The Radiohead song Thom York wrote when he couldn’t take it anymore: “Something snapped”

Posted On January 12, 2025January 12, 2025

Thom Yorke has always had a hard time with fame. From the moment Radiohead broke into the big time, their leader seems to have been moaning about it. Fed up with singing their biggest song, tired of the demands of their fans and bored of life on the road, his breaking point was captured on tape.

Some would say that Thom Yorke is a visionary who refuses to bend to the wills and ways of the music industry or be boxed in by expectations. Others would say he’s grumpy, ungrateful even. While people around the world dream about gaining the level of success that he’s hit or yearn to have a track do as well as ‘Creeps’ did, Yorke seems to hate it. “Fuck off, we’re tired of it,” the singer once yelled at a fan who demanded to hear the song. Johnny Greenwood seemed to agree with the sentiment, too, stating, “We seemed to be living out the same four and a half minutes of our lives over and over again. It was incredibly stultifying.”

By 2000, after seven dulling years of singing “Cause I’m a Creep” on repeat, Yorke had had enough. But it wasn’t just about that one song; it was the entire act and existence of being a notable, working musician. He was passionate about what he was doing and proud of everything the band were putting out, but with each new achievement, there only seemed to be more responsibility and tasks to be done. More and more was being asked of them the more successful they became, and Yorke couldn’t take it.

Even after they released OK Computer, their most experimental project to date, in 1997, the pressure of growing fame only piled on. “That OK Computer was happening. We did the Glastonbury Festival and this thing in Ireland,” Yorke recalled of the moment, stating, “Something just snapped in me.”

That snap was captured in music on the track ‘How to Disappear Completely’. With the title representing Yorke’s biggest desire at the time, the song deals head-on with the singer’s difficult relationship with his career. “I just said, ‘That’s it. I can’t do it anymore.’ And more than a year later, we were still on the road,” he said. He told the BBC, “I just needed a break. And in fact, I didn’t get one for another year and a bit, by which point I was pretty much catatonic.” Desperately in need of some time away, ‘How to Disappear Completely’ captured the trap of success he felt he’d fallen into. 

However, for a typically experimental song written by a man who has forever rejected mainstream success, the inspiration came from an unlikely source. Yorke admitted that the spark for the track came from a conversation with REM’s Michael Stipe, stating, “I rang him… said, ‘I cannot cope with this.’ And he said, ‘Pull the shutters down and keep saying: I’m not here, this is not happening.’”

Putting that exact mantra into the song, the Radiohead track came directly from Stipe’s encouragement for Yorke to disassociate his way through a stressful patch.

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