The house always wins.

jotterbook:

#3: The average coughed up for Radiohead’s innovative you-decide-what-to-pay, internet-only released seventh album ‘In Rainbows’ was a miserly £2.90, with 60 per cent of fans electing to pay nowt.

#5: Thom Yorke was inspired to become veggie by The Smiths’ ‘Meat Is Murder’ - as well as more personal reasons: “I started going out with this girl,” he explains, “and I wanted to impress her so I pretended to be a vegetarian.” Sadly Chris Martin trounced Thom Yorke to win the coveted ‘World’s Sexiest Vegetarian’ crown in 2005.

#6: According to Thom Yorke, he and Colin Greenwood only ended up in a band together because of their terrible dress sense: “We always ended up at the same parties. He’d be wearing a beret and a catsuit, or something pretty fucking weird and I’d be in a frilly blouse and crushed velvet dinner suit and we’d pass round the Joy Division records.”

#10: In 2004, Thom Yorke’s middle finger sold for £248 on ebay. It turned out not to be his actual flesh-and-bone, but rather one he’d deliberately smashed off his recently acquired NME Award, declaring the bird-flicking middle digit to be offensive.

#11: Thom Yorke suffered a traumatic Christmas in 1996. His garden pond froze, killing his collection of exotic fish.

#12: A mysterious number, 1426148550, appeared on the cover of the ‘Airbag/How Am I Driving’ EP. Fans quickly discovered it to be a pager number which, if dialled, revealed the voice of Thom saying “Hello”. Fans left messages which the band supposedly kept for possible inclusion in a future recording.

#18: In 1987, Thom Yorke and his girlfriend were involved in a car crash. His girlfriend suffered whiplash and although Yorke was unharmed, it brought on his car phobia, which he later wrote about in Radiohead songs such as ‘Airbag’, ‘Killer Cars’, ‘Stupid Car’ and ‘Drunkk Machine’.

#20: Thom Yorke recorded the vocals to ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ in late 1994 just after seeing Jeff Buckley play the Garage in London. Apparently, an inspired Yorke rushed back to the studio, did two takes then broke down in tears.

#21: Jonny Greenwood is the only band member to be a classically trained musician, having taken formal viola lessons as a child. In addition to viola and guitar, the multi-instrumentalist plays organ, piano, xylophone, glockenspiel, ondes martenot (similar to a theremin), banjo and harmonica.

#25: Thom Yorke wrote ‘Creep’ after being rejected by a girl he was infatuated with while studying at Exeter University in the late ’80s. Yorke says it is about being in love with someone, but not feeling good enough, declaring, “There’s the beautiful people and then there’s the rest of us.”

#27: After the success of Radiohead’s debut album, 1993’s ‘Pablo Honey’, Yorke has confessed his ego got a bit out of control, causing him to drink too much and dick about with his hair (blond extensions, anyone?). “When I got back to Oxford I was unbearable,” he cringed in 2000, “as soon as you get any success you disappear up your own arse.”

#28: Members of Radiohead have played homage to their increasingly expanding offspring by dedicating various songs/albums to them. ‘Hail To The Thief’ is dedicated to Jonny’s firstborn son Tamir born in 2002; ‘Amnesiac’ is dedicated to Thom’s son Noah born in 2001; while Thom’s daughter, Agnes, born in 2004, had Yorke’s solo effort ‘The Eraser’ dedicated to her.

#29: When Radiohead first got together at their Oxford school, they were known as On A Friday because they practised, cryptically enough, on Fridays in the music room. After they were signed in 1991, they changed their name to Radiohead, the title of a Talking Heads song.

#30: The Radiohead lads are a well-educated bunch. Besides their public-school learning, Thom has a degree in English and Fine Art from Exeter; Colin’s got a degree in English from Cambridge; Ed studied Economics at Manchester Uni, and Phil has got an English and History BA from Liverpool. Jonny dropped out of his Oxford Brookes music degree to join the band in 1991.