Kid A

In retrospect Thom wasn’t really with his girlfriend for very long, but at the time it felt like an eternity. I guess I would have spent most of that time with Colin anyway just because of the way we all split up for school and only saw each other on weekends, but none of that was the point. Nothing was the point at all, I just wasn’t happy and the only person who said anything was my brother.
When Thom broke up with this girl, there was a lot of tension with him and that’s when things started to get interesting for us. At first he didn’t really talk to me about it, I think he mostly confided everything with Ed at that point and I’m not sure if I was just off about something or what, or maybe Thom just figured that since I have Colin that he should start being best friends with Ed again. It could just be that I’m some 3 years younger than the rest of them and that just makes me different. I still don’t know.
Thom spent a lot of time alone writing, which was different because we always collaborated really well before. He wrote enough to make his own album in all of his alone time, and the rest of us just sat around and tried to get on with everything. The past was the past so it became a matter of waiting things out for Thom; I just hoped we were waiting for him at all because you just couldn’t be sure that he was going to snap out of it and be the same old Thom we all knew. Needless to say he did, but in the moment it still seemed very real that he might not.
Our conversations became less personal for a while. Sometimes he would comment on the sounds I mixed on the computer, “That sounds nice, Jonny, maybe we should use it somewhere,” “You think so? I think it still needs some polishing,” “You always think too deep into it, Jonny, just keep it and see where it takes you.” I always took his advice, and a few years later a good amount of those melodies found their way into songs that made their way onto albums, and I guess that meant that my mentor was back even if I didn’t notice it at the time.
I think there was just a demon in the room and it didn’t want to leave without being acknowledged, but I couldn’t really bring up what I didn’t understand.
I liked Thom a lot. I was insane over him and I didn’t understand that that’s what was happening; really I didn’t think of such a thing as even being possible. I guess I had no reason to consider such a strange possibility, there wasn’t anything else in my life that would’ve made me come to feeling such a strange way it just sort of happened.
It took a few more melodies but we got back to our old habits of writing music together and after that happened things fell back into place with me and Thom and we were best friends again. Everything went back to how it was going before we all left to separate schools, Thom forgot about his rendezvous with his old girlfriend and I guess that caused me to stop being off as well.
There was this one night and we were all together until really late. Everything was white and foreboding outside, as much as we could see through the windows well into the night, and so we all camped in together. Colin and Ed and Phil all got in their own spaces to sleep and me and Thom stayed up a while past them until even we couldn’t keep our heads on straight anymore. I’d went over to the couch and Thom sat next to me, and I slouched over until we both must have just fallen asleep on each other or something of the sort; whatever happened I woke up 5 hours later on the floor with my arms wrapped around Thom as if I were a child and he was my beloved teddy bear. He still doesn’t know about this, as far as I’m aware, or at least we’ve never brought it up. But it was this night I started to figure out why I might’ve been so off about everything before, and I still hadn’t a clue what to do about it.
We had made some great musical breakthroughs that night, and we played them live some days later and then some time after that we were signed to a record label and something weird was happening. Our little band that was now called Radiohead was actually going somewhere and to be honest I don’t think any of us quite understood why. Thom was so happy though, we all were. That’s what mattered.
The whole ordeal brought us all together at first and I guess it still does to this day, but after a few years of things staying where they were with us, things got weird again.
Thom was always the one who was in the spotlight most whenever Radiohead did anything amazing, and it started to get to him again. All the fake lifestyle and the non-stop attention and the stupid questions will melt anyone down, but I think it really got the best of Thom’s neurotic personality. He would talk to the rest of us in the band but none of us could do anything and so times just got really dark. Thom would sing his soul out so much and the beauty of his voice became more painful with each show. He went so crazy he would go on these binges and it really worried all of us. We had to cancel a show once or twice, even, it got so bad.
I don’t know what happened but Thom just got so intoxicated I think with his drinking problem and all hell breaking loose in his head along with it that he just gave up. He threw a tantrum on stage and he was throwing things, and while I ran to cower next to Colin everyone just left. He couldn’t do it, and none of us could, and we let so many people down that night. People would scream profanities at us after, especially at Thom, and I could just tell it all kept getting worse for him and it just hurt all of us.