Thom Yorke on CISM

Thom Yorke and Colin Greenwood spend half an hour on CISM, a Montreal student station, just after The Bends comes out, and Thom sings “Fake Plastic Trees” and “(Nice Dream)” on an acoustic guitar between records. Jonny Greenwood is in bed after being sick all day. His brother calls him a terrible show-off on stage, playing string parts with the head of his guitar.

“Planet Telex” came out of a night when they were bogged down and fed up. Back from a meal, Thom told John Leckie, who produced The Bends, they would write a new song there and then, and Colin had never seen Leckie move faster, shuffling round in his moccasins with heavy microphones. “I did the vocal at half four in the morning,” Thom says, by which time Ed O'Brien had gone into a coma. Part of the record was made at Abbey Road, where their first day went on spotting the cupboard the Beatles smoked dope in, until the novelty wore off. The noise at the start of “The Bends” comes from a hotel in Phoenix, where Thom woke to a man with a big microphone drilling small children in a march.

A magazine has called The Bends the first great British rock album of the year; one of them points out the year is two months old. “Creep” is still a favourite, though people who stop them in the street to praise it are told “we have others”. Being filed with “My Generation” in rock's lexicon of angst would put them on the walls of Hard Rock Cafes, and “that's not where I want to be”. Thom says “My Iron Lung” is about “Creep” and more, a machine that keeps you alive while you can do almost nothing else.

Weeks after a gig at the Holly Bush in Oxford in the summer of 1991, the answerphone in the house they shared filled with record companies offering to be their new best friend, and a mum asking whether the smalls, meaning underwear, had been washed. Asked about his name for slagging off other bands, Thom says he regrets what he said about Kurt Cobain and wishes he had apologised.