Song · The Bends era (1994–96)
Sulk
Its last line went when Kurt Cobain died, so that nobody would hear the song as being about him.
The Bendsalbum- 1995released
- 3:42length
1987
hungerford
On 19 August 1987 Michael Ryan shot dead 16 people in and around the Berkshire town of Hungerford, and then shot himself. No motive was ever established. Thom Yorke wrote “Sulk” in response. The 2003 page counts it among his earliest; Far Out dates the first draft to the late 1980s.
1994
the one the others wanted
At RAK Studios in London in early 1994 EMI wanted a follow-up to “Creep” before anything else, and the band worked up four candidates one after another, “Sulk”, “The Bends”, “(Nice Dream)” and “Just”. Mac Randall, in Guitar World, says none of them felt right, and the hunt slowed the sessions to a crawl. Yorke told Peter Paphides of Time Out in 1997 that the sessions were so short on talk and self-belief that he thought the band might split, and that the last row was over “Sulk”, which the others wanted as a single.
Accounts of where it was finished differ. Mojo has it completed at the Manor in Oxfordshire in July, with “Bones” and “The Bends”, and Randall says songs that had caused no end of trouble earlier in the year went down there with a minimum of fuss. The band's own fan-club booklet calls it the last song recorded, at Abbey Road. It was mixed, like most of the album, by Sean Slade and Paul Q. Kolderie.
1994
the last line
Kurt Cobain died on or around 5 April 1994. The song as Yorke wrote it closed on a line about shooting a gun, and when it came to recording it that line went. He did not want anyone hearing it as a comment on Cobain's death, when the song had been about something else entirely. What is left ends on the chorus, with its flat verdict that the person is just like their father and will not change.
The archive first has it at the Royal Berks Hospital Social Club in Reading on 21 February 1994, six weeks before Cobain died, on the same night as the first “Bones”.
the sound
how soon is now
J.C. Macek, writing for PopMatters' thirtieth-anniversary series, heard the drone under the opening as close to the one under the Smiths' “How Soon Is Now?”. Calm arpeggios carry the verses, the second chorus tips into a wild guitar solo, and after the fade the noise from the start comes back for a short coda of its own, a false ending before “Street Spirit (Fade Out)”.
1994–95
a soundcheck in new york
After Reading it waited 284 days for a second night, at the Melkweg in Amsterdam on 2 December 1994, and it was gone from the set after the Town and Country Club in Leeds on 1 November 1995, thirteen nights in all. Rolling Stone pointed out in 2020 that every other song on The Bends except “High and Dry” had been played at some point after 2000.
A month before Leeds the band played a secret show at the Mercury Lounge in New York, and at the soundcheck they played “Sulk” because Andrew Mueller of Melody Maker asked for it.
on stage
Live at the Liquid Room, Shinjuku, Tokyo, June 1995.· Future With A Heartwatch on youtube →
the record(1)
on stage(4)
Live history
| Times played | 13 shows |
|---|---|
| Live debut | Monday 21 February 1994 · Reading |
| Last played | Wednesday 1 November 1995 · Leeds |
Nights played include broadcasts; opened and closed count gigs only. A cancelled night has no setlist. All setlist stats →
Tabs (2)
sources12
- Wikipedia, “Hungerford massacre”, for the date, the gunman and the dead.
- Jordan Potter, “The Radiohead lyrics edited due to Kurt Cobain's suicide”, Far Out, 31 March 2022, for the late-1980s draft, Hungerford and the dropped line.
- J.C. Macek, in “Between the Grooves of Radiohead's ‘The Bends’ at 30”, PopMatters, 13 March 2025, for Hungerford and the sound of the track.
- Mac Randall, “Radiohead's The Bends 20 years later: reexamining a modern rock masterpiece”, Guitar World, 15 May 2015, for the four single contenders and the Manor.
- Peter Paphides, Radiohead feature, Time Out, 5–12 November 1997, for the last row.
- Jim Irvin and Barney Hoskyns, “We Have Lift-Off!”, Mojo, July 1997, via Wikipedia, “The Bends (album)”, for completing it at the Manor in July 1994; the same Wikipedia article for the mixers.
- Answerphone 01, the Radiohead fan-club booklet issued through W.A.S.T.E., 1995, for the last song recorded at Abbey Road.
- Wikipedia, “Kurt Cobain”, for the date of his death.
- Angie Martoccio, “Radiohead's ‘The Bends’: 10 Things You Didn't Know”, Rolling Stone, 13 March 2020, for the song's absence from the stage since 1995.
- Andrew Mueller, “Shiny Unhappy People”, Melody Maker, 28 October 1995, for the soundcheck at the Mercury Lounge.
- This site's own preserved 2003 lyrics pages, for the early song and the changed ending.
- Performance dates from this site's own setlist archive.