Radiohead on MTV 120 Minutes

Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien talk to MTV's 120 Minutes about The Bends, then record station idents in several takes.

The title track was the first song they had for the album: Thom had it on a four-track in his cottage while they were making Pablo Honey. He wrote it taking the piss, and then the joke wore thin. They had expected the first album to sell 10,000 or 20,000 copies, and “Creep”, like Beck's “Loser”, became the one song people knew. The only way to kill the beast was to write another song about it, which is “My Iron Lung”. “Bulletproof” goes back to the first time they landed in Los Angeles, when the record company's limo driver explained that people sometimes shoot into cars at junctions and drive off in them.

Jake Scott pitched the “Fake Plastic Trees” video down the phone after Thom had been drinking: a doll, which Thom didn't understand, and a supermarket, which he did. Scott was the only director who heard the song as ambient, and the supermarket was built in an aircraft hangar. Thom meant the lyric to say nothing and found it full of the ways people define each other.

John Leckie, their long-lost uncle, took the mystery out of the studio, and the best fortnight was at the Manor outside Oxford in a hot summer, with a pool. For the strings on “Fake Plastic Trees”, one of them and Jonny Greenwood spent a whole day hunting for the most antagonistic notes they could put against a plain melody. The “High and Dry” video was shot at Vasquez Rocks, with a park ranger offering camera angles.