We think the same things, at the same time...

Yes, I'm a Radiohead fan. Fuck off. I know a lot of my posts lately have been all "I'm a Hawkwind/Girls Aloud/etc. fan and I'm not embarrassed!" but frankly I *am* a bit embarrassed about liking Radiohead. They are distinctly not cool. Normals deride them because they're too... weird while the Hipster Kids deride them for being too... normal. An experimental band for people who would never think to listen to experimental music. Or a stadium rock band for people who don't like stadium rock.

Plus, you know, their *fans*. They're a bit... errrr... obsessive, shall we say. They give obsessive fandom a bad name, and yes, that really hurts, coming from me.

I admit, Thom Yorke brings out the worst in me. Hence, why I should probably clarify the whole "Thom Yorke is my spirit guide" thing. It's not just because I've been listening to The Eraser over and over again today. (Bah, stupid flash on that site crashes my 'puter.)

I got into Radiohead about the same time everyone else did - Creep. Pablo Honey was one of the few decent albums we were allowed to listen to when I worked at Tower Records, so I used to put on the last track, Blow Out, and do the hair-shakey dance about the cassette department. And then I kind of wrote them off, thinking that they would go on to do more sub-Nirvana ripoffs until they got dropped, while I disappeared to listen to 60s Garage for a few year, writing off modern music entirely. And then, like everyone else, I rediscovered them with OK Computer, and went back and bought everything else they'd done.

The thing is, they always seem to release exactly the *right* album at the right time in my life. OK Computer was the soundtrack of Leaving New York. I was burned out, the stress and the pressure, hated the city and capitalism and office life and America and everything. Not knowing what else to do, I went back to my mother's house in Upstate NY and stayed there, on my own (my mother was at Yale at the time) for several months while I figured it out. And I went insane. Quite literally. OK Computer is the sound of living alone, in that big, spooky, haunted house, not seeing other people for weeks at a time, slithering all over the walls. I developped an imaginary friend who lived under the table - Thable Thom. Childish, petulant, mischievous, prone to tantrums and throwing his legos out of the crib. Tormenter of cats and winder-upper of internet folk. When people did actually come to visit me, I still insisted that Thable Thom was real and that they address him and interact with him. (Kind of a spooky foreshadowing of The Sims, eh?)

Yes, I KNOW this makes me sound completely mad as a box of snakes, and in fact, just like your average mentalist Radiohead fan. It was a really weird time.

(Thom even made it into one of my "Stories", unfortunately as the Bad Guy. (As much as there are ever Bad Guys in my stories.) In Loving In A World Of Desire, he was Kate Gordon's foil, her destroyer, her downfall. He represented all the worst aspects of her personality, her spoiledness and petulance, her alienation, yet also her creativity. Neither of them loved the other, but they were both obsessed with what the other one *symbolised* to the other. She was his Jungian Anima, he was her Jungian Shadow. She used him as a way of proving (to herself, or her lover) that she didn't actually deserve the good, supportive, loving relationship she had finally found herself in, after all the badness and melodrama of her soap opera life. (She was like that, as a character, she invariably kicked her way out of any Happily Ever After I could write her.))

Amnesiac was another album that came just when I *NEEDED* it. I lived inside it for the horrible months I spent recovering from illness and the forced termination of my only child, trapped in an abusive relationship. I can't listen to that album now, it just brings it all back. But at the time, it was the most real escape I had.

So when he turns up in a dream, and tells me things, I tend to believe them. Because they're really coming from a part of me that I don't like to acknowledge.





Poor man, to be saddled with the expectations and neuroses of the so many broken people who are his fans.