John Leckie on Andrew Talks To Awesome People

John Leckie tells Andrew Scheps how The Bends began. He was still mixing Ride, then the biggest band in Oxford, and had to ring Radiohead to say they would start two weeks late, which they hated. Parlophone wanted a follow-up to “Creep” and asked him to pick it from the demos before he had met the band; none of them was a single in that sense. At a rehearsal in Oxford, with both managers, the British A&R man and Capitol's, flown over with an assistant, the band played 35 or 36 songs, then played them all again because nobody could decide.

The brief was four A-sides and eight B-sides first, then an album if there was time, in nine weeks at RAK, with the label coming down to hear progress. The first single was “My Iron Lung”. After the band toured the Far East, Leckie redid tracks at the Manor on his own, and “Sulk” at Abbey Road. Nigel Godrich, his tape operator on Ride, set up the RAK sessions and recorded “Black Star” while Leckie was away mixing.

“High and Dry” was not his at all. Jim Warren, the band's front-of-house engineer, taped it at the managers' studio when they ran through an old song on Phil Selway's new white kit, still clean from the shop, which is why the drums ring. They only played it once, Leckie says, and that was it. The song was on the list of demos, and Thom Yorke kept saying it was too good for the album; he had a lot of songs like that, he said, which caused an explosion in the band.