Thom Yorke Just Said the Quiet Part Out Loud. The Creative Industry Should Be Taking Notes.
Last week, Thom Yorke walked to a podium at Grosvenor House in London to accept the Fellowship of the Ivors Academy — the highest honor British music gives to its songwriters — and proceeded to do what he has always done. He said the uncomfortable thing, clearly, in front of the people most uncomfortable hearing it.
Watch Thom Yorke’s full acceptance speech and read the transcript here.
The industry, he told the room, was engaged in “weird, myopic self-destruction.”
Not a metaphor. A diagnosis.
I have been a creative professional for forty years. I have watched this industry talk about itself with great enthusiasm and very little clarity. And I have rarely heard anyone with a platform, a statue in hand, and nothing left to prove, use the moment the way Yorke used his. I am, unambiguously, a fan. But this is not a fan letter. It is a provocation, and Yorke handed me the opening line.
On Finding Your Voice Late — And Why That Might Be the Point
Somewhere in that speech, Yorke said something that became personal. That it takes time for artists to find their voice. He said it without apology and without the false modesty that tends to follow such admissions. He said it as fact.
I am, as of a couple of weeks ago, sixty-two years old. I have run creative departments, built brands, advised governments, and spent the last two and a half years building RockPaperScissors — a practice built on strategy, storytelling, and AI-enabled work. And I will tell you something that I could not have told you ten years ago, or twenty, or thirty: I think I am finally finding my sound.
Not the noise of accumulation. Not the LP of a man with a longer CV. The music of someone who has finally, genuinely, stopped doubting myself and started speaking.
The advertising and creative industries have a complicated relationship with experience. We valorize youth and novelty, and we quietly warehouse the people who have seen enough to actually know something. We talk about fresh perspectives as though a perspective without scar tissue is somehow more useful. It is not. A voice without history is just noise with good energy.
Radiohead did not find their voice at Pablo Honey. They found it somewhere between The Bends and OK Computer, and then — bravely, maddeningly — they blew it up again at Kid A. When they had the world’s attention, they turned left. They made something strange. They made something that the industry did not know how to hold. And in doing so, they made something that lasted.
That is not an accident. That is a philosophy.
Strange Is Not a Problem. Strange Is Where the Work Lives.
Here is the word I want to use about where the creative industry is right now: strange. And the word beneath that: weird. And the word beneath that: unsettling.
These are not algorithmic words. They are not dashboard words. They are human words — the kind we reach for when the situation exceeds our vocabulary, when something is happening that we cannot yet name.
Artificial intelligence is that thing.
I have watched this industry respond to AI the way it responds to most disruptions: with a short burst of panic, followed by a long period of confident misunderstanding. The panic said AI would replace creativity. The misunderstanding says AI is just a faster version of what we already do. Both are wrong. What AI actually does — if you approach it with even a modest amount of intellectual honesty — is expose the gap between what you have been doing and what you actually think.
That gap is uncomfortable. It is strange. It is weird. It is precisely the space in which your real voice lives.
Radiohead understood this intuitively. When every contemporaneous British band was consolidating their sound, Yorke and Greenwood were asking what music could do that it had not yet done. They were not afraid of the strange. They were afraid of the safe.
I am not suggesting that AI is the moral equivalent of a Telecaster processed through a Fender Deluxe on the OK Computer sessions. I am suggesting that the question both moments ask is identical: who are you when the familiar tools stop working?
That question belongs to everyone. But it lands differently depending on where you are in your career.
To the Young Ones: The Garage Is the Point
There is a version of this moment that is paralyzing if you let it be. Every tool is changing. Every platform is new. Every benchmark you were trained on is being quietly retired. If you are twenty-five and staring at a screen full of options, wondering which one to master first, I want to say something directly to you.
Lock yourself in.
Not metaphorically. Find your studio, your garage, your corner of a shared apartment at two in the morning. And start swapping things out. Different tools. Different platforms. Different combinations of things that were not designed to work together. Do what the musicians always did — change the amp, change the pedal, change the chain until something comes out of the speaker that you did not expect and cannot immediately explain.
That is not inefficiency. That is the work.
The creative industry will tell you to specialize early, to build a legible personal brand, to be discoverable. It will reward the polished and penalize the provisional. Ignore this. The polished work comes later. Right now, the most important thing you can make is a mistake that only you would have made, in a direction that only you would have gone, using a combination of tools that no one thought to put together until you did.
Step boldly into the uncomfortable places. Not because discomfort is romantic — it is not — but because the comfortable spaces are already fully occupied. The dark, singular spaces of genuine self-discovery have no queue. No one is waiting in line for the version of yourself that only emerges when you stop performing and start searching.
Thom Yorke did not know what Kid A was going to be. He knew what it was not going to be. Sometimes that is enough to start. The Bends was the album where Radiohead could hear their own voice without yet trusting it — the transitional record, the almost-there record, the one that sounds, in retrospect, like a band learning to stop apologizing for what they were becoming. That is not a lesser album. That is a necessary one. You are allowed to be making your Bends right now.
The Industry Yorke Was Talking To Is Also Us
Yorke’s speech was nominally directed at music executives. But creative directors, agency heads, brand leaders, and anyone who makes decisions about what gets made and who gets to make it should hear it as being addressed to them as well.
Worth noting: Yorke has been making this argument not just in speeches but in the work itself. In 2007, Radiohead released In Rainbows directly to the public, on a pay-what-you-want model, before a single label had touched it. It was not a protest. It was a proof of concept — a structural argument, made in public, about who gets to determine what creative work is worth. The industry largely treated it as a novelty. Yorke treated it as a position. Eighteen years later, standing at a podium at Grosvenor House, he was still having to make the same case. That should tell you something about how well the industry was listening the first time.
Yorke’s sharpest line was the observation that the industry had become “risk-averse and unable to help” fresh talent thrive. That it was more interested in the financial engineering of heritage catalogues than in the cultivation of anything new.
In advertising, we call this optimization. We have become extraordinarily good at it. We have built entire disciplines around measuring the performance of existing ideas and almost no infrastructure for generating genuinely new ones. We are very efficient at mining what we already know and very poor at tolerating the period — which Yorke correctly identifies as long — when someone is still finding their voice.
AI will not fix this. AI will accelerate it, in either direction.
If you use these tools to do faster versions of what you already do, you will get faster. You will also get more replaceable. If you use them to go somewhere you could not have gone before — to make the strange thing, the weird thing, the unsettling thing that only you, with your forty years or your four, would have thought to make — you will find something that no model was trained on. Because it did not exist yet.
To the Ones Who Have Already Played the Big Arenas
And then there are us.
The ones who have spent decades building something — a body of work, a sensibility, a way of seeing — and now find ourselves in a system that has quietly decided our back catalogue is a liability rather than an asset. The experienced creatives. The ones being screened out by HR generalists looking for tool names instead of architectural thinking. The ones whose institutional knowledge is being mistaken for institutional inertia.
I want to speak to you plainly.
Your work has mattered. Not in the abstract, motivational-poster sense — in the specific, traceable sense. The campaigns you made, the brands you built, the creative decisions you fought for in rooms that did not want to hear them — these things have been the soundtrack of other people’s most important moments. Their first purchase. Their defining memory. The ad that played during the thing they will never forget. You did that. It is already real. It cannot be unbuilt.
This is what Radiohead understands that the industry keeps forgetting. The music does not depreciate. OK Computer is not worth less now than it was in 1997. It is worth more, because it has had time to reveal how right it was. The people in the back catalogues are not the past. They are the proof of concept.
And then there is A Moon Shaped Pool — 2016, their most recent album, their quietest and arguably their most emotionally precise. Not the sound of a band running out of ideas. The sound of a band that had finally stopped needing to prove anything, and could therefore go somewhere entirely interior, entirely true. Late work is not diminished work. Sometimes it is the most concentrated version of everything the earlier work was reaching for. Your late work is still ahead of you. That is not a consolation. That is a fact.
The system that has discounted your experience is not wrong because it is cruel. It is wrong because it is innumerate. It has confused the date of creation with the value of the thing created. It has looked at your years in the industry and seen overhead, when what it should see is compounded interest.
You lit the way for the ones coming behind you. That is not a small thing. And it is not finished. The light does not stop being useful because the person who made it has been in the room for a long time.
Reclaim the space. Not with nostalgia — nostalgia is the enemy of the argument — but with the full, unhurried confidence of someone who has already been in the strange places and come back with something to show for it.
Keep Going
Thom Yorke spent decades being called difficult, inaccessible, pretentious. He made music that required effort to enter. He trusted that the effort was worth asking for. He was right.
You are allowed to be in the strange period. You are allowed to not yet know what your voice sounds like with these new tools in your hands. The strangeness is not a malfunction. It is the process.
I am not where I thought I would be at sixty-two. I am somewhere considerably more interesting. The industry I have worked in for forty years is, right now, genuinely strange. Weird. Unsettling.
I would not have it any other way.
Liner Notes
If this piece landed somewhere useful — the AI questions, the career questions, the music, the larger argument about what creative experience is actually worth — let’s talk. I am building something, and I am interested in who else is. A-sides, B-sides, deep cuts all welcome.
The work behind this piece spans three areas I have spent the last several years trying to name properly.
The first is AI and Creativity. The practical, hands-on work of someone who has spent thirty years inside storytelling, brand-building, and creative production — and is now making sense of what generative AI actually changes, and what it does not. Building films. Spinning brands. Asking, with genuine curiosity, what it means to make things that matter when the tools that make things have never been more powerful or more misunderstood. The future of creativity does not belong to those who can make more. It belongs to those who can mean more. Read more.
The second is The Epilogue Economy™. A framework — and increasingly a practice — built around the long, productive interval between who you were and what comes next. We are living in the epilogue of one story and the prologue of another. The people navigating that interval are not winding down. They are, in many cases, just beginning to do their most interesting work. I build frameworks, tell stories, and work with individuals and organizations trying to take that seriously.
The third is The Presence Economy. The growing premium placed on lived, embodied, shared human experience in an increasingly synthetic world. As the digital expands, the real becomes rarer, more valuable, and more necessary. Showing up — physically, intentionally, in rooms where things actually happen — is not a retreat from the future. It is a competitive position inside it.
Three shifts. Three different client conversations. One practitioner who sits at the intersection of all of them.
If any of it is relevant to where you are right now — the work, the reinvention, the music, the larger argument — say hello on LinkedIn. The A-sides are the ones everyone knows. The B-sides are usually where the real thing lives.