thom Yorke
If we got into a situation where people start burning our records, then bring it on. That’s the whole point. The gloaming has begun. We’re in the darkness. This has happened before. Go read some history. – Thom Yorke
I think maybe since there isn’t a great deal of access to the mainstream media and people don’t understand the language of mainstream media, if you put music out there with lyrics that are loosely political, people absorb some of it and spit it back out. – Thom Yorke
Well, my son really loves wildlife. And everytime he draws a polar bear I want to tell him there probably won’t any by the time… he’s my age. That’s kinda hard to deal with. – Thom Yorke
I think no artist can claim to have any access to the truth, or an authentic version of an event. But obviously they have slightly better means at their disposal because they have their art to energize whatever it is they’re trying to write about. They have music. – Thom Yorke
Generally speaking, if people are prepared to stick their heads above the power pit, like Zinn says, and absorb what’s going on around them, it makes them think. – Thom Yorke
People in bands don’t have the kind of conversations people might think they have. The best things about being in a band are the things that are unsaid. – Thom Yorke
We don’t have to stand on a soap-box and preach because hopefully we’re channelling it through the new record. – Thom Yorke
Well, I’ve been reading a lot about the fifty years since the Second World War, about Western foreign policy and all that. I try not to let it get to me, but sometimes I just think that there’s no hope. – Thom Yorke
I wrote a lot of stuff quickly: pages and pages of notes that seemed pretty incoherent at first. Most of it was taken from the radio because -suddenly being a parent- I’d be confronted by the radio giving a news report every hour of the day. – Thom Yorke
Coming from Britain, I was terrified of meeting all these other artists, because artists over there tend to fight with each other a lot, the premise being that there’s not enough room for everybody. – Thom Yorke
My dad spent his whole life getting into fights for telling what he believed to be the truth. Basically it comes from my dad-and he’s screaming right-wing, so there you are. – Thom Yorke
