Thom Yorke on MTV

Thom Yorke and Ed O'Brien talk to MTV in 1995 about The Bends. The title track was the first song they had for the record. O'Brien remembers Yorke in his little cottage with a four-track during the Pablo Honey sessions, saying he had this song, and Yorke admits he was completely taking the piss when he wrote it, before the joke wore thin. They had expected the first album to sell 10,000 or 20,000 copies.

The English press, Yorke says, build up a couple of dozen bands every year and then see a target on their backs, so none of it is personal; “My Iron Lung” was the only way to kill the beast of “Creep”. “Bulletproof” goes back to their first limo ride in Los Angeles, when the driver mentioned that people sometimes shoot through the window at junctions and take the car.

Jake Scott rang Yorke one night, when Yorke had been drinking, with two ideas, a doll and a supermarket, and they spent the next hour and a half faxing each other. Scott was the only director who understood that “Fake Plastic Trees” is an ambient song, even where it gets loud. No real supermarket was big enough, so one was built in an aircraft hangar, and they were wheeled up and down it in a trolley for two days. Yorke set out to write words that meant nothing, and did the opposite. John Leckie, who produced The Bends, is like a long-lost uncle, one of them says. The band came to the sessions in a fragile state, and Leckie took the mystery out of recording until the studio stopped feeling like a science lab.