Radiohead on Soundclash

The band go through the videos from The Bends one by one, starting with “High and Dry”. For the first video, shot in Oxford, the band invited friends and local people who liked the music to come and watch them play one evening, then filmed the audience watching. Thom Yorke notes that he weighed about twice then what he does now, which the interviewer handles gracefully.

The American version involved blowing up a car, which MTV disliked on the grounds that it might encourage children to blow up cars. The plot, as they reconstruct it between them, concerns a robbery, a diner and payment made in the form of a bomb, and none of them ever followed it. They asked not to be in it, agreed to turn up, eat and leave, and call themselves spectators in their own film.

The “Fake Plastic Trees” video, directed by Jake Scott, they remember as being all about colour and light, with the shopping trolley more or less incidental, and they point out, for the record, that they got there before a certain other British band did.