John Leckie on The British Library

Classic Album Sundays marked 30 years of The Bends to the day with John Leckie in conversation at the British Library, and ended with the record played in full on a serious hi-fi.

The host sets the scene with the pressure on a young band after a first album had produced an unexpectedly enormous single, a second record named for the illness divers get from surfacing too fast, and its arrival in the middle of Britpop without fitting into it.

Leckie remembers an evening at a Greek restaurant on Regent's Park Road, a few glasses of wine and the conversation that followed, the first time the band had been out of the studio with any distance from what they were doing.

Nigel Godrich, then the engineer, had one of the earliest hard-disk editing rigs, a stereo sampler running on a Macintosh that predates the software everyone now uses, and Leckie describes what they started doing with it once somebody suggested it.