Radiohead’s Thom Yorke has shared a formative piece of advice given to him by R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe as he struggled with fame.
Yorke reflected on his decades-long friendship with Stipe during his new Rolling Stone conversation with Harry Styles, which saw the pair discuss navigating fame and the impact it has on their private lives.
After Styles recalled feeling confined to hotels early in his career, Yorke said walking and people-watching could help “bring you out of yourself” and recalled how Stipe encouraged him to stop hiding away during Radiohead’s early years.
“I remember when we were on tour with R.E.M. [in 1995] and Michael Stipe figuring out that I would just hide in the dressing room, and never went out anywhere,” Yorke said. “So he started dragging me out, and he gave me this trick.
“He said, ‘If you don’t care, they don’t care. If you’re not looking, they’re not looking.’ And it works.”
Yorke recalled Stipe immediately putting the advice to the test during a night out on the road. “I remember being in Stockholm going to some really busy club, and he said, ‘Try it,’” he continued. “And it worked. Nobody bothered us.”
He added that while being recognised could still leave artists feeling vulnerable, living permanently behind closed doors was worse: “It’s not an easy decision to make, but it’s better than the alternative.”
Radiohead supported R.E.M. on the latter’s huge 1995 ‘Monster’ tour, beginning a friendship between Yorke and Stipe that has continued for more than three decades.
Speaking to NME in 2019, Stipe said the two had “forged a friendship through touring together and a mutual respect for each other’s work”.
“He became a contemporary,” Stipe continued. “He’s one of the people that I go to for advice in the industry of music, outside of Mike and Peter. He’s one of my first texts to say, ‘Here’s what I’m thinking of doing, what would you recommend?’
“There’s a cross-inspiration that happens there.”
While Stipe played down the suggestion that he had acted as Yorke’s mentor, he acknowledged that his own experiences with fame had proved useful to the younger singer.
“‘Mentored’ probably because I was older and had been through a little more than he had, but we’d had a lot of conversations about it and I know that it helped him,” he said.
Yorke has similarly credited Stipe with helping him when Radiohead’s success began to overwhelm him, saying in 2019 that the R.E.M. singer “helped me when things went crazy, when people started to talk to me like I was Jesus… on the street.”
When Yorke called him during the relentless touring that followed ‘OK Computer’ to say he was struggling, Stipe advised him to imagine withdrawing from the situation and tell himself: “I’m not here, this isn’t happening.”
The phrase became the central refrain of ‘How To Disappear Completely’ on Radiohead’s 2000 album ‘Kid A’. Stipe confirmed the story to NME, simply responding “Yep” when asked whether the lyric had originated in his advice.
Yorke has repeatedly joined R.E.M. to perform ‘E-Bow The Letter’, taking the vocal part originally sung by Patti Smith, including at the 1998 Tibetan Freedom Concert and a secret London church show in 2004. A recording of the latter performance was officially released in 2018.
At two shows in Vancouver in 2003, meanwhile, Yorke joined R.E.M. for ‘E-Bow The Letter’ and ‘It’s The End Of The World As We Know It’, before Stipe returned the favour the following night by joining Radiohead for ‘Karma Police’.
Their friendship endured beyond R.E.M.’s 2011 split too. Yorke revealed at the time that Stipe had sent him a message warning him that the band were about to call it a day.
