Thom YorkeThom Yorke was honoured with a Fellowship Prize at this year’s Ivor Novello Awards, held on Thursday (21 May) at the Grosvenor House in central London.
The Ivor Novello Awards are a prestigious annual awards ceremony that celebrates songwriters and screen composers, and by taking home this year’s Fellowship of the Ivors Academy, Yorke has won the awards’ highest honour.
Upon his acceptance of the prize, Yorke took the opportunity to address music industry executives, telling them to “pull your finger out” and invest in new artists, concluding his speech with a rallying cry: “Just remember: without us, you ain’t shit!”
Harry Styles presented the Radiohead frontman and acclaimed solo artist with the prize, Billboard reports.
The Adore You hitmaker told the audience that he lost his virginity to the intro of Radiohead’s legendary 1996 B-side, Talk Show Host, and left the crowd in stitches of laughter after informing them that he was born the year after Radiohead’s debut album, Pablo Honey, was released.
While there was some wit in Yorke’s acceptance speech, there was also plenty of serious material he had to share. Plus, he premiered a new song called Space Walk.
In his statement, Yorke claimed that the music business has become “risk-averse” and focuses on lining its pockets with catalogue deals of older artists, per Consequence of Sound.
Yorke continued, “I wonder why no one questions this insane flow of money upwards that leaves nothing but dust for new artists.”
You can watch a snippet of Yorke’s speech below and read the speech, transcribed by NME, in its entirety below.
Thom Yorke’s 2026 Fellowship of the Ivors Academy Acceptance Speech:
To me, every generation has the God-given right to rebel and thumb their nose at the business and prove everyone wrong.
To use music and song to tell the story of what it truly means to grow up in their mode, and go stylistically wherever the fuck they want, because they can. This is the pumping heart of music. This is how music stays relevant.
For this to happen, the industry itself has to have faith in these people. They’re fragile, usually kind of fucked up like me, and they need support. And the industry needs the wisdom to allow them to develop and be able to take risks with them and make mistakes with them. That is literally their job, in my opinion.
I’m very aware, and so are my band, [of] how lucky we were in our formative years, thanks to our managers Brian, Chris, Bryce and Jules. They fought really hard for us guys. And weirdly, our old record company, the old school EMI, cut us a lot of slack back in the old days. It all paid off.
We watched a lot of other artists not be so lucky, get chewed up and spat out. It takes time for artists to find their voice, to learn their craft and where it will take them. That is when the good shit occurs.
I worry that our business is becoming risk-averse and unable to help. It makes zero sense to me. The same is true in a lot of the creative industries: art, film, theatre – they’re all going through this weird, myopic self-destruction.
Instead, I picked up the FT [Financial Times] and read about the exciting share price of streaming services and the insane value placed on the catalogues of a few artists of the previous generation, and the financial frenzy around them.
That’s nice for them. But it is not, as they would like to call it, investment in the music sector. Quite the opposite.
I wonder if those people appreciate what went into the making of those records. Maybe you should read some biographies of the music you’re buying and hoarding, and some of the history about that subject.
I wonder why no one questions this insane flow of money upwards that leaves nothing but dust for new artists.
Those heads of our industry are not asking what happens for the future generation, when the musical well dries up – which it will, guys.
Instead, a lot of lip service is paid to new music with self-serving playlists, and to the idea of a vital music scene. But there is a refusal to offer even a semblance of a sustainable revenue source for the majority of musicians.
And they continue the nasty fucking opaque accounting tricks that major labels were doing in the ’90s.
So, I guess I’d like to provide a quick reminder to the top of the industry and streaming services: pull your finger out. Where are you gonna get your next juicy back catalogues from, eh?
This industry will die and arseholes with it, if all you do is devalue the next generation of artists and their fans. Just remember: without us, you ain’t shit!
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