FEATURE:
(Nice Dream)
Radiohead’s The Bends at Thirty
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ALTHOUGH the anniversary…
IN THIS PHOTO: Radiohead in 1995/PHOTO CREDIT: Andy Willsher
is not until 13th March, I wanted to look ahead as it is one of my all-time favourite albums. I will ask whether we’ll get a thirtieth anniversary release of a classic. This particular classic reached number four in the U.K. upon its release. I am interested in the phenomenon of a band or artist releasing a promising but flawed debut album and then vastly surpassing expectations with the sophomore realise. One can see the leap from Nirvana between 1989’s Bleach and 1991’s Nevermind. People might have their own examples. I think one of the most extreme rates of progression between a debut and sophomore album came from Radiohead. Their 1993 debut, Pablo Honey, had a few good songs but was defined by its biggest hit: the sensational Creep. Few expected such a remarkable follow-up album. The Bends arrived in 1995. It is a masterpiece album from a band who made a gigantic creative leap. They would do it again on 1997’s OK Computer. Because The Bends turns thirty on 13th March, I wanted to think about a possible thirtieth anniversary reissue. Produced by John Leckie, with extra production by Radiohead, Nigel Godrich and Jim Warren, there was a switch from Pablo Honey. More complex songs and a broader palette, the mixture of ballads and more introspective songs together with heavier numbers did make an impact. The start of the album was fraught with pressure. Starting out at RAK Studios in February 1994, there was expectation from Parlophone that Radiohead would or should produce another single as massive as Creep. Following an international tour in May and June 1994, work recommenced at Abbey Road Studios. They also recorded at The Manor in Oxfordshire. With Nigel Godrich adding valuable production support, he would produce for Radiohead going forward.
I am going to get to some reviews for The Bends. Upon its release in 1995, it did divide critics. Not sounding like anything around it, maybe at the height of Britpop, critics were not ready for something genuinely different or unconcerned with trends and ‘fitting in’. Years later, retrospective reviews have been glowing. People realising how important The Bends is. In 2015, marking twenty years of The Bends, Billboard provided their thoughts:
“Had Radiohead vanished after its first album, 1993’s Pablo Honey, the quintet from Oxford, England, would be remembered as a decent grunge band with one novelty hit. That song, of course, is “Creep,” a crushing outsider’s anthem that might’ve played like a post-Nirvana alt-rock parody had singer Thom Yorke not actually been such a creepy weirdo who didn’t belong on pop radio.
With “Creep,” Yorke was up front about his non-rock-star qualities, but when he moaned, “I wish I was special,” well, he was just being modest. Beginning with its second album, The Bends — released 20 years ago today in the U.K. and three weeks later in America — Radiohead proved it wasn’t just a bunch of smarty-pants Brits aping the Pixies or the Seattle sound.
On these dozen songs, Yorke comes into his own as a troubled, enigmatic lyricist and howler of haunted melodies. The band — and especially guitarist Jonny Greenwood— also advances the plot, riding a psychedelic tailwind beyond the borders of Alternative Nation.
More than simply a successful skirting of the sophomore slump, The Bends is an early taste of the avant-garde flavor capsule Radiohead would serve up via android waiter two years later on OK Computer, the group’s real artistic leap forward.
If The Bends is less staggeringly different from Pablo Honey than some subsequent Radiohead albums would be from their immediate predecessors (see: OK Computer into 2000’s glitchy, guitar-lacking Kid A), the progression is unmistakable. The guitars don’t simply go from quiet to loud and back again; there are layers upon layers of jangle, shimmer, shudder, and crunch.
The sound is bold and confident, and it didn’t come easy. Reeling from the pressure of sudden fame, Radiohead faltered during its initial sessions at London’s RAK Studios in early 1994. It took a second go-round at Richard Branson’s Manor complex to wrap many of the tracks. Manning the boards both times was producer John Leckie, whose credits include the self-titled debut by the Stone Roses, a Radiohead favorite.
While drummer Phil Selway told Consumable in May 1995 that Leckie taught the band “how to use the studio in different ways and how to get the best out of our material,” Radiohead’s bosses at EMI weren’t totally sold. The label handed the master tapes to Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie, the producers behind Pablo Honey, and they set about giving the record a more American-style mix.
From a chart standpoint, they failed. The Bends peaked at No. 88 on the Billboard 200, and none of its singles managed to crack the Top 10 on even the Alternative Songs chart. But the album was a critical hit, and at the end of 1995 — after which time Radiohead had rocked arenas as tour support for R.E.M. — The Bends made many critics’ year-end best-of lists.
Two decades on, The Bends is seen as the jumping-off point for a group that’s been jumping around ever since. It’s experimental, but it also rocks, and if there were a Radiohead album everyone could agree on, this might be it”.
I am going to wrap things up soon. I want to highlight Pitchfork’s review of the Pablo Honey: Collector's Edition/OK Computer: Collector's Edition/The Bends: Collector's Edition in 2009. I am going to be interested to see how people approach The Bends ahead of its thirtieth anniversary. It is a magnificent album that has lost none of its power and impact:
“I distinctly remember then the first time someone suggested The Bends was a great record. Not being one of the million-plus Pablo Honey owners at the time, I was content to hear "Creep" on the radio over and over and expected I'd soon spend about as much about time with Radiohead's catalog as one would with, say, Hum or Ned's Atomic Dustbin or School of Fish. The My Iron Lung EP had beaten The Bends to U.S. record shelves by a few months, and the "High and Dry" / "Planet Telex" single was out a few weeks prior as well, but few noticed. Anyone who had explored those two earlier singles, however, would have been excited for the LP.
A reaction to the success of "Creep", "My Iron Lung" found Radiohead still exploring the loud/soft dynamic, but guitarist Jonny Greenwood was also locating his own identity and Yorke, inspired by Jeff Buckley, was using a wider vocal range, including some falsetto. Balancing a slightly artier sense of musical self-destruction with a sinewy guitar line, on "Lung" Radiohead found new ways to pick apart and re-construct the typical alt-rock template. Elsewhere on the EP, the five B-sides demonstrated a band whose collective heads seemed to crack open and spill out new ideas, moving the group away from the dour dead-end of grunge signifiers: With more loose-limbed and nimble guitar work ("The Trickster"), hints of art-rock ("Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong"), the valuing of texture over riffs ("Permanent Daygliht"), offers of emotional nourishment ("Lozenge of Love" and "You Never Wash Up After Yourself") and tension and apprehension about workaday life ("Lewis [Mistreated]"), and themes of misanthropy (um, most of the five songs), these tracks pointed the way toward what was to come.
The band's next release, the "High and Dry" / "Planet Telex" single, announced that they'd arrived. "Planet Telex", an early exploration with loops and studio enhancements for the group, is their first song that could have fit on any of their albums, regardless of how experimental they grew; "High and Dry", meanwhile, is the blueprint for the big-hearted balladry that spawned the careers of imitators Travis, Starsailor, Elbow, and Coldplay (who, let's face it, wound up perfecting this sort of huggable, swelling arena rock).
The Bends was essentially split between these poles: warmth and tension; riffs and texture; rock and post-rock. The tricks employed by "Planet Telex" were rarely bested on it-- only arguably by "Just"-- while the "High & Dry" version of the band was topped at every turn here, especially on "Street Spirit (Fade Out") and "Fake Plastic Trees". Even B-sides such "Bishop's Robes" and "Talk Show Host" come close to matching "High".
To many fans, this more approachable and loveable version of the band is its peak. I can't agree, but the record is still a marvel. It feels, with hindsight, like a welcome retreat from the incessant back-patting and 60s worship of prime-period Britpop and a blueprint for the more feminine, emotionally engaging music that would emerge in the UK a few years later-- led by OK Computer. Alongside late 1996 or 1997 releases by Verve, Spiritualized, Belle and Sebastian, Cornershop, Mogwai, Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, Primal Scream, Super Furry Animals, the Beta Band, Mansun, and even Britpop stars Blur, Radiohead's OK Computer led the push back against knuckle-dragging Oasis clones who segregated their Boomer rock leanings from the fertile explorations of dance, classic indie, hip-hop, and art-school sensibilities going on throughout the rest of the UK. But once again, the press chose what they knew over the new, and despite the plaudits for 2000's Kid A, by the time of 2001's Amnesiac, people wanted another The Bends”.
I am going to end with this feature from Consequence from 2020. Marking twenty-five years of The Bends, they offered their review and take. They celebrated a restless album with ambitions to create and explore. Radiohead stepping things up and showing why you could not write them off or define them after Pablo Honey. I think I first heard The Bends in the 1990s and it was a real revelation. Still my favourite Radiohead album:
“It’s easy to look back on Radiohead’s discography and see the scope of their achievements as inevitable. In retrospect, the band have had a near-perfect career: initially gaining widespread attention with the much-loved and much-maligned “Creep” and a hit-or-miss debut album largely indebted to grunge and ’80s American indie rock bands like R.E.M. and Pixies and then becoming critical darlings, challenging themselves to stretch their sound to encompass new musical ideas. Many see their output up to 2000’s Kid A as the musical-career equivalent of a mind-expansion meme. The Bends was the album that forced critics and listeners alike to take them seriously — in a sense, it was the beginning of Radiohead as we know them today. However, as inevitable as it may seem in retrospect, it was anything but at the time.
One of my favorite anecdotes about the creation of The Bends highlights the important fact that at this point in their careers, Radiohead were twentysomethings, one-hit wonders who didn’t know what they were doing. It’s actually the story behind the now-iconic album cover, the first one Stanley Donwood, who’s been involved in all things Radiohead ever since, did for the band.
Thom Yorke and Donwood met at the University of Exeter, both of them studying art and literature. Donwood first collaborated with Radiohead on the cover for the 1994 single “My Iron Lung”, which would later appear on The Bends. Inspired by that single, Yorke and Donwood, two kids with an old-school video camera, went to a hospital to get footage of an iron lung, which, according to Donwood, turned out to be “not very interesting to look at.” They found a more interesting subject in the form of a CPR mannequin. After recording the footage, they played it on a television and photographed the screen, creating the grainy, shimmering variations in color you see on the cover.
I like this story because it shows a side of Radiohead that undercuts the mystique generated over the years by the band’s critical adulation, far-reaching influence, and exploration of increasingly insular, experimental sounds on later releases. The Bends shows us a group of young artists who are very much still figuring it out, jaded early on by unexpected fame, throwing ideas against the wall to see what works. We see this process of creation-as-discovery in the story behind the album artwork as well as in the record itself.
This need to experiment stemmed just as much from youth and inexperience as it did from desperation. The success of “Creep” took a toll on the band. Before they had a chance to discover who they were for themselves, countless listeners had already put them in a box: they were derivative, they were a one-hit wonder, defined by a single song at the start of their career. After a cancelled set, Thom Yorke told NME, “Physically, I’m completely fucked, and mentally I’ve had enough,” and the band’s record label hit them with an ultimatum. Though many have come to admire Radiohead for their consistency, in the lead-up to The Bends, it was becoming increasingly unclear whether the band had a future at all.
When opening track “Planet Telex” was released as a split single with “High and Dry”, it pointed toward the future, but no one, perhaps not even Radiohead, knew it yet. The loops, the keyboards, the studio flourishes, the shimmering tone, and the abstract lyrics — all, in retrospect, point to the band’s future. It’s difficult to listen to “Planet Telex”, and much of The Bends in general, without thinking of where the band would go from there, without hearing the feedback of OK Computer and the synthetic frigidness of Kid A. That opening single sounds nothing like Pablo Honey. It’s easy to see the band Radiohead were becoming in it, but the creative process was certainly not as clear as it seems now. There was a haphazardness to the way this song came together. Story goes, the band laid that record down in one night, after a night of drinking. Thom Yorke was lying on the floor as he recorded the vocals (in one take). And they were going to call the song “Planet Xerox” before they realized it was trademarked. They were still young, unaccustomed to fame, but they had something to prove, and they were spitballing, following their impulses and inspirations to truly exciting results.
One thing they were sure of was that they didn’t want to create a second Pablo Honey. Although The Bends still bears the influence of grunge and ’80s indie rock, musically it was a massive leap. The guitar playing became more complex and mercurial, oscillating between placid strums and frenetic freak-outs. We see this duality in a song like “Nice Dream” starting with chords and lyrics by Yorke before being expanded and complicated by Johnny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien. You can hear this tendency to fuck up (in a good way) a would-be straightforward song across the record, particularly in tracks like “My Iron Lung”, which purposefully flouts the constraints of a song like “Creep”.
Greenwood’s influence (particularly his string arrangements, which are incidentally all over the band’s most recent album, A Moon Shaped Pool) became more pronounced. And The Bends saw the entrance of Nigel Godrich, the band’s longtime producer and de facto sixth member, who did engineering for the record and produced “Black Star”, which could have been a more straightforward song if it weren’t imbued with such menace and restless energy. This restless energy permeates the record.
On The Bends, Radiohead were not content — to be another Britpop band, to be a one-hit wonder, to be what they were last year, last month, last minute. That restlessness has ironically been a major factor in the band’s consistency over the years — an unwillingness to settle, to continue making the music they’ve always made. Their constant reinvention has given the illusion of consistency and inevitability, but it was the band’s frantic desire for discovery, for trying new things, that have made them the band they are today. As Thom Yorke said shortly after the release of Kid A, “The best things are often those that go somewhere you weren’t expecting”.
Ahead of 13th March and the thirtieth anniversary of Radiohead’s The Bends, I am wondering if there will be a reissue. Extras, possible demos and outtakes. It would be fascinating to think there is something coming. If not, there will definitely be new reviews and insights from critics and fans alike. One of my favourite albums, it is a pleasure to revisit it for this feature. If you have not heard The Bends for a while then listen to it now. 1993’s debut album, Pablo Honey, had the odd promising moment but was underwhelming. The Bends changed everything. It was certainly a…
GIGANTIC leap forward.