Yorke still wishes High And Dry had never been written

A conversation with Harry Styles turns on songwriting, The Bends and the listening habits of a frontman who would rather hear old folk, film scores and electronics than another singer with a guitar.

Thom Yorke has said he wishes he had not written Radiohead's High And Dry. The track, from the 1995 album The Bends, peaked at number 17 in the UK. Yorke made the remark in a conversation with Harry Styles for Rolling Stone, after Styles recalled hearing him talk about songwriting on a podcast.

Yorke's reply was blunt. The song, he said, is "a guy with an acoustic guitar. Singing his song. That particular one I wish I hadn't". He added that he does not listen to a lot of singer-songwriters, and that he prefers mad old folk music, film music or electronic music. The judgement falls less on The Bends as a whole than on a particular shape of song — the solitary writer with a guitar — that he wants no part of as a listener. For an audience that has lived with High And Dry as a familiar track from that record, the dismissal is sharp precisely because it is so specific: not the band, not the album, but that one figure at the microphone.

One single from a 1995 album

High And Dry was released as a single from The Bends and became one of the more widely known tracks from that record, reaching number 17 on the UK chart. Thirty-one years on, its writer is prepared to disown the impulse behind it. That distance is of a piece with the listening he describes: old folk, scores written for film, and electronic music sit at the centre; the conventional singer-songwriter record does not. The comment reads as a craftsman's note rather than a press-cycle provocation — a sorting of what still feels true to write and what does not.

The same conversation also took in Yorke's feelings about OK Computer at the time of its release. No full fresh verdict on that album is set out in the exchange, and none is required for the force of the High And Dry remark to land. He is drawing a line under one way of writing and performing, and he has named the song that, for him, still embodies it.

Styles across the table

Harry Styles, who began in One Direction after the band formed on The X Factor in 2010 and continued until their indefinite hiatus in 2016, has since issued a run of solo albums: Harry Styles in 2017, Fine Line in 2019, Harry's House in 2022, and Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally. in 2026. Putting him opposite Yorke on the subject of songwriting sets a writer of large-scale pop next to a musician long associated with refusing the simplest version of that role. Styles's question, filtered through a podcast memory, opens onto Yorke's refusal rather than onto nostalgia for The Bends.

Nothing in the exchange announces a change of set lists, a reissue campaign, or any further stripping of older material from view. What it does record is a clear preference and a rare, specific regret. High And Dry remains filed as a UK hit from 1995. Its author would rather it had never been written, and he is prepared to say so without softening the point.