Everything that embodies what I’ve been feeling lately
Because life operates in circles (which I also have been thinking lately)
I’m immediately going to start by saying that this is not something that I found myself, it came to me, like much of the good media that I cherish, from a friend. So if this strikes a chord within the fibre of your being and you can relate to it, credit Dominic Tang.
I couldn’t be too bothered to find out who the interviewer is as I sit here pretending to do work, but she asks some very thought-provoking unconventional questions, to which Thom Yorke responds very happily and openly (something he very much avoids and despises when doing conventional ‘industry’ interviews). Immediately it is obvious that this is not just a Radiohead semi-promotional-interview-on-foreign-television. The interviewer, who I now know to be one Charlotte Roche, shows that mixing it up culturally is what it’s all about. Being born in England then living in the Netherlands before moving to Germany, she spent her ‘formative years’ leaving home, starting a band, self-harming, experimenting with drugs and shaving her head and seems to have emerged on the other side as a complete, confident and aware person. She’s worked on television (which is why she’s doing the interview), been in a film, and written a semi-autobiographical bestseller with massively blatant pornographic imagery. So she’s a pretty rad chick we’ve established. The angle which she takes in the way that she frames questions in fact surprises Yorke, and she is pretty happy-go-lucky considering the subject material covered. It strikes me as strange that a lot of the things that he says are things that I can completely understand, not being concepts too deep for ‘your average joe’ to understand but more because they embody what has been a recurring theme of recent times for myself and the other ‘dislocated, disillusioned’ nearly-twenty teens that I live with. Obviously I’m not as outspoken as Thom but he does well to iterate the thoughts that permeate some of my day to day consciousness.
One can’t help but feel a little special to be in the same boat as the Radiohead frontman philosophically (ignoring blatantly that the interview was from a good couple of years ago), either that or everyone feels this way and we’re all too afraid to connect with each other over it because of the very fact that we feel a bit more special being dislocated and unique than as part of the herd.
I forgot to mention that you should try to ignore the fact that I turn into a big wet girl at any mention of Radiohead and seeing them live in the summer simply dug up the cardboard box at the back of my mind where all these subconscious Yorke thoughts got shelved and lay dormant for a bit.
So in summary, why, after all the awareness that we credit the human race (or most of it) with, have things not changed? Perhaps it’s because everyone just wants to be cool enough to walk around at a music festival and interview someone famous and, as Thom put it himself, maybe the political concern stage only lasts for about 10 minutes every day, and the rest of the time we can walk around in blissful ignorance.
Brother Bear Love