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| liste | list | Q, March,1998 |
Their Time Is Now! UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH Thom Yorke's brother's band sound like Radiohead. Without the strange bits. It is the summer of 1994 and three friends from Oxford, Andy Yorke, 22, Nigel Powell and Jason Moulster, both 23 -decide to form what they will later look back on as "a songwriting team". The former sings, while the latter pair play drums, keyboards and guitar, and bass respectively. They decide to call themselves Unbelievable Truth, after the darkly downbeat Hal Hartley film of the same name, as they believe its themes best describes their music, and despite maintaining this non-band scenario (they never play live), the trio nevertheless enjoy instant good fortune. "We had all these top managers who made things happen very quickly," explains Yorke now, a quiet, nervous, bespectacled individual with a grown-out buzz cut. "We were offered a deal almost immediately. But I wasn't ready. I didn't quite feel confident enough about being in a band, about making it my job, my living." So the Russian language graduate left his friends high and dry, and decamped to Moscow, where he had previously spent his final student year. "I had no intention of returning," he admits. "Instead, I was ready to make a life out there." Ultimately, however, Yorke did return, now convinced that what they'd had together constitued something really rather special. Gradually, they became a bona fide band (played live, too), and signed to Virgin Records in the spring of last year. This month, the band embark on a British tour and release their new single Higher Than Reason. "As I'm not a particularly confident person," he says, "I needed that time away to give me a boost and help me prepare to deal with the whole music biz lifestyle which, by its very nature, is rather bizarre." Like his brother, Radiohead's Thom, Andy Yorke is a brooding individual. He shares his brother's sense of anxiety and negativity; the eternal square peg. The band's elegant debut album, Almost Here, also has a strangely familiar feel to it, with its sense of lyrical alienation, pre-millennial tension, and the equation that maudlin often equals magnificent. And, while he himself unsurprisingly worries over the connection ("It's inevitable, I suppose, that people will initially think we're trying to ride on their coat-tails - we're not."), his bandmates still look to their singer in much the same way Radiohead view theirs. "Jason and I are pretty one-dimensional in that music is all we do," shrugs Nigel, almost poignantly. "But Andy has a lot more to him -his interest in Russia, politics, academia. He brings all these dimensions to the band, which should ensure we'll never become Ocean Colour Scene." "Ultimately," continues the man who is completely bald save for a ponytail that sprouts from the back of his head, and with tramlines that run to his ears, "we've a strong desire to maintain a certain level of dignity." |
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