Shout out to Fluffy, The Goat & mini-binky for a few days chilling in Cannes.

August 2003 issue of ‘Mojo’ Magazine was a great airport read. Opinion of Thom Yorke has totally changed and rate him a helluva lot more now than I did personally

Check this extract.

“You need to switch off once in a while though,” says Thom. “I read this autobiography of Miles Davis and in it he’s taking these huge breaks where he won’t go anywhere near his work. All right, he can’t help thinking about it all the time, but he’s not actively doing it all the time - which is what I used to do.

And after OK Computer came out, I had drawers full of notes just about everywhere. Just frantically writing all the time. And although 99 percent of it was fucking nonsense, everything just seemed to have this profound significance.”

In Spike Milligan & Dr. Anthony Clare’s 1994 book ‘Depression And How To Survive It’, the comic legend and the psychiatrist attempt to ascertain the link between depression and creativity. Clare cites a study of prominent British writers and artists undertaken by American psychologist J.P.Guilford, in which “an attempt was made to establish whether there is any association…between certain aspects of manic depression - most notably the heightened mood, word fluency, thought acceleration - and creative output. Almost all of the 47 subjects reported have experienced intense, creative episodes, the duration of such episodes varying from 24 hours to over a month. These episodes were characterized by increase of energy, enthusiasm, fluency of thought and a asense of well-being.”

The more commonly known term for such periods of frenetic activity is hypomania. When a person is in a hypomanic state, they may not appear outwardly depressed. Indeed the world may appear to make sense to them than it has done for a long time.

Guilford pinpoints the role of hypomania in the creative process by alighting on two terms: “spontaneous flexibility (the ability to produce a rich variety of ideas and to switch from one are of interest to another) and adaptive flexibility (the ability to come up with unusual ideas or solutions).”

Anthony Clare adds, “There is more than a suggestion that they can be heightened or facilitated by the quickening of cognitive processes and the surges of mental energy that are a feature of hypomania.” At its most extreme, hypomania can precipitate a depression that can - although in Thom’s case, did not - result in paranoid schizophrenia. He expresses momentary surprise when the term is mentioned. “Hypomania. Yes, that’s exactly what it was. And then I went through a period of deep depression.”

It was another two years before the discovery of Clare & Milligan’s book would reveal to Thom not only that his activity had a name - but that actually it was common among people who created for a living.

“[Thom Yorke on Spike Milligan’s book]….Also, it taught me a lot about the nature of what you creat. When I’m writing, I think that everything I do is shit. And that’s all tied up in the fact that it’s not mine. I’m tearing it to bits because I’ve yet to work out where it came from. It’s like an Ouija board, but these days I have a positive outlook to the hand-pushing. Which, in a way, was what Michael [Stipe] had been telling me all along. You sort of have to learn to stop for a bit. You can’t just be receiving this stuff 24 hours a day.”

In-depth pieces too on The Cure and how the record industry wrecked the career of Bill Withers, the soul music legend who recorded many classics such as “Lovely Day” and “Lean On Me”:

[Bill Withers]: “Do you know what A&R stands for? Antagonistic and Redundant. Here’s the way it works: when I did songs that you’ve heard for the last 25 years like Lovely Day and such, I was being urged to do a cover of In The Ghetto,” Withers laughs. “I’m better received now than I was then, because somebody whose job was Antagonistic and Redundant was not happy with what I was doing. They’d ask, “How long is the intro? How long is the song? Are you gonna put any horns on it? Have you ever thought about doing a duet?”

“I used to get criticized for making simple records - the term was ‘underproduced’. I mean, some guy who grew up in a culture absolutely so different from what I grew up in would assume that my motivations and my intellect was identical to - pick a name, say James Brown. If you didn’t try all the dumb shit they wanted you to try, you were labeled ‘difficult’. So my way of dealing was to leave them alone, and those few simple songs that I did fortunately found their own way. I’m amazed and dumfounded that those songs survived.”

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