The song Yorke wrote advised and inspired by Stipe

Thom Yorke leader of the Radiohead He’s always had trouble with fame. From the moment the band became famous, their leader complained about it. Fed up with singing their biggest song, tired of fan demands and bored with life on tour, his breaking point was put in a song.

For some, Thom Yorke is a visionary who refuses to bend to the will and ways of the music industry and does everything he can to avoid being pigeonholed by expectations. Others consider him simply grumpy, even ungrateful. While many (artists and otherwise) dream of achieving the level of success he has achieved or wish for a song to be as successful as “Creeps“, Yorke seems to hate it. “Fuck you, we’re tired,” the singer once shouted at a fan who asked to listen to the song. Also Johnny Greenwood he seems to agree with this sentiment, stating, “It felt like we were living the same four and a half minutes of our lives over and over again. It was incredibly jarring.”

By 2000, after seven boring years of singing “Cause I’m a Creep” on repeat, Yorke had had enough. But it wasn’t just about that song, it was about the whole thing about being a musician of note. He was passionate about what he did and proud of everything the band was producing, but with each new accomplishment there just seemed to be more responsibilities and tasks to do. The more success they got, the more they were asked to do, and Yorke couldn’t stand it.

Even after having published, in 1997, “OK Computer”, their most experimental project yet, the pressure of growing fame only increased. “That OK Computer was happening. We attended the Glastonbury Festival,” Yorke recalled of that moment, saying that afterwards: “Something clicked in me.”

Those sensations and that discomfort were “stilled” in music in the song “How to Disappear Completely“contained in the next album”Kid A” (released in 2000). With the title representing Yorke’s greatest desire at the time, the song tackles the singer’s difficult relationship with his career head-on. “I just said, ‘Enough. I can’t take it anymore.’ And over a year later we were still on the road,” he told the BBC, adding: “I needed a break. And in fact I didn’t get one for another year and a bit, at that point I was practically catatonic.” Under these conditions, “How to Disappear Completely” captured the success trap he felt he had fallen into.

However, for a quintessentially experimental song written by a man who has always rejected mainstream success, inspiration came from an unlikely source.

Yorke admitted that the spark for the song came from a conversation with Michael Stipe of the REMstating: “I called him… and said, ‘I can’t do this.’ And he said, ‘Pull down the blinds and keep saying, I’m not here, this isn’t happening.'” And so, putting this exact mantra into the song, “How to Disappear Completely” by Radiohead was born directly from Stipe’s encouragement to Yorke to dissociate in order to overcome a period of stress.

Thom Yorke, speaking to the BBC about the song in 2006, said he would like to remember Radiohead for “How to Disappear Completely”, reiterating that “it was the best thing they ever made”