Radiohead on The Beat

Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood talk to The Beat as The Bends comes out, with “Planet Telex” and “High and Dry” as a double A-side. Pablo Honey has sold over a million, which they never imagined. They had not expected to sell outside England, or Oxfordshire, or to leave the country promoting it, and it held up the second album by about three years.

Yorke is open about the personal reviews, the ones about him rather than the band, and says he spends most of his life swinging between completely super confident and completely super paranoid. “Anyone Can Play Guitar” was taken as ironic and was meant as a celebration of being in a band. He set himself up, he admits, and remembers Steve Wright's radio show doing its own version of “Creep” that made them a bunch of melodramatic schoolboys. Writing The Bends in rehearsal was a joy; walking into a studio froze them again, and a tour of Japan and Europe did them good.

For the first time since the four-track tapes they made in their bedrooms, one of them says, a record feels as if it really came from them, and if the press smash this one he doesn't care. The subject matter? One of them offers hospitals, bones, illness and iron lungs, and the other calls that his interpretation.