Radiohead

Another upload of the 1995 MTV conversation with Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien about The Bends.

The title track came first and came early. Yorke had a complete version on a four-track in his cottage during the Pablo Honey sessions, and neither of them can explain why it went unused then. He wrote it taking the piss out of the situation, he says, and the joke thinned once everything it describes started happening.

The director for the “Just” video was the only one of the several they spoke to who understood the song, and the most enthusiastic about it.

Yorke calls John Leckie a long lost uncle. They went into the record fragile, and Leckie gave them a room they could work in, not instructions. Asked what he thought, he would tell them they were the band and it was their decision, and that he would say when they were going wrong. Yorke is grateful above all that the studio stopped feeling like a science lab.