We’re on the train because Yorke hates to fly, and he’s positively terrified of cars. Life has been like this for Yorke: His problems have become his strengths, his obsessions have fed his repulsions, and his fears have inspired his music. That may be why he’s so worried that people occasionally mistake him for an arrogant prick. When he was a kid, they used to tease him about it. His lazy eye flutters and droops, a handicap as well as the punctuation point of his fractured charm. He laughs a sudden, explosive, truncated laugh. “Er, increasingly so, actually.”Ī couple of days on the road have taught me that even when Thom Yorke isn’t suffering from one of his various phobias, he’s still more than a touch intense. When we go under, I ask Yorke if he’s claustrophobic.

This is significant for a man who once wrote an album called The Bends. He doesn’t see the sheep and the farms-he is keenly aware that those things out there will disappear very soon, and then we will enter a tunnel and be deep, deep underneath the sea. We’re on the Eurostar train from Paris to London, and Radiohead’s singer is compulsively looking out the window at a pastoral French landscape. The pupils of Thom Yorke’s eyes zip from side to side like nervous insects.

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