Thom Yorke (10 page)

Their decision to go back out on the road was vindicated by a May 1994 performance at the Astoria in London. Most of the fans would have been expecting a run-through of
Pablo Honey
but what they got was over half of
The Bends
. It’s odd now to think of Radiohead playing a show where ‘Street Spirit’ would get a less rapturous reception than ‘Pop Is Dead’, but in the DVD of the show, the audience simply look stunned at what they’re hearing. They wouldn’t hear most of the songs again for almost a year until
The Bends
finally came out.

“This is yet another new song,” Thom half-smirks before introducing an astonishing version of ‘My Iron Lung’. It was so good that when they listened to it afterwards they decided that they weren’t going to top it in the studio. Thom just re-recorded his vocal and they kept the rest for the EP and the album.

“They always seem to work their best when there’s a certain moment when they all get into the flow,” says Nigel. “It just seems to take them a long time to get there. Once they’d got ‘My Iron Lung’ down suddenly they were like, ‘Hey, maybe we can do this,’ and it all went quite quickly from there I think.”

What at the time seemed like an agonising combination of paranoia and creative paralysis would turn out to be merely Radiohead’s normal working method. This would only become clear when they tried to record subsequent albums.
The Bends
was the first time they’d had absolute freedom to do whatever they wanted. It turned out that was a lot harder than they’d thought. It was perhaps their hardest album to record because they had no idea what to expect. Revealingly, Thom once named a painter called Alan Davie as one of his heroes because, he said, Davie wasn’t afraid to admit that art could be a frustrating, gruelling experience.

“He always talks about how he finds creating a really painful experience,” he said to
NME
. “How he really despises himself when he’s creating and how it always takes him ages, how sometimes he
won’t think of anything good for six months and then it all comes pouring out; I really identify with all that.”

The second breakthrough on the album came when they went back into the studio to record ‘Fake Plastic Trees’. It was a day, Phil said later, when they just couldn’t get anything done. Characteristically Thom put it in more melodramatic terms. “I had a complete meltdown,” he said. John Leckie suggested they take a break to go and see Jeff Buckley at the Garage in Highbury, London.

Inspired by Buckley’s extraordinary vocals, Thom went back to the song afterwards and came out with the beautiful, keening falsetto that’s on the album. After months of indecision and paralysis, most of
The Bends
then came together in one or two takes. When they knew what they were trying to achieve, it suddenly seemed much easier. Opening track ‘Planet Telex’ was recorded with Thom, drunk, spitting out his vocal while crouched in a corner, barely able to stand. ‘Bones’ was captured in one go on the same day as ‘The Bends’. ‘Black Star’ was recorded while John Leckie was away with, according to Jonny, “a real ‘teacher’s away’ larkiness” to it. From being barely able to pick up their instruments, suddenly they were recording a song a day. “I went into The Manor and did the whole fucking album in two weeks – having realised what we were doing wrong,” Thom said later. “That easy, but sickening!”

In retrospect, the moment they knew they’d really done something special was when they recorded
The Bends
’ last track, ‘Street Spirit (Fade Out)’. It was initially another day of going round in circles and feeling that nothing was going to happen. Then suddenly the melody came pouring out. Those were the moments, Thom said later, that justified everything else. Those two or three minutes of complete happiness when the song came together made the long nights on the tour bus and the weeks of studio madness worthwhile.

At that point, they also went back to ‘High And Dry’. Thom said later that he had his “arm twisted” to put it on the album. Perhaps somebody at the record label thought that they needed something simple and straightforward as a counterpoint to songs like ‘My Iron Lung’. The band weren’t convinced but, for the only time on
The Bends
, they gave in, much to Thom’s consternation. He was perhaps put off the song later by the fact that it provided a blueprint for the many bands, such as early Muse and Coldplay, who were openly influenced by this period of Radiohead. But, after the magnificent
‘Fake Plastic Trees’, it has one of the best lyrics on the record, seemingly a thinly veiled band biography disguised as the story of a dare-devil motorcyclist.

“It’s about Evel Knievel, but not really,” Thom said in a TV interview when it was released as a single. “One of the first things I noticed when we started doing this was that people around us, other bands and ourselves, were changing into complete idiots, losing their friends and losing their connection with reality very fast. I saw us doing that.”

This doesn’t sound quite right. When he wrote ‘High And Dry’, Thom was still at university and Radiohead didn’t even exist. In an interview with
Billboard
, he admitted that, “the words were originally about some loony girl I was going out with, but after a while, they got mixed up with ideas about success and failure.”

But then many of the lyrics on the album seem eerily prescient. ‘The Bends’ sounds like it’s an autobiographical description of what happened when ‘Creep’ took off. It’s clearly an allegory about a band who rose too quickly and became ill from the pressure. Except that, too, was written long before they’d ever had any kind of success, long before ‘Creep’ made them stars in America.

“I had a four-track of it when we were doing
Pablo Honey
,” Thom said in a 1995 TV interview. “I don’t know why we didn’t do it really … I poured all this rubbish out into the song. Then it all started happening, which was a bit odd. I was completely taking the piss when I wrote it. Then the joke started wearing a bit thin.”

By the time
The Bends
was finished Thom felt like they were back on track. “Somewhere along the line,” he said in another interview, “the enjoyment went out of what we were doing and it all got a bit silly. But by the time we finished
The Bends
we thought, ‘Yeah, this is why we started this.”

Another exciting moment came when they added strings to ‘Fake Plastic Trees’. It was the first time they’d ever recorded with other musicians and they went for the unorthodox combination of Caroline Lavelle, the cellist who’d played the haunting strings on Massive Attack’s ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ and John Matthias, the young violinist Thom had met at Exeter.

“It was the first time on that album that they’d used other musicians,” John Matthias told this author. “And I think that helped make it real for them in some way. I got the impression that it
brought the process to life.” John has since gone on to make highly regarded music in his own right but at the time he was aware not everybody was delighted that Thom wanted to employ an old college friend.

“When they arrived I realised we had this violinist who was a student from Oxford, and probably the best cello player in the world,” said John Leckie in a
Melody Maker
interview. “So there was a slightly uneasy atmosphere to it.”

“I wasn’t a student,” says John, “but I wasn’t a regular professional and she [Caroline Lavelle] was brilliant. She was an amazing musician. Thom had to stick his neck out to get me on board, I think. I think he had to argue with EMI. He said, ‘No, I want John Matthias.’ Which was pretty brave at the time for someone in his position. I was a completely unknown quantity. He probably had to argue with Jonny as well I should think! I was really appreciative of that.”

On the morning of the session, John met Thom at an exhibition by photographer Annie Leibovitz. He was struck by how excited and upbeat the singer was at that point. There was no sign of the angst or confusion that had been the hallmark of earlier sessions.

“I don’t know what the atmosphere had been like before,” John says, “but I got the impression that the sessions hadn’t been easy and there was a lot of pressure on them to get the album right. But certainly they were very excited about it. There were some tracks that just ended up as B-sides that sounded great.”

However, just as with
Pablo Honey
, the pain wasn’t over yet. They still needed to get the record mixed. At first, the mixes they were hearing just didn’t quite sound right. The band and the record label weren’t at all sure what to do. Then somebody had the counterintuitive idea of calling
Pablo Honey
producers Paul and Sean to see if they’d do it. It was a controversial decision because, although they liked the two Americans, the process of mixing
Pablo Honey
had not been smooth either. Remember, towards the end of their relationship things had got a little tense. It was only in retrospect that they started to think they might have done a pretty good job, considering the material they had to work with.

“It was one of those things where they were kind of thinking,
What the fuck, who can do this?
” says Paul, “and somebody raised his hand, I don’t know who it was, and said, ‘Well, these guys mixed the
million-selling hit that we had. Let’s call ’em’. I think they were just taking a shot … they were just trying anything they could think of and it just happened to work pretty well.

The first song we mixed was ‘Bones’ and we went, ‘Yeah, this is like the Pixies’ and mixed it like that and sent it back to them and it was a home run. They started pitching them at us and we started hitting them back. The whole process took a while and several of them were done several times. ‘Just’ we must have mixed five times. The band … would say, ‘No, try again, this part should be louder, or whatever.’ So we’d send it to them again and pretty soon they were all in the ‘Done’ pile. It was over a long period of time and we were doing other things.” Some of John Leckie’s mixes were also used – for example, ‘Street Spirit’ and ‘Iron Lung’ – and so the record ultimately came to have a fine balance.

Regardless of their own part in the process, Sean admits that Leckie’s production skills and those of his (then unknown) engineer, Nigel Godrich, were one of the key factors in the success of
The Bends
.

“One of the reasons working on
The Bends
was such a thrill and a pleasure was that the tracks were immaculately organised,” he says. “I think to an extent Paul and I might have got a little too much credit for mixing it, because the tracks were just there. It was just 24-tracks. No fucking Pro-Tools and we cranked it through our board and said to ourselves, ‘Let’s make this sound like Van Halen!’ I’m being a little facetious when I say that, but I think they did want to showcase the guitar power that they had. When they started to work with Nigel they said, ‘We don’t want all that guitar stuff anymore.’ Which is great.
The Bends
is the penultimate Radiohead, guitar-band album. That’s how Paul and I entered the situation because we had this skill of recording loud rock ’n’ roll guitars.”

At one point during the mixing process, Ed flew out to America on holiday and while he was there he visited Sean and Paul’s Fort Apache studios. They were shocked when he told them how close they’d come to losing it while making the record. “They nearly packed it in making
The Bends
,” says Paul. “The way Ed described it to me was that, ‘We thought we’d made the worst record. We had a chance and we lost it.’” “There was that panic,” admitted Jonny later, “when we thought, ‘oh no, we’re rubbish after all, our music’s shite! It’s a disaster.”

“They went through that thing that’s so prevalent in the studio where the thing you didn’t pay any attention to turns out good,” says Paul. “The harder you try the worst it gets.
Because
they truly believed they’d lost it, they won. They truly believed it. They weren’t just like, ‘Maybe we’ve fucked it up?’ They were like, ‘We have screwed it up and lost. We’re over. Radiohead is finished.’ Right then the mixes started coming back from us in America and they were like, ‘Wait a minute – maybe it’s good!’ And everybody started pounding each other on the back going, ‘This is good!’ And everything changed. But they really got so far down. They really came close to breaking up. The fact that record came out as good as it did and did as well as it did is a miracle. It’s similar to the miracle of ‘Creep’ – how the hell did that come out when the rest of what they did was still forming? The real important story of the band is how they fought their way out of that trap.”

Although Sean was joking when he said they wanted it to sound like Van Halen, the album undoubtedly rocks. Paul thinks that
The Bends
is defined by the fact that many of the songs were written when their primary means of winning new fans was simply by playing live. They needed an album of songs that would work well in that context. They wanted to redefine stadium rock from something bloated and vacuous to something intimate and warm.

“I think it’s because they were in a cycle of touring and playing and they wanted to really kill people,” he says. “They wanted to hit them hard. A song like ‘The Bends’ – Thom would never write a song like that today. That kind of heraldic, anthemic guitar part. He wouldn’t have a need for that. But because they were out there playing [live] they needed ammunition. Some of those songs, I think, it was Thom saying, ‘Well, if I’ve got to drag my body round the world and try and grab people’s attention, I’ve got to have a body of songs that’s slamming.’”

When they got the mixes back for the first time, Thom was convinced he’d got exactly that. For the first time since they were kids, he and Jonny listened to the finished work over and over again. They’d hardly ever listened to
Pablo Honey
after recording it, but this one he knew was good. It was
really
good.

However, when the new material from the second album –
The Bends
– was released, it was met with an initially disappointing
reaction. First of all they released the
My Iron Lung
EP and, just as they had with ‘Creep’, radio programmers took one listen and said a definite ‘No’. They’d listen to the first two minutes, nod happily along to the gentle melody and then abruptly switch it off as it exploded into the warped, violent guitar assault of the last two minutes. “I wrote the verse,” Thom said in a TV interview, “and thought,
That’s great, that’s beautiful
, so we just had to screw it up by putting the other bit in.” He had intended it to make people forget ‘Creep’ but it didn’t quite work out that way.