Read Thom Yorke for Free Online Page B

spectacle as they were about the music.
    “Thom had that long blonde bob that he used to swish about onstage,” says Martin. “Shack had very long hair and I was a Goth so I had dyed, back-combed hair. We looked quite good and had a lot of energy and attitude onstage. We used to shout at the audience. People would scream and shout. There’d be lots of banter. It was always a fun night rather than, ‘there’s a band up there taking themselves seriously’. This was the fun band where Thom could let his hair down.”
    “We did lots of stupid covers,” Laura Forrest-Hay remembers. “Like a really heavy, thrash version of ‘Postman Pat’. And we did Prince’s ‘Raspberry Beret’ at four times the speed. Shack was quite into punk, as well, and anarchic music. Myself and John Matthias were bringing in more melodic stuff on top of it.”
    “We did a very hard, grungy cover of ‘Funky Town’, continues Martin. “Thom would prance up and down in a way that … although his onstage presence got quite professional, musically, he would definitely fuck about. We also used to get a lot of dancers in who’d strip off and paint themselves in funny coloured paint and all that. Part of it was that if you have a visual appeal and make it a party, people will come. I remember a couple of gigs where we had four to six dancers covered in DayGlo paint down to their underwear. We did a couple of gigs at farms in the middle of nowhere with properly decent light shows. There was definitely a buzz about it. I mean I didn’t leave [the band] thinking, Oh my God, I’ve just done a Pete Best . I was never good enough as a drummer to have gone the distance. But it had enough of a buzz about it that a lot of people would have remembered those times, regardless of what Thom had gone on to do. It was a good enough band and stage show and a good enough thing that happened for people to say that, ‘Yeah, there was a band called the Headless Chickens and they were really good and we had a lot of fun.’ We were better than the average student band.”
    This was proved when they achieved something else that On A Friday had never come close to – their own record. Local promoter Dave Goodchild had a record label, Hometown Atrocities, and when he saw the small following that Headless Chickens were building up among the student population, he suggested that they record a song for an EP of Exeter bands. The Headless Chickens’ song was called ‘I Don’t Want To Go To Woodstock’ and Dave arranged for them to go to a studio in nearby Honiton to record it.
    The other three bands on the record, Jackson Penis, Beaver Patrol and Dave’s own band Mad At The Sun, had a completely different sound, much louder and heavier. Headless Chickens were unmistakably a student band.
    “They were different from all the other punk bands in Exeter,” Dave told this author. “The big influence in Exeter at the time was hardcore. We were into Emo bands like Fugazi, which is very different to what they call Emo now, but they’d branched off into more of an avant-garde thing. It had more of an indie appeal.”
    “Thom had done a bit of demo recording before but none of us had been involved in anything like that,” says John. “It was great. It was a laugh. We went to a studio called Daylight Studios in Honiton. And it was just a day. I remember Thom over-dubbing lots and lots of very noisy guitar, very quickly. Then we over-dubbed the violin. I think we did the whole thing in about four hours and then took about an hour and a half to mix it and it was mastered the next day and that was it.”
    Despite the fact that it was a micro-budget recording, it was a fantastic moment for all of them when they heard the finished record. It was an anti-hippy piece beginning with Shack ranting, “with flowers in their hair/they say that they don’t care” and ending, “don’t let the hippies get me”. The biggest influence seems to be the cussed humour of The Wonder