Thom Yorke on KCRW

Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood play an acoustic set for Chris Douridas on KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic on the day The Bends comes out in America, and give a first airing to a song they were still working out at the soundcheck, with the working title “Subterranean Homesick Alien”. They play “Street Spirit” and “Bulletproof” as well, and Yorke says tonight's in-store at Tower Records on Sunset will be the whole band after all. The only other time they did one as a band was in Paris, where old people came in off the street to complain.

The Bends was hard to make, one of them says, because of “Creep”, playing an album that was essentially three years old and being written off as the band with that song. Landing back in Seattle, they had no idea whether anyone would remember who they were. At every show about ten of the MTV crowd left straight after “Creep”, and when the band had them stopped at the door, they said they did that to every band. What held them up was paranoia about what people would think, and the songs came through despite it. They had gone a year and a half on tour without one rehearsal, playing only for the shows. “We were a jukebox,” one of them says.

Jonny had followed his elder brother Colin around since he was in short trousers, begging to be let into the band. Told to learn keyboards, he did, and was then told they didn't like keyboards any more; he came to rehearsal with a guitar he had owned for a week and could already play it better than Yorke. Yorke started the band after a previous one whose drummer had a huge ego and threw sticks around. One rejected name was Music, with a Greek letter at the front. Radiohead was a pathetic attempt to get on the radio.

The album is dedicated to Bill Hicks. Yorke saw a Channel 4 documentary on the comedian a couple of days after he died, in the middle of making the record, and was struck that a man with so much energy and conviction could be so funny with it, though he admits he isn't sure whether Hicks was Canadian or American. They go out on “My Iron Lung”, which came from the problem of writing about being a rock star, “which has got to be the most boring subject in the world”.