Ed O'Brien on MTV

Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien talk to MTV's 120 Minutes in 1995, with “Fake Plastic Trees” the new video. The Bends is named after the first song they had for it. O'Brien remembers Yorke with a four-track of that song in his cottage while they were making Pablo Honey, and Yorke says he was completely taking the piss when he wrote it, before everything in it started happening to them. They had expected to sell 10,000 or 20,000 copies of the first album and tour Britain in a van. “Bulletproof” came out of their first landing in Los Angeles, when the limo driver sent by the record company mentioned that people sometimes get shot at junctions and dragged out of their cars.

The “Fake Plastic Trees” video came from Jake Scott ringing one night when Yorke had been drinking. Scott had two ideas, a doll Yorke did not understand and a supermarket, and they built the supermarket in an aircraft hangar because no real one was big enough. He was the only director who understood the song was ambient even when it gets loud. Yorke had tried to write a song that meant nothing, and by doing so did the opposite.

To them John Leckie, who produced The Bends, is “our long lost uncle”, who stopped the studio feeling like a science lab. For the strings, a violinist friend of Yorke's from college and a cellist came in, and Yorke and Jonny Greenwood spent a day hunting for the most antagonistic notes, Jonny writing them out as “the proper musician in the band”. The “High and Dry” video was shot at Vasquez Rocks, where they filmed The Flintstones, and the park ranger kept giving the director tips.