At the Barbican gallery and estate, one of London’s most iconic slabs of concrete, Thom Yorke is in a reflective mood. “
Scott Walker invited us to play once for his Meltdown,” he tells us. It’s a poignant moment. The groundbreaking singer and auteur passed away in March aged 76, leaving a void in experimental music.
With dark balladry that exposes the fragility of the human experience, both Walker and Yorke opened new worlds. The similarities didn’t go unnoticed. Yorke once jokingly described
Creep as the band’s ‘Scott Walker song’ after it was initially dismissed by producers who mistakenly thought it was a Scott Walker cover. In 2006, Walker was quoted saying: “Radiohead are fabulous. If I could have it all again and be in a band, that’s the kind of band I’d like to have been in.”
Of Walker’s death, Yorke
tweeted, “he was a huge influence on Radiohead and myself, showing me how I could use my voice and words.” If part of Walker’s enduring legacy was to impact the use of Thom Yorke’s voice, we arrive at a pertinent time. On a forthcoming solo album, the details of which are kept close for now, Yorke tells anxiety-ridden tales of contemporary claustrophobia across layers of electronic fuzz and deconstructed noise, his voice in many guises taking centre stage.
