Thom Yorke regrets having penned High And Dry.
The Radiohead frontman wrote the enduring 1995 single—often hailed as one of the band’s defining songs—but Yorke has confessed that he regrets crafting it, a track that appears on Radiohead’s second album, The Bends.
During a discussion with Harry Styles for Rolling Stone, Styles asked Yorke if he had noticed a shift in his approach over time. He suggested that Yorke rarely sits down to compose a song with a fixed blueprint—he weighs how it sits within the production. Yet when you revisit The Bends, particularly High And Dry, it’s clear that it is a song in its own right.
Yorke replied: “Yeah, just a fellow with an acoustic guitar, singing his tune. That particular one I wish I hadn’t, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with it.”
“I don’t listen to a lot of singer-songwriters. I gravitate toward wild old folk music, or film scores, or electronic music. The act of strumming the guitar can connect with me at times, but not very often. I’m not entirely sure why—that probably stems from growing up during a real renaissance of that sound, and The Bends captured that moment.”
Yorke also admitted that by the time OK Computer hit the streets, he was already tired of the album and couldn’t wait to move on, though touring the record left him frustrated.
“When we finished that record, we’d already been playing those songs too much. I literally begged [management, saying] ‘I can’t, I can’t do it. I need to move on.’”
“Two years later, we were still going. That was really f***** up because the moving on thing is not a luxury. That’s entirely essential. You know? Everybody has their different ways of dealing with this. Personally, I rely on not doing it for too long… I wish I could do it for a long time. I can’t.”
