The boy in the black eye patch sat in a classroom in Oxfordshire, already different before he had said a word. His left eye was paralysed at birth, and by the age of six he had been through five operations. The last one failed badly. His eyelid barely lifted, and for about a year he wore the patch, a small kid in a private boys' school who felt so alien he regularly fought his classmates. This was Thom Yorke, later the singer of Radiohead, and the patch was not a costume. He was born on October 7, 1968.
The refusal that echoed later
When doctors suggested more surgery, Yorke said no. He liked that his eye did not look like other people's. That refusal to fix the part of him that made life harder would echo through everything he did later: a musician who, at the height of his band's success, would rather walk away from the sound that made him famous than keep repeating a version of himself that felt false.
The awkwardness had deep roots. His family moved constantly for his father's work, selling equipment for the chemical industry, until they settled in Oxfordshire when Yorke was ten. He got his first guitar at seven, and by ten he had built his own, inspired by Brian May's homemade Red Special. He joined his first band at eleven and wrote his first song, and at school he found shelter in the music and art rooms, writing music for a school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
From On a Friday to Creep
In his mid-teens Yorke and his schoolmates formed a band they called On a Friday, because Friday was the only day they could rehearse. Years later, after university, they signed to a major label and changed their name to Radiohead. Their first single, Creep, came out in 1992 and turned into a global hit. But Yorke grew sick of it fast. He said performing it felt like singing someone else's song, a cover version, and he started drinking heavily, often stepping on stage far too drunk to play the part of the anguished rock star the song demanded.
Radiohead's third album, OK Computer, made them one of the most important rock bands of the 1990s. Then Yorke broke. After the tour he had a nervous collapse and could not write new music. He moved to Cornwall, walked the cliffs, drew, and restricted his songwriting to the piano. The first song that came out of that period was Everything in Its Right Place, a title that sounded like a joke from a man who had spent years feeling that nothing about him was.
During that recovery he listened almost entirely to electronic music from the Warp label, artists like Aphex Twin and Autechre. The result was Kid A, released in 2000, an album built from synthesizers, drum machines, samplers, and a voice processed until it barely sounded human. Radiohead fans who wanted more guitars were baffled, but Yorke had already made his choice back in the school infirmary: better to be strange and honest than smooth and fake.
Critics caught up. Kid A was named album of the decade by both Rolling Stone and Pitchfork. The boy with the eye patch, the outsider who fought his classmates and hid in the art room, had turned his discomfort into the most influential left turn in modern rock. He did not fix what was wrong with him. He built a whole career on it.