In a bizarre series of events one of Bill Murray’s co-star’s in Groundhog Day is actually behind how 90s rock band Radiohead would come to get their name
Radiohead are one of the biggest bands to come out of the 90s. But their army of screaming fans with jet black died hair could have been calling out a different name if it wasn’t for an entirely different band – and one iconic Groundhog Day star.
The journey Thom Yorke took to choose the band’s name is a suitably bizarre tale involving some psychic arts, two classic 80s films, and one Talking Heads legend. Any diehard Radiohead fan will know the band formed under a very different name – On a Friday, named after the day of the week the group were able to use their school’s music room to practice in.
However after climbing up the ladder and landing their first big deal with music giants EMI, the label heavily encouraged the band to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new name. Inspired by new wave pioneer Talking Heads, Thom decided to take the name of their song Radio Head from their True Stories album.
Thom is said to have liked the futuristic sound and style. “[It] sums up all these things about receiving stuff,” he said. “It’s about the way you take information in, the way you respond to the environment you’re put in.”
But the song itself has a strange story behind it. David Byrne of Talking Heads based the song on the work of a writer and actor he worked with on 1986 film True Stories. And this actor is someone familiar to any fan of classic 80s comedies – Stephen Tobolowsky, best known for playing annoying insurance salesman Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day.
It gets even weirder – the actor claims to have a special gift. He says he can read and hear people’s “tones” just by being in a room with them, in an almost psychic-like way – a skill he said he often performed on his friends at college.
Prompted by his partner, Stephen spoke to the Talking Heads star about his mystic talents, recalling the chat on Chris Hardwick’s Nerdist podcast. He said: “So I sat and told David the story of me hearing tones.
“And he looked and said, ‘You’re kidding!’ And I said, ‘No, David, that’s really the story but I don’t do it anymore, I don’t like to do it anymore, it was too creepy, and I don’t like to do it anymore.’
“Sure enough, a year later, David has written into True Stories a character that hears tones, and he wrote the song. That day he came over and played Wild Wild Life. He says, ‘Here is a song that I wrote for you, Stephen.’ And we put it in the thing, and it was Radio Head.”