The Truth About Thom Yorke's Eye

If one thing is for sure, it's that Radiohead fans have a lot of opinions about Radiohead. Maybe you fall into the "older is better" camp and regale everyone with a "'Pablo Honey' is their best album because it came out when I was a kid" tale. Maybe you're a proggy diehard and swear that 2011's "The Daily Mail" is their best deep cut. But all fans — young and old, serious and casual — will agree that Thom Yorke's eye is as iconic as the band.

But what's up with that eye, anyway? It might seem like a catty, superficial question to ask, but knowing about Yorke's eye actually provides some decent insight into his and Radiohead's art. Even back when he was belting those final notes of "Creep" back in the day, his eye served him well, adding verisimilitude to the song's subject matter, as though he really did consider himself so pitiable. The thing is, Yorke's eye really did help define his personhood and drive him to music.

Right from the get-go, The Irish Times tells us that Yorke suffered as a kid because of his eye. It was closed and paralyzed when he was born, and he had five operations on it within the first six years of life. He wore an eye patch at school, and you can bet other kids weren't kind about it. From then on, Yorke's eye played a critical role across each phase of his life.    

Numerous outlets have recounted the story of Thom Yorke's early days and battle with his own eye. "I was born with my left eye shut, and they had to take muscle from my ass and graft it to make a muscle that would open the eyelid," he told Esquire in 2014. As fate would have it, those operations were all failures and merely resulted in Yorke's paralyzed left eye being half-open rather than fully closed.

But even at a young age, Yorke responded to his eye by demonstrating some of the same creative aptitude he's demonstrated across his entire musical career. In the Esquire interview, Yorke said that his parents very matter-of-factly responded to his complaints about the surgeries by saying, "Look, you've got to do it." He asked for a red track suit as compensation, and his parents were glad to oblige. "I was happy to go back to the hospital even knowing that I was going to go under the general anaesthetic, wake up, and throw up everywhere," he said, saying that he wore it as long as possible until he totally outgrew it. 

Decades later, Yorke would approach the eye just as matter-of-factly as his parents once did. "I think we're all born with something wrong with us and that was mine," he said on BBC Radio 4's "Desert Island Discs." But to reach that conclusion, Yorke had to pass through a lot of other eye-related difficulties as a child and young adult.

In a lot of ways, the story of Thom Yorke and his eye relate an important, almost fairy tale-like lesson. Without the "something wrong" of his eye — as he put it — he wouldn't be who he is and possibly wouldn't have pursued his musical career in earnest. This is especially true because of one of the childhood crucibles that make or break many people: bullying. 

As Far Out Magazine explains, Yorke came from a wealthy family and attended the private, £40,000-per-year boarding school — Abingdon School, in Oxfordshire, England. But kids being kids no matter the background, he was mocked because of his eye and for having to wear an eyepatch. Dubbed "Salamander", Yorke withdrew and found refuge in the school's music room, the kind of facility that might not have existed at a less well-to-do school. He'd always loved music and got his first guitar at age 7. Taking inspiration from the Red Special guitar designed by Queen's Brian May, Yorke even built his own at age 10 — no matter that he later called the craftsmanship "terrible" on BBC Radio 4's "Desert Island Discs."

Abingdon music director Terence Gilmore-James remembered Yorke as "forlorn and a little isolated" because of his looks, as Far Out Magazine quotes. Gilmore-James also said Yorke wasn't "a great musician" — he was more of a "thinker and experimenter." Thankfully for Yorke and the world, the rest of his Radiohead bandmates also attended Abingdon. There, the group formed under the name On a Friday, the one day when they could meet and practice.

It took until Thom Yorke's pre-fame, young adulthood to come to terms with his eye, as he explained in a raw and low-fi interview with Rookie Magazine's "Ask a Grown Man" series in 2013. During the talk, Yorke faced the camera and demonstrated how he can only open his "wonky" eye with difficulty and some manual eyebrow manipulation. "When I was your age I was convinced that girls would think that [his eye] was really not nice at all," he told the interviewer. 

Yorke worked at a pub at one point, and it took a fateful comment from a drunk patron to change his perspective about his eye. "It's the nicest thing about you," the lady said. Yorke called this statement "the truth" and said that everyone has "imperfections" and "no one has a symmetrical face, no one's body is perfect." And if the reader just got a chill recalling the "I want a perfect body" lyrics from Creep, you're not alone.

As Far Out Magazine explains, Yorke took a year off after Abingdon to pursue music before getting into a car accident that drove him back to a more practical schooling path. He went to the University of Exeter to study English and fine arts, but three years later, in 1991, he reunited with his On a Friday bandmates and snagged a record deal, anyway. They changed their name to Radiohead and released "Pablo Honey" in 1993.