“I met Brian May and said, You're the reason I used to spend months and months on end in my garage trying to build a f***ing guitar.” How Queen inspired Radiohead's Thom Yorke to follow his dreams

Thom Yorke and Queen.

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke was just seven years old when he decided that he wanted to become a rock star. One song above all others fuelled his dream: Queen's 1975 masterpiece Bohemian Rhapsody.

“I was obsessed with Queen when Bohemian Rhapsody came out,” Yorke revealed during his appearance on BBC Radio 4's long-running Desert Island Discs programme in 2019. “I lay down in front of these big speakers in my friend’s house and we just listened to Bohemian Rhapsody and at that point I decided, Yep this is what I’m doing.”

In an interview conducted for the 2023 book The Singers Talk, Yorke admitted that, initially, he imagined that he might become a guitarist in a band rather than a vocalist.

“I didn’t see myself as the sort of character that could put myself in front of a microphone," he confessed. "I was really into Queen, but I never saw myself as Freddie Mercury. I was always Brian May in my head, surprisingly.”