Tom Yorke(1920 — 2004)

Thom Yorke was born in 1968 with his left eye paralysed and shut. He underwent several operations from early childhood, including one that failed, which explains his characteristic drooping eyelid. As a child, he was often teased at school because of this eye, and he later said that music had become his refuge.

Radiohead formed in 1985 at Abingdon School, a boys' grammar school near Oxford. Since the members could only rehearse on Fridays, they first called themselves “On a Friday”. They would not take the name Radiohead, borrowed from a song by the American band Talking Heads, until the early 1990s.

In 1992, the song “Creep” became an unexpected worldwide hit, so much so that the band ended up hating it for being everywhere. For years, Radiohead sometimes refused to play it in concert, not wanting to be reduced to that one single.

In 2007, Radiohead shook up the music industry by releasing its album “In Rainbows” as a pay-what-you-want download: everyone paid whatever they wished, or even nothing at all. This bold commercial experiment, at the dawn of streaming, felt like a small revolution.

Thom Yorke has long been a committed environmental activist. He has supported the organisation Friends of the Earth and has often raised the issues of climate change and overconsumption in his lyrics and public statements.