My Iron Lung

the morning of reading

Thom Yorke started writing it on the morning Radiohead pulled out of the Reading Festival in August 1993, his voice gone. That summer a Harley Street specialist had felt his neck and told him it was like concrete. He finished most of the second half in a day on the American tour bus that winter, in the months when he had decided to leave the band. At college he had kept a picture of a child in a 1950s iron lung, only a head showing out of the machine. It fitted, because “Creep” was keeping the band alive and they could not get out of it.

He told Stuart Bailie of the NME that the song was him trying to kill the beast.

It's not just a full-stop on 'Creep', it's a full-stop on everything that was turning us into something we didn't want to be.

thom yorke · nme, 1 october 1994

The words say “we” where “Creep” said “I”. Yorke told Melody Maker he had started using it all the time because he was sick of projecting things onto himself.

a hospital social club and the astoria

It was first played on 21 February 1994 at the social club of the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading, with a different second verse and “The Trickster” also heard for the first time. A song named after a hospital machine had its first night at a hospital.

Then it went into RAK, where John Leckie was starting on the second album, and would not come right. Months of takes produced nothing the band liked better than the one Leckie heard them play at the London Astoria on 27 May. That version is the record, with the audience taken out and Yorke's vocal sung again; Record Collector said later that new guitars went on too, but Jonny Greenwood and Ed O'Brien, in the fan club's own booklet, said only the vocal changed. Leckie, as Mac Randall quotes him, was pleased with how much they got from a tape made in a lorry outside the venue.

having not done a very good version in the studio, we thought that it sounded much better from this concert

jonny greenwood · glamour guide for trash, quoted in rolling stone, 13 march 2020

The single was meant for May. It was not ready, and the band's summer newsletter blamed coffee, the cat and the bus before admitting they had not been able to decide what to put out. It was rescheduled for September.

six songs that missed the album

Yorke said in November that the six other new songs were too diverse to sit on the album, and were there for the fans who had been waiting since the last records. Leckie produced “The Trickster”, “Lewis (Mistreated)”, “Punchdrunk Lovesick Singalong” and “Lozenge of Love”, with Leckie, Chris Brown and Nigel Godrich engineering. “Lozenge of Love” was written by Yorke and Jonny together, and Bailie heard Nick Drake in it.

The other two came from elsewhere. “Permanent Daylight” is credited to Godrich and Radiohead as producers and mixed by Jim Warren, the band's live sound engineer. It is the first time Godrich's name stands on a Radiohead record as producer. “You Never Wash Up After Yourself” was, the sleeve says, recorded live in a fruit farm by Warren. Halfway through it Phil Selway can be heard putting down his sticks and walking out; he thought it was a rehearsal.

legs and a limo

It was the first Radiohead sleeve by Stanley Donwood, who had known Yorke at Exeter and had never heard “Creep”. In 2025 he told The Guardian how the call went.

Our record sleeves are shit, do you want to come and have a go?

thom yorke, as remembered by stanley donwood · the guardian, 7 august 2025

The plan was to film a real iron lung, and that hospital trip ended up on the cover of The Bends instead. The picture they used here is, as the NME described it, a television image four video generations down, “some legs and a limo”. On the front it is a dark band of shapes and scan lines under RADIOHEAD in white capitals and the title in lower case. The credits give the fine art to Donwood and The White Chocolate Farm, the name Yorke worked under, the layout to Green Ink, and the band photograph to Danny Clinch. The first CD is purple and blue, the second red. Inside, a panel of pale rounded shapes, like pills or plasters, sits over a television picture of East Asian characters and umbrella symbols. The back says to write to P.O. Box 322, Oxford.

two cds and a cassette

Parlophone released it on Monday 26 September as two CDs, a numbered 12-inch and a cassette. Each CD carries the title track and three new songs not on the other, so a fan needed both to have the six, and Music Week's Martin Aston noted that a seven-track EP was not the usual way to preview an album. Radio 1 had already judged it too raucous and kept it off the A-list. It entered the chart at 24 on 8 October, dropped to 53, and was gone. By the winter, the band's newsletter put the sales at 30,000.

The tour behind it opened in Glasgow the day after release and ended at Shepherd's Bush Empire on 8 October. In Bangkok that month a crowd of about 4,000 knew every word of it, and in Mexico it went into the chart at number 11.

The reviews were mixed. Smash Hits gave it four out of five and called it a song made for jumping off the bed; Music & Media found the Nirvana-style switch from soft to loud a trick the band had already played on “Creep”, and others heard “Heart-Shaped Box”. In Melody Maker Jennifer Nine called it a staggering return. Asked if it was pure In Utero, Jonny said he did not own the record, and nor did O'Brien.

america and the eight-track ep

Capitol put a shorter EP out in America in November and sent it to college and modern rock radio without pushing it as a single. Larry Flick in Billboard decided in December that the success of “Creep” had been no fluke.

That was only meant to be a fan-based item.

perry watts-russell, capitol · billboard, 25 february 1995

Mac Randall reports that it went to number one on the college charts and sold about 20,000 copies there, which in a country that bought few singles was a sign that an audience was waiting. Pitchfork's Scott Plagenhoef remembered it beating The Bends into American shops by some months, and hardly anyone noticing.

Alongside the singles came the full set, an eight-track EP pressed in Holland with all seven new songs and the acoustic “Creep” recorded live on KROQ in Los Angeles on 13 July 1993. EMI put it out from Greece, where it was a mini-album on vinyl, to Korea, Thailand and Argentina.

the one left off

Only the title track went onto The Bends, eighth in the running order. The EP came back in EMI's 2009 Collector's Edition of the album, made without the band, and that year Capitol pressed it again as a 180-gram 12-inch. When XL took over the catalogue it put the EP up for download on 13 May 2016 with seven of its eight tracks. The one left off was “Creep”.