Thom Yorke

Thom Yorke is an English musician, singer, and songwriter whose three-decade music career — primarily as the lead singer and principal songwriter of English rock band Radiohead — has produced one of the foundational bodies of work in late-20th and early-21st-century international rock and electronic music. He was born Thomas Edward Yorke on October 7, 1968, in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, England. His father Graham Yorke was a chemical-engineering equipment salesman and his mother Barbara Yorke was a homemaker. He was born with a paralyzed left eye that required five corrective surgeries across his childhood — shaping his subsequent autobiographical songwriting.

His 1985 founding of the early Radiohead band (initially called On a Friday) at Abingdon School in Oxfordshire — with future Radiohead bandmates Jonny Greenwood, Colin Greenwood, Ed O'Brien, and Phil Selway — and his subsequent 1991 EMI Records signing under the renamed Radiohead, launched his career.

The 1992 first Radiohead single "Creep" — which became an international Billboard Hot 100 chart hit in 1993 (despite Yorke's substantial subsequent ambivalence about the song) — launched the band's commercial breakthrough. The 1995 second album The Bends and the 1997 third album OK Computer — which produced the singles "Paranoid Android," "Karma Police," and "No Surprises" — produced his late-1990s English rock-music public profile. OK Computer won the 1998 Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album.

The 2000 fourth album Kid A — which departed from the band's previous guitar-rock orientation toward an electronic-and-experimental aesthetic — won the 2001 Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album. The 2007 seventh album In Rainbows — which the band released October 10, 2007 via the band's own website on a pay-what-you-want pricing model (a foundational document of late-2000s digital-music distribution) — produced one of the most-influential Internet-era album releases. His parallel solo career has produced multiple solo albums (The Eraser 2006, Anima 2019), his 2009 founding of the supergroup Atoms for Peace with Flea, and multiple film soundtracks (particularly Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria 2018). He has been with Italian actress Dajana Roncione since 2016.

His name Thom began as his personally-modified spelling of Tom (the English short form of Thomas, from the Aramaic T'oma meaning "twin"). Thom has been a rare but enduring American boys' name across the late 20th century.