Anyone Can Play Guitar (3:37)

“Anyone Can Play Guitar” was a single taken from Radiohead’s first album Pablo Honey, released just in advance of the album. It was the band’s second single, and their first to receive a wide hearing (“Creep” had been issued in limited quantities some months earlier, and had failed to chart, but would soon become a hit and ultimately be re-released later in 1993). “Anyone Can Play Guitar” made relatively little impression on the charts, but it remained a staple of the band’s live sets throughout the early-mid nineties.

Thom Yorke has said that the song is about the mysticism that guitarists seek to perpetuate around their instrument, rather than it being about practice, a talent that anyone can gain with some application.

He has also said that he has a pathological disrespect for Jim Morrison. He has said that he feels it affects people in rock, “in that they believe that they think they have to act like fuckng prats in order to live up to the legend”

He has also been quoted as saying:

“Jim Morrison’s a fat talentless bastard - and he’s dead.”