Radiohead

Another copy of the 1995 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 cannot explain why it went unused. He wrote it, he says, taking the piss out of the situation they were in, and the joke wore thin once everything in it started happening.

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

Yorke calls John Leckie a long lost uncle. They arrived at the record fragile, to put it mildly, 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 theirs to decide, and that he would say when they were going wrong.

Yorke is eternally grateful that the studio stopped being a science lab, on the principle that something only becomes his own once he has learned to use and abuse it.