John Leckie on The British Library

Colleen Murphy of Classic Album Sundays talks to John Leckie at the British Library on 13 March 2025, 30 years to the day after The Bends came out, with the record played in full between the interview and the audience's questions.

He first saw the band at a gig in Gloucester, then at a rehearsal where they ran through about 30 songs, all arranged, for the manager and the A&R people, some of them flown in from Capitol in America, none of whom could pick the single. He would only make the record at RAK if Nigel Godrich engineered it, and the band had never met him. They lived there for nine weeks. “Planet Telex” came out of a night at Lemonia, the Greek restaurant on Regent's Park Road, when the cook who fed them at RAK every night had the day off. Back at the studio with more wine, Godrich built drum loops on his Sound Tools rig, and by two in the morning Thom Yorke had sung it. Those loops are the only computer on the record, and it was “Planet Xerox” until the trade name got in the way.

“Fake Plastic Trees” was cut the day after they all saw Jeff Buckley at the Garage, Yorke alone with an acoustic guitar and no click, in the three minutes the song lasts. The organ took two days. The band had the tracks sent to America to be mixed, and chose Sean Slade's mix of the song, which had dropped the strings because the mixers didn't like them, so the final version is that mix with the strings from Leckie's multitrack flown back in. Leckie never heard “High and Dry” until the album was in the shops. Jonny Greenwood's solo on “Just” climbs because his octave pedal went up another octave with each click.

Asked from the floor whether the band ever played him anything that surprised him, he says no, but he played them things they had not heard: Yorke had never heard Tom Waits. Leckie put on “Kentucky Avenue” at RAK one day at noon, and when he turned around Yorke was in tears.