The Bends

the benz

It is one of the oldest songs they have. Thom Yorke wrote it before Pablo Honey was recorded, under the title “The Benz”, and it went straight into the live set; Radiohead were playing it in 1992 and 1993, long before anyone could buy it. Colin Greenwood called it “a perennial hardy annual of a live favourite, faithfully committed live to tape”.

A 4-track demo exists from the Pablo Honey sessions. Yorke played it to Paul Kolderie at the end of those sessions and then decided to keep it back for the next record. In March 1993 they cut another demo at Courtyard Studios with their live engineer Jim Warren, in the same session that produced “High and Dry”, and sent that to John Leckie.

rak, then the manor

Leckie recorded it at RAK in London between February and May 1994. That version never came out. He thought the guitars too loud and the whole thing “overblown”, with Yorke's vocal closer to a scream, and the band disagreed. They cut it again at the Manor in Oxfordshire in July, and the version on the record is the first take there, because Phil Selway wanted to get away from the studio to look at a house to rent.

Q later reported it took several takes. Either way the intro was still too bombastic, and the fix was a cassette Yorke had made on the first American tour, holding a tape recorder out of a hotel window.

There was this guy training these eight-year-old kids, who were parading up and down with all these different instruments… So I ran out and taped it.

thom yorke · vox, april 1995

That marching band is the tinkling before the guitars arrive. The opening chords are played in unison by all three guitarists, the song moves through five sections, louder and quieter in turn, and there is a multi-tracked recorder buried low in the mix. Ed O'Brien called Jonny Greenwood's playing on it “abusive”.

taking the mickey

The title is decompression sickness, what happens to a diver who surfaces too quickly. Since it arrived just as “Creep” was making the band famous, it was read as a complaint about that, and Yorke has spent thirty years saying the joke was missed. He called it a Bowie pastiche, meant the wish to be back in the Sixties as a gag, and was then asked in interview after interview whether he really wished it was the Sixties. In Rome in May 1995 he told Caitlin Moran the band had written the line as a joke, and had all found the song hilarious.

No, I don't wish it was the fucking sixties. Levis jeans wish it was the sixties. I certainly fucking don't.

thom yorke · melody maker, 10 june 1995

By 1996 he was aiming the line squarely at the journalists who could not stop writing about that decade, and at the bands feeding them. Underneath the joke the song is about something plainer. On stage he first introduced it as a song about “knowing who your real friends are and when they're going to come to your gigs”, and soon cut that down to “knowing who your friends are”.

released twice, sort of

The first version anyone could buy was live, “The Benz”, recorded for the French radio show Black Sessions on 23 February 1993 and tucked onto the French pressing of “Creep”. The studio version came out as track two of The Bends on 13 March 1995.

Parlophone eventually put it out as a single, but only in Ireland, on 26 July 1996, a limited run of 2,000 copies backed with live versions of “My Iron Lung” and “Bones” from the London Forum. It reached number 26 on the Irish chart and lasted one week there. Stanley Donwood and Yorke drew the inhaler on the sleeve, Yorke credited as The White Chocolate Farm.

The original 4-track demo surfaced in 1997 on Long Live Tibet, a Tibet House Trust charity record, slower and lo-fi, with louder guitars at the front, the recorder much more audible and the vocal flat.

for s club 7

The archive first has it in London on 13 September 1992, two and a half years before the album, the first of the album's songs they played live. In 1995 alone they played it 89 times, and no song opened more shows that year, with “My Iron Lung” a distant second; it has opened 81 in all, nearly all of them by the end of 1996. It stayed in the set on every tour up to In Rainbows, went quiet for six years and came back for A Moon Shaped Pool. After the 2018 tour it was not played again until Madrid on 5 November 2025.

In June 2001 the band had a whole edition of Later... With Jools Holland to themselves, recorded at BBC Television Centre, and when the hour of broadcast was up they kept going for another half-hour. The last song after the cameras stopped was “The Bends”, and Yorke dedicated it to S Club 7, “who like smokin' the weed”.

anthrax

Anthrax covered it as a B-side in 1998. “Radiohead are like the Pink Floyd of this era,” their drummer said, by way of explanation.