Thom Yorke Looked Into Copying Bowie's Rail Tour for Sustainability — Called It 'Completely Impossible'

Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke has revealed he seriously looked into replicating David Bowie's train-based touring method as a way to cut the environmental cost of touring — and concluded it's "completely impossible" today. The comments came in a recent interview reported by Far Out Magazine, in which Yorke, long vegetarian and increasingly vegan, was asked whether he'd reached any conclusions about building a less environmentally destructive touring industry.

What Yorke said

Yorke said he'd been reading about Bowie's 1976 Station to Station tour just as Radiohead began discussing their own touring plans. According to Yorke, Bowie moved from stop to stop without flying at all, at one point riding the Trans-Siberian Railway, and used the same train-based approach while touring inside the United States. Yorke added he wasn't fully certain how accurate his account was — and Far Out Magazine confirms the broad shape of the story is true, but notes Yorke merged two separate periods of Bowie's career into a single narrative.

What actually happened with Bowie

Bowie's Trans-Siberian Railway journey took place in 1973, as he returned to Europe after his Far East tour — sailing from Yokohama to Nakhodka, continuing to Vladivostok, then boarding a train to Moscow and onward west. The seven-day rail trip left a strong impression on him; he wrote that he couldn't imagine such vast, unspoiled country, describing the strangeness of crossing land untouched by human invention while sitting inside one of humanity's own technologies, the train. But the trip's real motivation wasn't environmental — it was Bowie's fear of flying.

That aversion to air travel later shaped his actual 1976 tour, officially titled Isolar – 1976 Tour but generally known by the album's name, Station to Station. Bowie did travel by train between shows and cities on that tour. Far Out Magazine points out that the U.S. still had substantial public transit infrastructure at the time, which made train travel between tour stops workable; Bowie kept up the same habit once the tour moved to Europe.