So head-butting the radio and then smashing it into splinters with my naked fists while sobbing like a baby was a bit of an overreaction. But I was sorely provoked.
Thom Yorke was plugging his new solo album, The Eraser, on NPR. Now, Thom and me go way back. It was me that tried to get Radiohead's drummer sacked from the Samaritans. On account of how it was a conflict of interest. And I once offered the band the song title "I'm So Full Of Sunshine I Make Rainbows When I Cry." For free. And they turned it down. Can you believe that?
The interviewer is ever so gently probing Thom about his appalling habit of just standing onstage and looking miserable when he no longer "feels" the songs—instead of pulling his socks up, painting on a great, big, grease-paint clown smile, knocking back a Prozac and/or snorting a line of charlie and just getting on with it.
People have paid money to see you, points out the interviewer, reasonably.
"But would they rather I was dishonest?" gasps an aghast Thom "Because if I was being honest, I'd be on the train going home. ..."
And that's when I stick a righteous Zinedine Zidane-style head butt on the radio.
"They're not paying you to be honest, you pinky-cocking, wonky-eyed prima-donna!" I screech, smashing the sparking, spluttering mess of wires and shattered plastic with my two magnificently over-muscled, Mighty Joe Young-size superfists.
"They're paying you to sing. And dance like an organ-grinder's monkey. What part of the word ‘showbiz' don't you understand?"
I'm hallucinating savagely through a hissing red mist. I see Henry Rollins seizing Morrissey by his greasy quiff and dragging him outside into the sunshine and making him do press-ups and play Frisbee while Art Brut's "We're in a Band!" blasts away in the background
The trouble is that Thom and his fellow legions of miserabalist, oh-pity-poor-me indie musos don't realize they're in showbiz at all. They think they're artists. Seriously.
But that just doesn't wash. Can you imagine Michelangelo saying to the Medici pope, "Sorry, Pope, I can't finish the Sistine Ceiling because I just don't ‘feel' it any more"?
John Pope would've had the idle fop choking on his own lopped-off penis in nanoseconds (and remember, this was before the invention of organ-restoring micro-surgery). And then tied him to a stake with his own entrails and burnt the lazy bastard alive. Just as a first warning.
Now I'm not suggesting that we get similarly medieval on Yorke's boney ass. Okay, so I am. FLASHBACK!
We're in the seaside town of Ayr, Scotland, sometime in the naughty '90s. We're staring enviously at the bass player from the Brit metal band Wolfsbane who—shortly after signing a hefty deal with DefAmerica—is dangling one hand idly in a huge barrel full of ice and bottles of Newcastle Brown Ale while getting a manicure from a striking young lady with incredibly long legs and a mane so luxuriant it'd make Fabio crap his faux leopard-skin loin-cloth with envy.
Suddenly the smiling singer walks in, dressed only in a skimpy white towel and reeking of his own sexcapades.
These boys have got it all! Beer, money to buy more beer, sex with people better-looking than them, manicures—what more could any scruffy chancer who strums a banjo and caterwauls for a living possibly ask for?
Which is why Thom Yorke should pull up his socks up, buck up his ideas and learn to dance like a happy little monkey. Or get burnt at the stake. It's his call.