Oh, OK. Why are there so many references to cars? Well, I’ll tell you why. It’s because when I was younger, my parents moved to this house, which was a long long way from Oxford, and I was just at the age where I wanted to go out the whole time. I used to have this one car, and I very nearly killed myself in it one morning, and gave my girlfriend at the time really bad whiplash in an accident. I was 17. Hadn’t slept the night before. Anyway, eventually, my dad bought me another car, a Morris Minor, you know, and when you drove around corners in it, the driver door used to fly open. Um, and I’d only do 50 miles an hour, and on the road that went from my house to Oxford, there was fucking maniacs all the time, people who would drive 100 miles an hour to work, and I was in the Morris Minor, and it was like standing in the middle of the road with no protection at all. So I just gradually became emotionally tied up in this whole thing.

STUPID CAR
‘Drill’ EP
Cars have long been a staple of rock’n’roll lyrics, a tradition Thom has keenly continued. Few, though, have brought quite the same paranoia and disgust to the subject. Armchair psychologists don’t have to look far to find the root of this obsession: in 1987 he was in a car accident in which his then-girlfriend suffered whiplash. This short, unadorned ballad was the only EP track not to make the debut album. Worth noting, is the Yorke-patented balladic bellow (after two minutes) – clearly considered a worthwhile feature.