Which poem gave The Smile their name?
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(Credits: Frank Lebon)
The fact that Radiohead are in with a shout of being one of the world’s biggest and most respected bands is still something of a miracle. A band of wilfully obtuse, artsy shut-ins with all the sex appeal of a queue at a chemist. By rights, the band should have killed their careers at least three times over in at least three different ways.
Followed up the album that made them a mainstream concern with a depressed, paranoid prog record and then followed that up with a depressed, paranoid techno LP. Which is to say nothing about the album they literally released for free or the album they wrote about a tree. Yet still, they can comfortably sell out in any arena in the world, and when their side-project, The Smile,was announced in 2021, it was international news.
Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, teaming up with Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner to form a new band, was met with the kind of enthusiasm normally reserved for returning astronauts. Partially because there hadn’t been an album from Thom ’n’ John’s parent group for five years but also because the gang had discovered guitars again. No more synths, pianos or distorted beats; this was going to be something earthier, more down to earth, more raw. Or so it may seem.
You see, while this was a very different project to anything put out by ‘Gloomy Thom’s Serious Hommes’, those who’d been paying attention knew the very last thing it would be is simple. In fact, this was clear from the very first inkling that the project was happening at all.
Rather than send out a press release or anything so passe, Greenwood, Yorke and Skinner made a simultaneous post on social media. Which is… also pretty passe, but the content made it workable. Each of them posted the same extract from the Ted Hughes cycle of poems ‘Crow’, the last half of which makes it clear that though this was a band called The Smile, this endeavour would be anything but happy.
Yorke himself would elaborate on the band’s name in their very first performance during the 2021 ersatz Glastonbury livestream, ‘Live At Worthy Farm’. The famously taciturn Yorke said in his only bit of stage patter “Ladies and gentlemen, we are called ‘The Smile.’ Not the smile as in ‘ahh,’ more ‘the smile’ as in, the guy who lies to you every day…” Ever since, The Smile have gone from a side project to a full-on band in their own rite. Releasing their debut, A Light For Attracting Attention, in 2022, along with not one, but two albums in 2024, January’s Wall of Eyes followed by October’s Cutouts.
With those three albums, we can see that The Smile is a perfect name for the project. On the surface, it’s a much more upbeat, alluring project. Riffs tumbling over each other held together with Skinner’s effervescent grooves. Once you’re up close, though, that’s when the darkness hits. When you’re in it, there’s nowhere else to go. See the extract below.
The poem that inspired The Smile’s band name:
“And at that very moment the smile arrived
And the crowd, shoving to get a glimpse of a man’s soul
Stripped to its last shame,
Met this smile
That rose through his torn roots
Touching his lips, altering his eyes
And for a moment
Mending everything
Before it swept out and away across the earth.”
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