“I’m a creep /I'm a weirdo/What the hell am I doing here?/I don’t belong here” went the chorus, Thom beating out this refrain on his chest, the words forming a crown of thorns perched atop two verses that tenderly worship some coveted beauty and lament the author’s own defects. Leaving aside its artful use of the word “fucking” (a bugbear, as it turned out, since the specially-adapted ‘radio edit’ replaced it with a less-contentious “very” and the critics sneered) and its stunningly simple two-tiered tune for guitars, ‘Creep’ set about its business of capturing hearts with its deadly, self-mocking lyric. They were signed to Parlophone, so someone had eyed potential in the largely unimpressive- looking glop of Thames Valley fashion detritus -but it was ‘Creep’ that turned the tide for the rest of us. The promise of this essentially slippery five-piece at that stage lay only in some sparky live support slots and a much-ignored debut, the Drill EP’. It was Radiohead’s second single, ‘Creep’, that did it. Thom Yorke, born in Oxford, lazy eye, ex-stude, pop star designate, had us all on the edge of our seats last September. “I’d never really wanted to do anything else. I’ve just asked Thom Yorke, aged 24, singer with Radiohead, if he's in this to be a star, because it’s odds-on that he’s about to become one, and the answer is a very definite, resounding yes. “First of all I wanted to be Brian May.” Uh- oh! “I went into a guitar lesson when I was eight and said, I wanna be a pop star.” Story by Andrew Collins | Photos by David Tonge ‘Hurt At Work’ and ‘Herman Spitz Florist’. Look out for LP titles like ‘What's Your Name, Jerky‘?’. “‘Pablo Honey’ was appropriate for us, being all mothers’ boys." “Our manager got a tape off them,” says Thom. He was an ex-record plugger, which would explain how his tapes spread like a virus through the music biz, and why he’s such a poisonous bastard. The Wonder Stuff met Rizzo at a club in New Jersey in late 1991. It’s just the ultimate sacrilege - turn up in someone’s life and they can't do anything about it.” But the notion of phoning up people cold is so ’90s. “Some of it’s really sick,” concedes Radiohead’s Thom Yorke. he’s a Rottweiler.” He tries to book an appointment to remove piles (“my ass is killing me!”) and meets a frosty receptionist who is his match: “Sir, could you please use the correct terminology?” He applies for a job selling cars by telling the salesman about how he was fired for attacking a customer: “I said, you buy this fuckin’ car or I break your fuckin’ head.” He asks a piano tuner to “help me get my fuckin’ dawg out from inside the piano. He phones strangers and urges them to “fuck my wife up the ass". He takes the piss out of gays, Puerto Ricans, every conceivable nationality. Rizzo’s genius is in his utter inhumanity. Pablo, spooked beyond belief, repeatedly asks: “Who is this?” In the sketch where Radiohead’s album title comes from, he pleads to a mysterious ‘Pablo’ to “come down to Florida”. It involves a set of circulated tapes, usually known as ‘The Jerky Boys’, containing telephone pranks so abusive, nasty and malicious that they make Victor Lewis-Smith seem like the smug public school under-achiever he really is.įrank Rizzo (he’s our man) is a New York-based telephone terrorist who replies to small ads in local papers in a quite mesmerisingly rude voice reminiscent of Louie from Taxi. Wondering why Radiohead called their album ‘Pablo Honey’? It’s one of the music biz’s best secrets since someone taped Linda McCartney's hilarious backing vocals to ‘Hey Jude’ and sent out copies.
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